Showing Choices You Can’t Make in A YEAR OF SPRINGS (2021)

By npckc ( bluesky / site & other social links )

Visual novels are all about choices, and every inclusion (and exclusion) of a choice is a conscious decision by the dev. In A YEAR OF SPRINGS, I wanted to try different ways to show to the player the choices that aren’t actually available.

For a quick intro as to who I am, I’m npckc. I make lots of games, and many of those are visual novels. I think the way visual novels use choices to steer a game can be really fun and I could write about it for ages, but I’ll keep things specific this time.

Generally, choices in visual novels are actively visible to the player. For example: 

• Switch (Imbibe Drink Me potion → you shrink vs Don’t imbibe Drink Me potion → you do not shrink) 

• Incremental (Give chocolate to a love interest for +5 heart points)

• Flavour (Pet a cat and nothing changes except the cat meows and is happy)

However, there are also the choices that are unseen. Every time dialogue progresses without choices, the writer is choosing to move the story down a specific path without player input. If a choice is only available under certain conditions, not meeting the conditions hides this choice and its path from the player.

In A YEAR OF SPRINGS, I wanted to show these hidden choices in different ways. The game has three protagonists, each with their own personalities, so I wanted to show how each protagonist would choose not to make choices in ways that matched them.

For the first two games in the trilogy, one night, hot springs and last day of spring, I went with more common methods, like completely hiding future choices after taking too many “incorrect” ones (point-deduction system) and having choices directly lead to “bad” endings (gate system).

The code above shows a scene from one night, hot springs with the point-deduction system where the protagonist potentially has two choices – to go to the baths or not. Depending on the value of a variable (representing the protagonist’s energy level) that changes based on previous choices, one of the choices may be unavailable. In the game screenshot, Haru is only left with one choice – to avoid the baths – and the choice to go to the baths is hidden, because Haru herself does not even have the energy to think of that choice as a possibility. 

However, in spring leaves no flowers, the last game of the trilogy, I wanted to actively show the choices that aren’t taken, so I ended up doing this. 

Whether you select the struck-out choice or the regular choice, the dialogue will proceed as normal – Manami will not ask whether something happened with Erika and will instead just ask about the present.

However, showing both choices here lets the player know that the protagonist is deliberating over what to say, even if she ends up saying the same thing. If the player selects the struck-out choice, it shows that the protagonist wants to say something but is reluctant to. Even if the protagonist does not say it now, having the player make this choice shows a bit of the protagonist’s personality – somebody who may have things she wants to say but will hold her tongue because she’s worried about how the person she’s talking to will react.

Later on in the game, the player is presented with the same struck-out choice multiple times, and only after selecting it repeatedly will the game finally present the choice without the strikeout – as actual dialogue for the protagonist to say.

Since choices have been around in visual novels for so long, they often follow the same “patterns”, but I’d love to see more devs play around with them since they’re capable of so much! (I like choices so much I have a game where all the player’s dialogue bubbles are choices…) 

Hopefully this might inspire you to make a visual novel where…

• None of the choices can be selected

• Game settings have to be changed with dialogue choices

• ALL the text in the game is dialogue choices!

There’s infinite choices you can make or not make. In any case… the choice is yours!🥁

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