Looking for advice on architecture of a visual novel type game

I am building a visual novel in Unity.

I have a small demo so far where I've created the basic structures of the game. My game has a text parser which can load dialogue, button choice screens etc. At the moment, I've structured it so that dialogue choices will load a new unity scene, with the new unity scene having all the gameObjects like TextParser etc, and reading the new scenes text from a new text file. Each text file leads to new scenes being loaded.

However, I can see that doing it this way will cause me to have 100s, perhaps 1000s of similar unity scenes with the same duplicated gameObjects. This seems like a big disadvantage. For example, if I wanted to change the structure of my game screens I'd have to change each of the many screens. However, split into many scenes might be more easily manageable in terms of organising my story.

I am thinking it would be better to have a core game screen, capable of presenting text, choices and images in any format and then one large text file with the entire game script and instructions for character poses, image backgrounds etc.

As I am still quite new to games development and Unity, I was wondering is this a good idea (the core game screen capable of doing everything) or is the previous idea (lots of self contained scenes) the better way? Or is there a better way I am not aware of?

Thanks for reading.

 

You're definitely barking up the wrong tree. As you're new to games development, and you just want to make a visual novel, I strongly suggest you just get a visual novel engine (like maybe this or one of several other excellent options in the Asset Store).

 

For this project, consider even using a different engine, such as Ren'Py. It really depends on your goals.

• If your goal is to make a visual novel, something like Ren'Py will get you there faster and more reliably.
• If your goal is to get started with Unity, a visual novel plugin on the Asset Store is a good choice. It will take more time and effort than using Ren'Py, but at the end you'll be able to get around pretty well in Unity.
• If your goal is more about building your own visual novel framework in Unity rather than writing a visual novel itself, jump in like you're doing. You'll go down dozens of wrong paths and dead ends, as we all do when we're learning something new in a complex environment, but it will be a valuable learning experience.

Whichever you choose, have fun! You're getting to make games, after all!

 

Thank you both.

 

Ren'Py is the answer if you don't know how to code.

You can do your own custom one all in one scene. I rarely use multiple scenes.

 

You could try fungus in the asset store.