Basic Concepts

A visual novel in Novella is represented with the following entities:

1. Assets: including images for characters, scene backgrounds, and GUI components; audios for background music and sound effects. Potentially also videos for cutscenes (this is one of those features that may be better supported in Novella Two).
2. Screens: Screens represent the independent and functional components of the game as a whole. Those can provide either direct game play e.g. game scene and main menu or facilitate overall game, e.g. configuration screens. Other examples of screen include splash screen and game end screen.
3. (Game) Scene: A particular type of screen is known as GameScene. A game scene is where the majority of storytelling takes place. You can think of this as the "scenes" in a drama or play, and they are recognized as having distinct background images. This is not always true though, as dialogues can temporarily override background images.
4. Dialogues (and Dialogue Screen): Dialogues are implemented as a special type of screen that renders on top of a GameScene. Each dialogue represents a speaker, some contents, and presents the user available options.
5. Some other common screens: Will be introduced when they come up.
6. Attributes: Attributes are global level primitives that can be queries and modified throughout the game. They can be considered simple name-value pairs, e.g. wealth, health, likeness. Attributes can be set with simple expressions like: wealth = 15, or modified like: wealth + 15. They can also be used as expression for conditions, like: wealth > 15.
7. Transitions: A very powerful feature of Novella is the ability to define transitions between dialogues and scenes using transitions. Transitions have two components: condition, and target. The target is taken only if the condition is true. For instance, one can have a scene where the player encounters some monster only if certain road path is taken. In this case it's using a ´SceneTransition´ at the branching scene, e.g. the crossroad where options are presented.

With above simple ingredients, one can compose complex stories lines by chaining them together into visual diagram directly on Divooka.