Programming Choices in a VN (part 4)

As I wrote the script for the story, I wrote it as if I was conducting a role-playing game session for players. I imagined what the other characters might say, and I also imagined myself as the protagonist, Trey. Whenever a moment arose where I felt Trey would need to get involved or make a decision, I thought about the choices I would make for him if I was role-playing his character. I tried to imagine what different players might do as well if they were playing him, and this informed the decisions I made for how the story should branch. Sometimes, however, there were some obvious choices that would naturally arise but would create paths that were too divergent from the story I was writing. These paths were also problematic sometimes because they required more artwork than I had planned for, and ultimately didn't add much to the main story itself. If I simply omitted those choices, that would leave a glaringly obvious lost opportunity where players would cry foul and claim that they would have liked to see that choice as one of the options. So instead, I changed the dialogue and story events just enough so that those choices didn't seem like logical outcomes from the situation. This helped the story flow better without anything feeling out of place or contrived.