# VINORA SCREENPLAY SPECIFICATION
Version 0.0.1 (14.10.2025)  
Evgeniy "Parthen" Parfenyuk 

# 1. Introduction
## 1.1 What is Vinora Screenplay?
Vinora Screenplay is plain text format for writing 
[visual novel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel) screenplays.

It's based on (and one-way compatible with) Markdown, simple markup language 
developed by John Grubber and Aaron Swartz in 2004. It was developed to 
simplify web pages writing.  
While Markdown originally doesn't have specification (only `Markdown.pl`
as a reference implementation), we use
[CommonMark](https://spec.commonmark.org) for this role.

## 1.2 Why it's needed?
Vinora Screenplay is designed for use in the Vinora Engine. The goals of this
visual novels engine is to be as simple and compatible as possible.

Markdown is a popular format. There is a good change that you're already
familiar with \**italic*\* or \_\___bold__\_\_ syntax. So, by making 
Vinora Screenplay as Markdown-like language we fulfill both of our goals 
(it's simple to use since it's known and it's compatible with dozens
of existing Markdown interpreters).

## 1.3 Comparison with another languages (TODO)

[...]


# 2. Definitions

## 2.1 Technical definitions

**Character**  
is the smallest unit of text that carries a semantic or
visual meaning in a writing system. It can be a letter, digit, 
punctuation mark, space, special character (e.g., "@" or newline), 
or another element used to represent information in text form.  
*NOTE: emojis are images, and not text characters.  
So-called Unicode "combined characters" are considered (and rendered) as
multiple separate characters*.

**Newline characters**  
are special characters that end a line. 
Depending of the system, default newline character would be CR (carriage 
return, `\r`), LF (line feed, `\n`) or even both (CR + LF).  
*NOTE: All of them are considered valid end of line, but they are replaced
with LF (`\n`) character.*

**Whitespace characters**  
are characters which are rendered into whitespace. 
They are invisible, but they are affect formatting. For example, space
character separate different words.  
*All newline characters are whitespace characters*.  
Full list of whitespace characters: *tab (horizontal and vertical), space, 
carriage return, line feed, form feed.*

**Line**  
is a sequence of zero or more characters, that ends with newline 
or End Of File (EOF) condition. Line which has zero characters or only 
whitespace characters called **empty line**. 

**ASCII character**  
is a character supported by [US-ASCII](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII) 
encoding. Since any existing encoding is an extension of ASCII,
characters from ASCII is supported by nearly every computer.

## 2.2 Visual novels definitions
(Only techinal definitions goes here)

**Visual novel** *(from <vndb.org/d6>)*  
A visual novel can be seen as a combination of a novel and a computer game:
they're computer games with a large text based storyline and only little 
interaction of the player.  
A typical visual novel consists of text over an anime-style background image 
and is accompanied by background music.  
Throughout the game, the player usually has to answer a few questions which 
will have an effect on the story, thus playing a visual novel a second time 
while giving other answers may result in an entirely different plot.

**ADV / NVL** mode  
- Adventure (**ADV**) is a VN mode, where text takes only a small part of
the screen (and therefore, images take more space).  
- Novel (**NVL**) is a VN mode, where text takes up a large part of the screen
(sometimes even all of it, while images are in the background).  
Commonly, VN plays in ADV mode and switch to NVL for monologues.

**Kinetic** VN  
is a VN without choices or gameplay. Term was popularised to name games from 
'KineticNovel' publisher. Games *with* gameplay, but without choices 
called **liniear plot**.

**Character points**  
Points awarded or deducted based on positive or negative interactions 
with a character. Typically hidden from the player, these points influence 
the storyline.

**Hybrid** VN  
mix of traditional games (e.g. RPGs) and visual novel.