I knew I couldn't be the only person wondering about this 
@dan That one looks great! Although they do have some trouble with Chinese names it seems 
But I guess I can work around that by just switching things up ...
I'm sure by searching around you can find something that might work better. Or at least it can give you an idea on what it could look like, and you could draw it manually.
Yep, I've found some programs already that might work well. I guess I'll just test them one after the other and see what's working best. Anyway, great idea with the family tree! I honestly didn't think of that ... I was only pondering in the direction of diagrams or something.
Do symbols. I saw one a while ago for some manga or anime that if it was a love interest it had a 
with the arrow pointing to. So if it's mutual love, the arrow points both ways, if it's just one way then it just points from the person loving to the other. If it was family it had a diamond or something. And if it was a break-up then it'd have 
From a reader's viewpoint, the story should in itself give all that info within its narration.
But I get it now, your writing is character driven with the story being secondary. The story meanders along where the characters take it,
The Excel layout works for writing that is story driven where character development is tied into the main plot.
Right! And then I could just add an explanation at the side which symbol meant what ... Thanks! That idea is great!
I guess it could also be used together with the tree. Like the genealogy programs have only family relations but (as far as I've seen by looking at a few just now), they don't mention what relationship it would be exactly though (other than through the children lines) so if it was set up with just a relationship from one person to the other as in married but no symbol is shown, then that could be added in by hand afterward 
Well, the story does focus a lot on the character development but both sides influence each other with neither being secondary. Some things from outside will happen that force character development and sometimes the development will change the flow of the story.
It's just that the story is very long (as in 12 volumes, some of which have between 150-200 chapters) and even though I update daily (and sometimes more than one chapter), it'll take years to finish it (plus there are prequels and sequels) so I expect readers to take breaks (after all, some people like to stockpile and binge).
So even though the story does explain everything, the relationship chart is intended as a way to refresh the readers' mind after such breaks so they don't have to re-read hundreds of chapters and can just look at the chart to gauge who was who again and then get back to reading where they left off.
ah man, I just write all that down in a dedicated sketchbook just for that story by hand--so each story has it's own sketchbook just full of lore and meanings of words and where everyone is from, their ages, their backgrounds etc (or set of books depending on the complexity) For figuring out how people relate over time, I just write a chart where the vertical rows are the characters and the horizontal rows are the periods of time. That way I know roughly where each character is.
thing is I have a really hard time doing this typing on the computer? I have to brainstorm character backgrounds on paper, it's weird.
If I were gonna do one I’d do it like dawgofdawgness posted. As a matter of fact it’s a very good idea for me to do one because I can hardly keep track of things.
Having it visually spread out help me like visualize their relationships more.
Not helpful advice or anything but thanks for the idea since it never occurred to me to make one until now lol.
You can try Campfire for relationships! Or you can also use scrapple. Scrapple is a mindmap program while campfire is a database(?) program
We've been asked for this on both our series now. I wonder if it's a trend because our second series is pretty straight forward. We use Photoshop to put together a simple infographic. This is what it ended up looking like.
Might have to copy and paste the link to make it work for some reason.
Oh my god! Why didn't I think of Scapple? 
It's even tied in with Scrivener (which I'm using) so this might actually be the easiest way to do this. Especially for future projects where I could also use it before I start writing ...
Not sure if I'm sold on Campfire since I read some pretty bad reviews on that one just a while ago on Steam (it never occurred to me you could use it in this way though 
) but maybe they've updated since then? Did you try it for yourself and could share some experiences?
that means a lot!
Was it scrapple or scapple? Actually forgot 🤣
Campfire is alright. For series that is super long it's quite useful. And if you're making xianxia/xuanhuan type of stories it is even more helpful to keep track of items/ingredients. There's also a sort of timeline thing for you to keep track of your event... The only downside of the thing is probably that it takes up a huge memories to run.
I think the program is scapple. Scrapple seems to be something to eat?
And that's a pity - the memory requirements I mean. I'm afraid my old notebook wouldn't manage to do that But I'm actually quite hyped about scapple anyway right now. Just need to try everything out to see if it really does even with more complicated things