Sam was awesome, though having next to no dialog on the ship besides Jerry and the sword scene felt like a missed opportunity for comedy.
It's a bit of a matter of how many characters I placed on board. It became apparent fairly early in the game that I would not effectively be able to populate content for all of them. Thus the story focussed in more on the main LI's. Content does not write itself and the images don't magically appear. You really are drawing from a central budget, hence the greater the number of threads the thinner each one becomes.
Within the new game, several of the story concepts for Sam that I did not have time to explore in Callisto, will likely be covered in Stellar Crossroads. The Nova character is more central to the story and will have far more content than was possible for Sam.
How was it that there was so many multiple partner combinations yet only single partner endings? While full harem could be hard to legitimately explain, multiple trios would have made sense and in some cases made better sense than the single female choice instead.
The epilogue is set 10 years in the future, hence represents the next stage in the characters lives. As such they have moved on from life on Callisto. The design of the epilogue is for an account of the MC with X and then a catchup of what everyone else has been up to. The game design is to have 4 options that transitions into 5 segments of which 4 are played (exclude the one that contradicts first selection) and then a final scene. Thus the player will see 6 if a total of 10 events.
For a harem situation you would have 1 scene that would then invalidate all of the others. Hence you would only see 1 short scene. Such a situation would also be detrimental to the cast as they place their lives on hold indefinitely. I would note that many people seem to have forgotten that one of the alternatives has the MC still with multiple partners (different ones).
In the situation of multiple character options, everyone has different ideas about what these should be. If you include one and exclude the others, people will get upset about that. If you try to cover all of them, the required scenes gets completely out of hand. When you consider the combinations that are viable, perhaps another 10 scenes? Hence I would need to create 14 alternative selections for the player to pick from?
All of this comes down to game design. If you create too many options then you effectively reduce content. As an example if you have a budget of 200 images that is stretched across the epilogues.
Current design:
- 200 over 10 scenes, hence 20 per scene
- See 6 of 10 scenes, hence 120 images in epilogue
Harem alternative:
- 200 over 11 scenes, hence 18 per scene
- Harem invalidates all of the others, hence 18 images in epilogue
Threesome alternative:
- 200 over 20 scenes, hence 10 per scene
- Threesome invalidates two of the second series, hence 5 play, thus 50 images in epilogue
What would you prefer 18, 50 or 120 images of content?
Many people have expressed an opinion on this topic, however are unaware of the implications of their suggests. Hopefully the above will clarify some of this.
If you want an alternative ending, I'm not stopping you from writing fan fiction.
