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i am working furiously on it though and im excited about it!
- Nov 20, 2018
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No need to get angry as you work.
- Jan 1, 2019
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- Jan 9, 2023
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i want to have dialogue choices for the girls when ever roger isnt in a scene. romie says it steals from the immersion.
what do you think?
ps. im still gonna make my own decision, just wondering if anyone agrees with romie.
pss. i hate it when hes right about stuff!
psss. dont agree with him because his ego sucks and im right and manipulating these girls from inside their horny little minds is the best!
pssss. i dont know what the limit on psssses is.
ppssss. I ALWAYS WIN ROMIE!!
what do you think?
ps. im still gonna make my own decision, just wondering if anyone agrees with romie.
pss. i hate it when hes right about stuff!
psss. dont agree with him because his ego sucks and im right and manipulating these girls from inside their horny little minds is the best!
pssss. i dont know what the limit on psssses is.
ppssss. I ALWAYS WIN ROMIE!!
- Nov 20, 2018
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Sadly, I do think this could be problematic. So the players are controlling both the protagonist and the LIs? What happens when Roger wants to do something but Amanda chooses against it? Are you going to have a tug-of-war coded or something? Maybe if you elaborate on what you're thinking it might make more sense.
- Jan 9, 2023
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i am thinking simpler. if roger is in the scene you control roger. if roger is not in the scene you control the girl.
im still waffling over it.
- Aug 13, 2021
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There are games here that this works well for. Babysitters by Tabbo and Our Red Strings by Eva Kiss, for example. There are people on this site that are adamant about not having multi-protag games. I don't mind as much so long as there is a primary protagonist. I don't mind controlling the debauchery of other characters.
- Nov 20, 2018
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I could see that working if it's something like what kind of stuff she wants to do with Roger later — how she wants to dress, whether she'll have courage to say something specific to him, or whatever. But I don't think having huge variance because of a possible conflict of feelings / interest is a good idea generally. One, it's likely a nightmare to code; two, it's probably frustrating for many players; three, it's less immersive, because who is the player supposed to identify with? The protagonist is generally the person someone is "playing"; if you have others, feelings from players are likely to get all messed up and confused. But, as GetOutOfMyLab says, it can work. You just need to go about it the right way.
I personally don't have an issue with this, but that would get the game on this forum labeled with multiple protag and female protag and might put people off that aren't into that. I guess in some ways that's appropriate, but just playing devil's advocate on it.
Tbh I also find it makes a game less immersive, and it's not something I'm personally all that into. As CookieMonster666 said the player is less able to identify with the main protag. That said, this is a visual novel, and there are some very well written novels that benefit greatly from the dramatic irony that comes from seeing multiple characters' perspectives.
I guess for me the issue more comes from being in control of these other characters and corrupting them from within themselves as it doesn't make a ton of sense to me from like a story perspective.
Ultimately this is your game and it's a game in development, genuinely what you could do is just try it out and if you find it doesn't work or complicates things too much just... remove that feature. Like, if it doesn't work then just rewrite the scenes so instead of the player making a choice the girl just makes her own choice and now you only have one path there that you need to write instead of two or more, and you get to keep that dramatic irony.
It's not even just about the immersion. It's the added complexity in coding and writing that should probably be the biggest concern.
Let's assume a good chunk of the choices will do something, as opposed to being just flavor text that is not being tracked by the code. If we pick only choices for Roger, you basically code and write the script as it revolves around Roger's character. "If Roger does/says this, how would this girl react?" Those types of questions will be answered naturally since the writer knows what type of character they are working with.
Now if you let the players determine the characteristics of the girls, as well as Roger, you are looking at something that takes a lot more planning to rein in. I won't go into specific example scenarios, but I hope what I'm cautioning makes sense conceptually.
Even having 2 characters that can make choices leads to incredible complexity in the branching, and I shudder to think about all the planning that goes behind the scenes to converge the potential routes back into something manageable. Check out Our Red Strings. It's an amazing game by a seasoned dev, but the updates are getting slower and slower.
- May 16, 2019
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Considering the whole premise of the game is MC retelling his degenerate adventures to his therapist, I have to agree with this Romie fella.
Unless you're changing the premise with your version.
- Jun 2, 2017
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So the story that plays out is a visualization of what MC is telling his therapist. He could have found out things that happened while he was not present and now he is telling his therapist. So IMO:
If we can make some choices to shape the story MC tells by choosing red or blue sort of picking which universe of the multiverse of MC we are in then some small choices for the females would be OK as long as they aren't serious enough to alter things in a weird way. Like posted above true conflicts of interest. And also at the end of the day we would understand these are still MC's choices because the reality could have been let's say "LI chose a green t-shirt and jeans" but MC had wanted to see them in "a sexy sundress" so they are ultimately MC decisions anyway.
Absolutely steals from the immersion, as well as the general flow, balance and professional shine on the game. Unless this VN were one with two or three switching MCs or an innovative VN experiment with a Game of Thrones style where there were no true main character, it would come out awkward. Unless you're a writer with Charlie-Kaufman-like talent, I wouldn't risk the latter either. Most VN's I've seen attempt this convenient perspective switch generally use it as a crutch and it never flows well. There are rules in story structure for how first, second and third-person perspective are generally used for a reason, too. Doubly so for VNs, which by necessity are easier to pull-off successfully in a first-person single-character perspective throughout. It takes a great writer to seamlessly break those rules of thumb.
We know little about your experience, so if it ends up you literally wrote a couple episodes for the last season of Mad Men (GOAT TV show writing), then I take it all back. Have at it! You could probably pull it off.
Otherwise, I'd steer clear. No offense, but I'd probably abandon following at that point, since I don't think it can be done well, with a few rare exceptions. The two greatest strengths of the OG game IMO were #1 its strong writing, unusual for an AVN and #2 its naturalistic facial expressions and poses. Working in that sort of perspective change-up will likely take away it's greatest strength, even if Roman ends up being the one writing it.Also note that in ORS, the one decent example of a perspective switch AVN, both MCs are established from the very beginning and get equal time, so it works within the logic of the story & doesn't take genius-level writing skill to execute (though it still greatly slows down development + creates a load of implausible text for the multitude of choice combinations Eva may never find the time to retcon).
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- Jan 9, 2023
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i want explore the lives of the girls a lot more than the romans version did so i want to have scenes with just the female characters in which the protag is not always present. i just wonder how boring it will be to read/watch scenes play out that the player has no influence on beyond the prior interactions with roger. and seeing the girls in other scenarios outside of his presence will make their personal stories more...i dont know if real is the word im looking for but well get to understand them and their decisions better. i can see it both ways.
roger will always be the main protag and i never want to see his face because he is essentially the player. but if a scene takes place in a girls locker room i wonder how long attentions will hold if there are no dialogue choices.
roger will always be the main protag and i never want to see his face because he is essentially the player. but if a scene takes place in a girls locker room i wonder how long attentions will hold if there are no dialogue choices.
- Nov 20, 2018
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I think if you don't make other scenes lengthy, it would be fine for most people. You can also add a bit here and there, so that you're including a lot more of their stories overall without doing a dialogue dump on the players. So I think this can work without choices, but don't be heavy-handed about it. And I don't think there's a problem with minor choices from the girls, but as has been said this can easily run into unnecessary coding complexity.
Your goal is better to connect players to the lives of the girls, and I definitely think that's great. I would reiterate the warning about players' perceptions, however. Any time you spend away from the MC is time that will subconsciously begin to disconnect players from him. It will be mostly unnoticeable if done little by little, but if you spend too much time away or if you give too many choices to the player on their behalves, you will make players less able to connect with the MC and therefore the story overall. (In a television series, for instance, you rarely see an entire episode focused on someone who isn't part of the starring cast.) It's a balancing act, so just be careful with how you handle it.
The issue that could break the flow and immersion in the story isn't simply about the ability to control other characters' choices or not. It's just as much about the player/viewer seeing scenes that the narrator (first-person MC) wouldn't possibly be able to see. It essentially puts the user in the back seat, interacting occasionally while watching the story unfold. It could still be done well if done carefully, but it's a very different feeling and experience. There's much more of a distance there. Part of the reason why it's not often done (or ever done well) in a VN.
Where it could be especially messy though is in having multiple people narrate. As far as I can recall, we never actually hear MC's thoughts. Any thoughts or feelings from MC so far are told through the vessel of speaking to a psychiatrist, with a bit of an unreliable narrator bent. It anchors the story though. Cutting to another character outside of that structure could be tricky to do without feeling random or imbalanced. You'd have to find a way to anchor that too so the switch-up wouldn't feel off.
Seeing other VNs execute these switch-ups badly reminds me of watching dialogue in an amateur film with a cinematographer/editor that doesn't understand the 180 degree rule. A masterful creator can hit these rules of balance correctly and even intentionally break them for effect if they really know what they're doing. But it's tricky and it has to be executed smoothly and for a solid purpose beyond an easy exposition crutch.
Where it could be especially messy though is in having multiple people narrate. As far as I can recall, we never actually hear MC's thoughts. Any thoughts or feelings from MC so far are told through the vessel of speaking to a psychiatrist, with a bit of an unreliable narrator bent. It anchors the story though. Cutting to another character outside of that structure could be tricky to do without feeling random or imbalanced. You'd have to find a way to anchor that too so the switch-up wouldn't feel off.
Seeing other VNs execute these switch-ups badly reminds me of watching dialogue in an amateur film with a cinematographer/editor that doesn't understand the 180 degree rule. A masterful creator can hit these rules of balance correctly and even intentionally break them for effect if they really know what they're doing. But it's tricky and it has to be executed smoothly and for a solid purpose beyond an easy exposition crutch.
With this being the case, I would actual prefer some measure of choice in the scenes as opposed to just watching them unfold. I do agree that if the scenes are longer, not being able to do anything but read through them might be a bit dull. But it also depends on the scene too. Make it engaging enough and people might not notice one way or the other.