Hi folks. I recently joined and have been slowly going through the threads. This one has been quiet for a long time, but I'll comment anyway.
Although I've written a fair number of games/VNs (depending on how you count them, Finding Miranda was my 7th), I'm still learning and experimenting as I go.
I had received a lot of feedback on previous games that people didn't like that I railroaded them into who the male character was. They wanted more choice of who to be. This was my attempt to give them that. I recognize that it didn't work, though. There were a couple of problems with it.
One was that the meaning differences between the choices were pretty subtle. That made this somewhat of a "read the writer's mind" affair, which I hate in other games. And, I completely missed that this system would be inscrutable for people who weren't native English speakers.
Another problem was that, while I gave you 4 choices of who to be, they weren't choices that many people wanted. I was trying to find the right balance between "user choice" and "character I want to tell a story about," but I came up short.
I had also gotten a ton of feedback that people wanted branching storylines. They even posted links to articles that drew boxes for story choices that looked a lot like what FM was, branching and coming back, etc. So I decided to try it, but, in retrospect, feel that it didn't work well enough. This kind of thing forces you to replay content you've already seen, so it's a balance between "choice" and "redundancy." I've come to decide that 4 made the wrong balance. I had done 2 in the previous two games, and it seemed to work better. Not sure how 3 would have gone, because I abandoned the whole concept in the next game.
So, live and learn. If we're not trying to grow, we're dying.
All that said, though, this was one of my favorite games because of Miranda. Of all of my characters in my games, Miranda means the most to me, because she's based on a real person I know. She's a freakin' superhero, but not because she has all those skills. Anyone who doesn't need to sleep would be able to learn to paint and fix motorcycles, etc. Miranda's a superhero because, despite being in constant pain, she manages to even function. The person I know is also in constant pain and is holding it together. I'm in awe. Some people think I made Miranda "too good." I think I didn't make her good enough...
Tlaero