I would like to talk about story branching a little bit, but first some quick things:
- My artist is now back in full force and we'll see how fast things finish up to see if we can do a full release or temporarily cut it short of the dungeon. More on that soon™.
- There's currently 18 H scenes in the third act. This and combined with the one month long interruption is why it takes so long. I think it's too much.
The smart thing would be to release new updates with a few scenes at a time but I find it really hard to do with this game. Sana doing stuff in town, scenes (internally) depending on other scenes and so on.
I've gotten flak for Sana getting too lewd too fast during the first two acts already and smaller updates instead of a full package would make it worse.
- I want to turn one of my own, purely sprite-based (Think NTRPG) WIP into an actual game soon and see what people think. I would keep it short and make it roughly the length of Fluffy Neighbours and if people like it I will keep working on it. Maybe I'm being completely carried by my artist and it's going to be the worst thing ever, let's see.
Now, let's talk about story for a bit. This is going to drift into a blogpost, bear with me.
I am currently doubting on how to go about stuff.
I know most people couldn't care less about story in porn games but it's a lot of fun to me personally and I think it plays a big role for NTR. If you are someone who's interested in story I would like you to read this and give me your thoughts.
Some people really like having 'pure' playthroughs, but to state the obvious: it is not what I care too much about or what I want this or future games to be and I think I have gotten sidetracked on it.
Sana is going to have multiple endings but it's easy to have them. It can just be decided by winning or losing against the final boss, or a dialogue option. It can be fun to see the girls transition from pure hearted to meat toilet but it's not something you need a specific vanilla playthrough for.
For example, the lever in the sewers. It's a simple choice if the lewd scene happens or not, you can have your vanilla this way if you really want and it doesn't affect the story much.
Then there's the inn scene with Fief after Sana gets poisoned in the mines. Here you can make the scene not happen, but it is still strongly impled that the girl got lewded. It is a choice between seeing the scene or switching it to mystery NTR, and I like this a lot. If done vaguely enough, a vanilla playthrough can still happen. My thoughts regarding this would be "good enough".
And now, we get to something that's been giving me trouble.
You have the choice to engage the orcs or sneak around. Taking on the orcs is an important part of the story, the entire act revolves around it. This is what I want the story to be but in order to make a vanilla playthrough possible I made an alternative route (sneaking past) that basically cuts everything from the act because it's a game full of NTR porn and not about vanilla, and I think I got sidetracked a lot by doing this.
There's nothing interesting happening during the 'vanilla act3' that doesn't also happen in the normal route but it's still trying to explain the party moving forward without the orc events happening and that's work I put into the game that now strikes me as a complete waste of time.
Does anyone even want this in the game? I really want to scrap all of it and turn it into a choice between witnessing the events or keeping it 'mystery NTR'. A good ending is still possible and in my opinion becomes more meaningful this way but it's hard to make an argument for NTR being avoidable. I personally don't care about NTR being avoidable. It's an NTR game, I think having a possible good ending where the couple perseveres is great even without the cheating being completely avoidable.
Please let me know what you think about this topic. I've had so many people say so many things regarding 'NTR vs Vanilla' to me lately that I just went and wrote a vanilla alternative for act3 and I'm not sure if anyone actually cares enough to warrant it.