Do have to mention I'm not a fan of the stat points to unlock perks thing though. Story would still be just as good without it, and currently the only purpose it serves is blocking off choices/content becauae of some arbitrary number system. Just seems dumb to me. If the choices are there, let the player make them. No need to play gatekeeper like that.
I don't mind stats in an actual rpg, but for a choose your own adventure book with pictures and porn? Pfffft. No need for any arbitrary numbers. Just blocks you off from options/scenes you might have wanted to pick and for no better reason than to punish a player for not doing things "optimally". Which is a pretty dumb concept for an interactive picture book.
I kinda like discussing game design, so, if you want to elaborate a bit more on this, I wouldn’t mind brainstorming a bit. If anything else, it might help me or others stumbling upon this to have to design something better.
When I come up with this system in
theory, it was meant to address some typical shortcomings I’ve seen in visual novels:
A not congruent story: in many cases, the MC can just make any choice out of the blue, regardless of how out of character it is. Your MC has always done the right thing, acting honorable and judge when others misbehave? Doesn’t matter, click this button here and he’ll fuck his patient. After that, he goes back at always activing as if he’s on a high horse? Doesn’t matter, he can keep fucking the patient as if he had double personality. So, in a system where just picking choices is all that matters, there might be a dissonance between what the MC normally
always does, and some particular choices, which decreases the quality of the story. In NiF, to fuck Jen, the MC has have to picked many cunning choices before. In essence, he has to act as like the kind of person that would fuck patients (a second time). Imo, this increases the quality of the story.
Need for a walkthrough/read the dev’s mind: to fix the points above, what you usually see is the game keeping track of some choices. Usually it kind of goes like this: A random girl (let’s call her Deb), likes submissive men. When you’re with her, you’ll have 2 choices and if you pick one you have “+1 Deb love points”. At some point, if you have +10 Deb love points you can have a sex scene with her. The “right” choice to pick may or may not be that clear, and, more often than not, you might need a walkthrough to pick them. In NiF, the player doesn’t need to pick
any particular choices. Instead, his MC has to act in a certain way. Has to be a kinda of character. What defines if a girl gets in a relationship with him is not if he opened the door of her and complimented her dress, but instead is if he, in a holistic way, is the kind of man she would be interested. Imo, this increases the quality of the story.
It’s hard to adapt the story to the kind of MC the player is roleplaying as: the coffee scene with Kim on chapter 3 will play quite different depending if you have more manly points, or more submissive points. If the MC is a manly character, she’ll give him less shit, she will look at him as potential man to cheat on her boyfriend with, and the MC will be more incisive in his actions. If the MC is a sensitive character, she’ll know she can much more push his buttons, she’ll look at him as someone she can completely walk all over, and the MC will be more polite with his answers and even gain a hard on when she grabs his balls. All this happens organically because the game has enough information by that point to know how to develop that scene. If it was purely based on choices at that scene, you’ll even have to pick choices about how she would act. If it was just based on some previous interactions between you two, you’ll run into the problem highlighted above: go check a walkthrough to look up “what 5 choices you had to pick to not get a hard-on and be mocked by Kim”. Imo, this increases immersion and the quality of the story.
Besides that, the system was also meant to allow for some extra gameplay features:
Anticipation and better immersion as a roleplay as a psychologist: because there is a table with a bunch of kinks that you know will be used at some point with at least one girl, you might start to guess which one of them will be used with which girl. You really like the cuckquean kink? Perhaps
you start speculating which girl will have that kink and try to read between the lines to find out ahead of time. Kinda act like a “psychological detective” and, when the choice is revealed, you can say “I totally saw that one coming”. Without that system, you might not even know the kink is in the game and don’t “look” for kinks about it. And then just be prompted with the choice to cuck your girlfriend or not.
Protection against seeing any kink you don’t like: you hate sharing your girl? No need to have to pick a walkthrough to check which choices you have to not pick. You know that, if you don’t pick that skill, you’ll never see that particular content you hate. In a game with so many kinks, which half of them are dominant and half submissive, I thought this was important. You don’t have to walk in egg shells afraid of picking the wrong choice, or play with a walkthrough opened in the background, or end up being fucked in the ass by a girl and wondered how the fuck did you end up there and which choices you need to pick differently in the next play through. You simply know, if you don’t pick a skill, that won’t happen.
So, in summary, I don’t think this system is dumb because:
- – creates a consistent personality for the MC
- – you don’t need a walkthrough to know which choices to pick. You just need to know you need to have enough of those points
- – characters can react to the kind of man the MC is in a more holistic manner, as in, to the sum of his choices and not to what he picked in a couple occasions.
- – It clearly indicates which kinks there are in game (less need to keep asking if kink x is in the game), and it might also be fun to try to guess which girls have which kinks
- – it gives the player a peace of mind from knowing he won’t see any content he doesn’t like.
So, that was
in theory. In practice, I had to design the whole system and points required for each skill, predict how many points there will be per chapter, when a given skill will be needed, how many points there will be by the end of the game, how many chapters there will be, all of which even before writing a line of text. The system is quite forgiving, and I’m not sure if it does most of those points explained above as well as I expected it would in theory. I’m not yet sure if it was a failed experiment or not, or how I’d even improve upon it if I could start from scratch.
But I do think those were valid concerns to have. And I still think this system does a better job than "simply letting the playerchoices to tell a story and communicate to the player how to get the content he wants and avoid the one he doesn’t.
in the game it explicitly states what the punishments would be: he would lose his license as a therapist, lose his job, and never work in the field again. There is no jail time.
That was what I found in my research, yes.
