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I guess you have many questions about what Our Red String will be like. And I guess you won't be surprised and happy to hear if I tell you it will be similar to Good Girl Gone Bad.
What I love about writing visual novels is
the potential to give the player the power of affecting the outcome of the story and the evolution of it's characters. That was the main point I built my first game around, and it will be the same for the second. But with a new perspective.
GGGB was my first dive into this creative genre and I wanted to squeeze everything I could out of it, exploring as many of the branches and options that were possible. That's why Ashley could be a good, sweet girl, a drug-dealing thug, a nasty, cheating girl, a full blown bimbo or anything in between. The possibilities were plentiful and so diverse, but that meant that Ashley as a character suffered, and so did the story and her interaction with the other characters. Her personality and development were spread too thin over radically different branches. I don't know if I'm conveying my feelings about this...
What I'm trying to say is that
I want to be more focused with Our Red String. I believe GGGB was good because all of the choices, but also because of it's characters. After all, choices are only entertaining if you care about their effects, and to that effect, you need to care about the characters. And this is my main focus this time, creating cool, fleshed out and interesting characters that can produce fun and very engaging scenarios and choices for you to make and watch
sexy mayhem (or not) ensue.
I hope to make a good job so you can really enjoy what's about to come.
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So,
I said ORS would be similar to GGGB. Itwill take place in a similar scenario and will have as it's core choice mechanics, branching story-lines and character depth and evolution.
So, in what aspects will it differ? Aside from a
main one, central aspect of the new concept, which I can't talk about yet, one of the new things will be it's
improved production values. As I said before, I hired a couple artists to work with me. The style of the drawings will remain the same, just with
the look I would've wanted GGGB to have! I couldn't achieve that before because I was on my own, I couldn't afford to invest from the get go and I had to do everything myself. But now, thanks to GGGB and to you, that's different. I can invest in my own creation and give you guys the games I truly want to make, how I truly want to make them. You don't know how much
your support means to me and how it can
make this grow.
I hope you'll like the improvements as much as I do
But for now, I can just show you the silhouettes for the
main male characters...
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GGGB had
a ton of characters and it seems like ORS will have quite a bunch of them, too. I love populating the life of the protagonist with interesting people that provide a lot of options for players to explore.
But keeping with the more focused approach I'm aiming for, I want those characters to have weight, not just for the options they provide, but in the way they affect the story and how they relate emotionally to the main character. I want to make their life's more three-dimensional and interconnect them.
I felt that
GGGB had a few problems when I was writing it: first of all, many characters had no relationship between them. For example, Wilson and Enrico had nothing to do with Jack or Tyrone, or Ethan with Arthur, or Iris with Jessica... Their plots existed in parallel to some of the other cast. That was necessary for several reasons, mainly to be able to provide a lot of very different branches and options to players, but now I'd like to weave their connections more thoughtfully, creating more interesting and intense scenarios where
each choice can affect the main story and the side characters all at once.
The second problem was that some of the characters felt a bit "flat". What I mean is that they followed a bit too much the tropes of the archetype they represent.
It's important to build your characters around archetypes: that way you make them stand out and instantly recognisable by the player, giving him clear guides to understand and pursue the paths and characters he finds appealing. But it's important to add a twist and some depth to these archetypes, or they end up becoming cardboard cliches (that happens all the time with anime and manga, for example). I made Jack, the "alpha male winner", a guy with brother issues that tries to overcompensate for a lost love, Jessica, the "bitchy slut", a girl who was in truth lost and desperate to get acceptance and love from her peers, and so... But at some point
some characters just filled the same roles interchangeably, like Eric and Dave, representing very similar archetypes, Arthur and Ethan were kind of similar but with a different flavor, Tyrone and Bubba...
This time I want to define the archetypes better, making them different enough so
each character stands out from the rest and have their own distinct flavor to the player, and at the same time make them more intricate or interesting. Some will feel familiar to GGGB, while others will add a new kind of character and interaction. And I hope you find all of them fun, interesting and sexy!
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GGGB used a very simple stats system: you had Good and Bad points to keep track of how your decisions affected Ashley's progression. Later I added Money and Fame as an afterthought.
With ORS, I want to create
a more complex and interactive system. Good and Bad points are gone: your "karma" will be affected by your story choices, being purely narrative. But I wanted to give the player the ability to track their progress in several ways, and one of those will be through the new stats. They will affect what options you can access in some situations, like Good and Bad points did in the past, but this time those possible actions will be affected by more concrete stats, not just by karma points. Also, I wanted to add
some new mechanics you will need to wait to see...
All in all, ORS will be a more rich and comprehensive game, with a simple, streamlined but fun and robust system, and will give the player the ability to track their progress in-game in better ways.
Can you guess what stats are depicted by those icons?
