On the surface, choices don't seem like a hard thing to add and that's partly true. Writing choices or the coding part of them is easy, but the impact they have on the development time is what drives me away from them. I don't want to do simple yes/no type of choices, whether you do something or not. I want them to have a major impact on the story which would branch off into their own unique path. That's how choices should be set up. Now let's say I add 3 different paths, then every event would bring 3 choices with them and each play out in their own way. This would mean I would have to write 3x the amount of dialogue and produce 3x the amount of renders. Considering I do this part time, this would make the update cycle very long. I'm talking 6 months to produce an update with the same amount of content for each route, which now I'm able to cut that down to around 2 months.
The counter argument could be made: Well, make the updates smaller then, which is fair, but also, do you really want to play 10 minutes of an update instead of 30? 90% of the people play through every route anyway to see all the content, even if they don't like said route, they might want to see what type of renders/scenes it brings.
Another solution could be: Make the choices simple, with either yes I want this or no, I don't want this. Which again, is something I don't even consider as a proper choice, but just a way to bypass the kinetic novel type. Even if I were to do something like that, people will expect something in return for choosing yes or no in certain situations. You shouldn't be punished with less content, just because you don't want to do a certain thing. + Any dialogue referencing that specific choice event needs to be written and altered with the choice in mind, which again, doubles my workload.
TL;DR - Choices seem simple on the surface, but bring a lot of workload with them. If I were to do them, I want to do them justice and make them impactful. As a part-time game dev, I only have 2-3 hours every day to work on the game. Considering this is my first project, I didn't want to bite off more than I can chew. I want to build trust with the community with a quality product and gain as much experience as possible in order to eventually make a proper game with multiple paths. Once I can grow a team to aid in me such an endeavour.
