- Jun 5, 2017
- 28
- 33
Hey y'all,
So I've started sketching out a little text-only project on Twine, but before I go too far with it, I wanted to get some community feedback on whether the idea would even be interesting to anyone. It's a "new girl moves to a new town and might get corrupted" story, so that isn't that unusual (okay, it's a bit hackneyed by this point). But beyond that basic framing, I think it's a bit...unsual...
Basic Plot
...starting with the fact that the story begins in 1925. You play a young woman (I'm thinking 20 years old) from some small town in the Midwest who arrives in Hollywood on a train, innocent and eager to try to make it in the motion picture business. You'll have to work your way up from being an extra to starring in box-office hits, along with fame-adjusted occupational and social demands: making rent, getting an agent, choosing the studio you'll sign a contract with, negotiating that contract, schmoozing with the rich and famous, and so forth. Your films can have variable degrees of success with the general public, so balancing your choices to best connect with the New York elites and the Midwestern mothers is key.
Chronologically speaking, the game will progress somewhat more quickly than most html games. In other words, it won't proceed one day at a time, but I also hate games that try to force a week's worth of content into a single page. So I'm thinking that I'll probably have it set up such that you'll play through a whole day filled with various events, then you'll advance to the next week, in which you'll play a single day, so on and so forth. That way you get the immersion of a full single day while allowing the story to progress chronologically on a reasonable pace.
The reason for that chronological progression is that I want the game to last 20 years. (Doing the math on that, 1 day per week*52 weeks*20 years=1040 days, so playing the whole game will still be demanding and will reward those who stick with it through multiple sittings--or one very long one.) This chronology allows the story to advance through some key moments in the history of Hollywood: the arrival and improvement of sound technology, the Great Depression, the advent of the League of Decency and the Production Code Administration, the late-30s boom, and World War II. It also allows for character development that makes sense. Stars are rarely made overnight, after all.
Of course, in the midst of all this, there's also the NSFW component. I won't go into too much detail, but one can envision various negotiations and numerous parties, not to mention just plain ol' horny-ness, where the need might arise to have a bit of fun. I'll just say it right now: There will not be many kinks in this game. It will be largely "vanilla," as it were, as well as largely heterosexual and entirely consensual (as long as trading sex for favors is considered consensual, which is a bit questionable philosophically speaking in my opinion, but most people disagree, so I'll go with that). To be clear, I fully recognize that this is not an entirely accurate depiction of the era: People in the '20s, '30s, and '40s were kinky, plenty were queer, and sexual assault was still a major issue. I'm not trying to rewrite history by any means. I just know that I can write best from the background of my own tastes and experiences, so...it is what it is. (With all that said, if you're still reading at this point, I would consider bringing someone on to help write some of the sexy scenes. Writing good sex is really hard. Since my main character is a woman, I'm mainly looking for another woman to contribute in this area. As I plan to just release this casually and for free, it wouldn't be a paid gig, but if you're interested in doing some writing on specific scenarios I have in mind, let me know.)
Ultimately, you'll end up somewhere on the scale of box-office megastar to an underground porn actress just struggling to get by during an era when porn was much harder to access.
Key Stats
Most of the usual ones of course, but your sexual reputation and film reputation will both play a major role in how you're perceived, what jobs you can get, etc. The balancing of these two things, which both can go up or down based on choices made in the game, will be key to your success. At least in how I envision things proceeding, this is substantially more...substantial and narratively significant than most html games' base corruption stats. In other words, the goal isn't just to get the character corrupted as quickly as possible to get the most sex scenes.
But you said text-based...
Yeah, I should have said text-exclusive. At least at this point, the game will not have images. I don't want to go the porn photo/gif route, and I don't have art skillz. If someone is just super excited by this project and wants to do art for it, let me know, but I'm also just curious to hear whether a text-only game would be utterly dissuasive for y'all. Would the plot of this game, if well-written, be enough to compensate for lack of images? Or does it really, really need artwork to be intriguing, ultimately?
Wrapping Up
Well, that's about all I have. As for where things stand, I've basically just written up the stats system (with more than 30 variables) because I didn't want to go overboard writing the story if this project didn't have some appeal to its intended audience. If I get some thunderous applause, then I'll move forward on this; if it's largely crickets, I'll hold off on this for now. I'm genuinely interested in learning whether y'all would be genuinely interested in a project like this. I don't want to waste my time on something too niche.
Just let me know what y'all think!
So I've started sketching out a little text-only project on Twine, but before I go too far with it, I wanted to get some community feedback on whether the idea would even be interesting to anyone. It's a "new girl moves to a new town and might get corrupted" story, so that isn't that unusual (okay, it's a bit hackneyed by this point). But beyond that basic framing, I think it's a bit...unsual...
Basic Plot
...starting with the fact that the story begins in 1925. You play a young woman (I'm thinking 20 years old) from some small town in the Midwest who arrives in Hollywood on a train, innocent and eager to try to make it in the motion picture business. You'll have to work your way up from being an extra to starring in box-office hits, along with fame-adjusted occupational and social demands: making rent, getting an agent, choosing the studio you'll sign a contract with, negotiating that contract, schmoozing with the rich and famous, and so forth. Your films can have variable degrees of success with the general public, so balancing your choices to best connect with the New York elites and the Midwestern mothers is key.
Chronologically speaking, the game will progress somewhat more quickly than most html games. In other words, it won't proceed one day at a time, but I also hate games that try to force a week's worth of content into a single page. So I'm thinking that I'll probably have it set up such that you'll play through a whole day filled with various events, then you'll advance to the next week, in which you'll play a single day, so on and so forth. That way you get the immersion of a full single day while allowing the story to progress chronologically on a reasonable pace.
The reason for that chronological progression is that I want the game to last 20 years. (Doing the math on that, 1 day per week*52 weeks*20 years=1040 days, so playing the whole game will still be demanding and will reward those who stick with it through multiple sittings--or one very long one.) This chronology allows the story to advance through some key moments in the history of Hollywood: the arrival and improvement of sound technology, the Great Depression, the advent of the League of Decency and the Production Code Administration, the late-30s boom, and World War II. It also allows for character development that makes sense. Stars are rarely made overnight, after all.
Of course, in the midst of all this, there's also the NSFW component. I won't go into too much detail, but one can envision various negotiations and numerous parties, not to mention just plain ol' horny-ness, where the need might arise to have a bit of fun. I'll just say it right now: There will not be many kinks in this game. It will be largely "vanilla," as it were, as well as largely heterosexual and entirely consensual (as long as trading sex for favors is considered consensual, which is a bit questionable philosophically speaking in my opinion, but most people disagree, so I'll go with that). To be clear, I fully recognize that this is not an entirely accurate depiction of the era: People in the '20s, '30s, and '40s were kinky, plenty were queer, and sexual assault was still a major issue. I'm not trying to rewrite history by any means. I just know that I can write best from the background of my own tastes and experiences, so...it is what it is. (With all that said, if you're still reading at this point, I would consider bringing someone on to help write some of the sexy scenes. Writing good sex is really hard. Since my main character is a woman, I'm mainly looking for another woman to contribute in this area. As I plan to just release this casually and for free, it wouldn't be a paid gig, but if you're interested in doing some writing on specific scenarios I have in mind, let me know.)
Ultimately, you'll end up somewhere on the scale of box-office megastar to an underground porn actress just struggling to get by during an era when porn was much harder to access.
Key Stats
Most of the usual ones of course, but your sexual reputation and film reputation will both play a major role in how you're perceived, what jobs you can get, etc. The balancing of these two things, which both can go up or down based on choices made in the game, will be key to your success. At least in how I envision things proceeding, this is substantially more...substantial and narratively significant than most html games' base corruption stats. In other words, the goal isn't just to get the character corrupted as quickly as possible to get the most sex scenes.
But you said text-based...
Yeah, I should have said text-exclusive. At least at this point, the game will not have images. I don't want to go the porn photo/gif route, and I don't have art skillz. If someone is just super excited by this project and wants to do art for it, let me know, but I'm also just curious to hear whether a text-only game would be utterly dissuasive for y'all. Would the plot of this game, if well-written, be enough to compensate for lack of images? Or does it really, really need artwork to be intriguing, ultimately?
Wrapping Up
Well, that's about all I have. As for where things stand, I've basically just written up the stats system (with more than 30 variables) because I didn't want to go overboard writing the story if this project didn't have some appeal to its intended audience. If I get some thunderous applause, then I'll move forward on this; if it's largely crickets, I'll hold off on this for now. I'm genuinely interested in learning whether y'all would be genuinely interested in a project like this. I don't want to waste my time on something too niche.
Just let me know what y'all think!
