Excuse my rambling here, I'm an overtired insomniac at the moment. (Surprisingly not a joke. Insomnia fucking sucks. I wish it on no one.)
I'll start by saying, everyone is entitled to their own preferences/etc. That's pretty much a given, and seriously fuck people who do the whole "stop liking what I don't like" shit. I hope no one reading this is one of those - if you are, fuck off. That said.........
I'll use my own game as a point of reference here. Not that it's the worlds shiniest example of anything, but it's the one game where I can 100% vouch for the intentions behind things - while I suspect many devs have done things in the past for similar reasons, I can't that for sure, so I'll just use myself - but mostly I think some stuff applies to a lot of people.
Ok so first.
The great advantage of sci-fi and fantasy is that dev actually needs to have thought through the setting and thus more likely the story beforehand. In difference to a school setting which seem to be the default when dev does not have much of an idea what to do.
I don't know about that. The game I'm working on right now isn't in a school setting - but the one I *really* want to do after, is. It definitely wasn't some sort of "default" sort of thing. I chose the setting in that story for two reasons. #1 - let's be honest, it ticks a LOT of boxes for people. My current game ticks almost none, so I'm not just all about that "gotta get that money!" lifestyle, but still. #2 - The setting is central to the story. I actually built a tiny little game (no images, text only- I hadn't learned daz yet) and had it on this site for a bit, that served as a sort of prologue, but it seems to have been lost to the annals of time. Suffice to say, it being in a school setting was actually relevant. I suspect most people who go for it, do it for two reasons. First, and the reason I'm less comfortable with - some people just want characters as young as possible. Second, it puts you in an enviroment where it's easy to bring the characters together - you don't have to rely on contrived circumstance, coincidence, or other nonsense. Yea, there's other ways to bring them together, but it's definitely easier in a setting that actually forces them together.
No insta-sex. We're two acts in to a four act game, and there's none of that porny nonsense. There's plenty of desire, longing and flirting, though.
I don't really see a problem with insta-sex. I know I do it myself(in my game that is), and I definitely don't see it as "porny nonsense". I know when I was in my 20s... (I won't date myself any more than that. But yea...) I know I was fucking everything that moved. Sex on a 1st or 2nd date was not uncommon. Some of those people I formed relationships with.... some I didn't. I don't see why a game should be any different. I totally get some people want something a bit more emotional, or drawn out, or other stuff like that, but I definitely wouldn't classify it as "porny nonsense", cause I did it, and let me tell you, a porn star I am not.
The characters in my game tend to have sex fairly quickly. This is for two reasons if I'm being honest. First, the game is quite compact (for me. As you can see I tend to be verbose.) I'm about halfway through (chapter-wise... about 1/3rd or so in every other way), and I'm only 4 releases(about 6 months) in. I did move a few things, particularly in the relationship category a little faster than I would have wanted to, in the name of not making the game massively bigger than I wanted, and still having the back end of the story (where I think most of the real meat of it is) make total sense. The second reason is... I'm just writing my experiences. A *LOT* of this game is either based on, or inspired by real life. 90% of the stuff in my game, is stuff that actually happened to either me or people I know. Now granted, it didn't all happen to 1 person, nor was it in such a small time span, but still. Gotta make concessions somewhere I guess. Actually I should say like 50%. 90% of it is heavily inspired by actual events, but I definitely did take quite a few liberties. Some for reasons of trying to put together a better story, some because.... well as I think we all know, real life sucks sometimes, and I didn't want *too* much of that in a game.
As far as Intertwined goes.... man do I have a hate boner for that game. It's not warranted - it's a solid game for sure, but playing it made me feel like I was going through the porn version of dawson's creek. There was just WAY too much coincidental drama for my tastes.
Tags suck. Seriously. God they're awful. Half the tags aren't correctly applied, the other half everyone argues over the meaning of. I'm not gonna argue in favor of deleting them entirely, but..... idk if that would be better or worse?
I think this is a thread every dev should read through. Even if they're making the most porn-trope game in history, where the story is literally something like "You've been challenged by a god to fuck 100 women by the end of the week... or DIE". They'd still get a better sense of what people who play that would probably enjoy - just by looking at the most common things the people here generally DON'T. (Or at least disqualifying criteria, even if you do like it.) For everyone else, there's mastercard. Wait no that's not right. Oh well, moving on.
Oh god. There was NTR discussion in this thread. Quick, someone set those pages on fire.
I had a lot of other thoughts, but insomnia has rattled my brain a bit and they've since gone poof. I do know tomorrow is my "last day before I start working on my next chapter, so I'm going to spam play every game I can manage to find that looks even remotely worth my time" day. I've already pulled a few from this thread (as well as a couple of updates I never got around to), so hopefully I find a gem or two in there.
I'm mildly perturbed that I can't find a copy of that "prologue" game I mentioned earlier... basically the story was just an introduction to the MC, and his girlfriend, on the day of their high school graduation. Typical "Yay we're done with high school" stuff. Then at the end of the prologue, the MC wins the lottery. Him and his GF move into a nice house, they sign up for their dream colleges (because hey now they can afford it), flash forward a couple months, first day of college - of note, they were planning on going to different schools. Her an art school, him a standard "university". Her first day is "today", his is a few days later. She goes in, he hangs at home, has some breakfast, chills for a bit. Turns on the TV, in comes the "Special news bulletin".
The news is a mass shooting at his GF's school. Suffice to say, she died. ..... And that's the prologue. The actual story would pick up about a year after her death, and a school setting is pretty integral to the plot from that point on.
Anyway, none of the above is actually relevant, except to show that a school setting isn't just used because a dev ran out of ideas. Sometimes, it *IS* the idea. Some day I hope to have a chance to tackle that story, it was the one I initially wanted to when I first got into this until I realized just how absolutely massive in scope it was, so I backtracked and went with the one I'm working on instead. If I have any luck at all, maybe this time next year I'll be working on it.
Ok I've rambled way too much, I'll step away now. And maybe go try to bang my head into a wall until I pass out.
