Choices and Branching

Hey everyone. The final version of the demo’s been released now, but we’re still a ways off from launching the kickstarter, partly for planning/budgeting reasons (we want to make sure we can account for everything that’s intended to go in the game and what it should cost before we make promises about what we’re going to deliver on,) and partly because we went public so late in development and are still looking to reach more people before launch. So, in the meantime, I’m going to continue posting devlogs on our plans for the game.

A few people who haven’t played through all available choices have asked me this before, so to be clear, all branches in the current demo lead to the same ending (although it’s an ending which can be viewed from multiple perspectives.) But, that doesn’t mean that there’s only one planned ending for the full game. The ending of the demo falls well within what would be the common route of the full game, and there’s branching past that point which doesn’t converge back on a single path.

But, the branching doesn’t all end after the player ends up on a specific route. While Japanese commercial VNs seem to have developed in the direction of featuring less player choice over time, with choices in more recent games usually serving only a way to direct the player onto specific routes (with a handful of games going as far as to only give you a single choice to decide which route you want,) Complex Relations is intended as something of a throwback in that respect. I want to continue to give the player chances to offer input after the main route branches take place. As in many older visual novels, seeing every version of every scene, or every variation of each CG, is intended to be more of a completionist goal rather than a natural consequence of playing the game to each ending.

I don’t want to give the player opportunities for input up to a point, and then take that away and leave the rest of the game non-interactive. I think that the routes of a lot of visual novels suffer for the loss of the interactivity they had in earlier parts of the game. Besides, I like working payoffs for the player’s own choices into the script, and the writing wouldn’t be as fun for me if I gave that up. Several choices in the demo are already planned to have specific payoffs later in the game.

Aside from that, there’s one specific choice I want to address which comes up over and over in countless VNs, often numerous times within individual games. A choice that appears in most eroge, and only in eroge.

Inside, or outside?

Personally, I don’t have much enthusiasm for this choice. I’m interested to hear whether players care if it comes up in Complex Relations at all, since it doesn’t cost much extra to implement, but I’d be happy to do without it. But, I think there’s a lot more that a visual novel featuring explicit content can do to offer players meaningful choices during sex scenes, and I’m interested in exploring that. So the full game is intended to offer choices during sex, which pay off with different content inside those scenes and out.

I’m not sure if other visual novels have done this before (if you know of any, I’d be interested to hear about them.) But, whether they have or not, I hope I can make it a fun enough feature that other developers think it’s worth trying later.

If there’s anything you particularly want to see as a player, feel free to share it. While the overall direction and tone of the game is already set, it’s not too late for me to take input on board.