itch.io

no worries. i like interacting with people excited or curious about the project :)
so the way the narrative is written is that most BL or VN games are treated as "dating sims" and typically have a main character (MC) that meets a handful of characters and then you choose which one to pursue or "date." this sets up the multiple "routes" in the typical dating sim. i personally have a hard time with multi-tasking and had no idea what was i was doing with story writing or game development or art or coding or any of that and i figured that juggling multiple storylines would be insane for me to try and tackle. so rather than doing multiple guys to "date," i did one character pairing: zack and braden and focused hardcore on the narrative rather than just going surface level with a handful of guys and hopefully the depth of that narrative would outshine having multiple guys. however, there are 2 "routes" to the game, which was my way nodding back to the typical dating sim. but the way it's written here is that the main story is linear, then it splits at a certain choice in the game and sets up 2 routes. from there, the linear story continues but your choice of route changes a small handful of things that happen throughout the main story until it will split drastically in chapter 9 and then after that split, the main story will then merge back together for the ending. so the body of the story is sorta written generically enough that by adding only a few lines here and there or changing a picture, i can alter the entire perspective of the main story and basically create two different stories out of the same linear story. 

your choices, however, will have no impact on the ending. which i know goes completely against all dating sims and VN approaches ever. the reason here is that the story was never about us as a reader, it was about these characters. i wanted to build a story and entice the reader in by making relatable characters that you get attached to and eventually i wanted the reader to lose control of that and have no ability to affect the outcome. i think that creates tension and having choices that could help or hurt things takes away that tension because you could always redo it to make it more satisfactory to you. i didn't want the reader to have that out here, i wanted all of us, myself included even as the writer, to lose absolute control and have all of us dependent and watching from the outside as characters we've grown to love create their own destiny the same way a friend or family member or sibling would.