Hello my good sir,
Well, the way I intended it is a little less systematic than that. While most characters will have a mostly exclusive route and a more chaotic one, leaning more into a harem route or polycule/ntr/open route; some have at least a moment in their route where another character is involved.
For instance, Iris's route will always start with some lesbian events with Alex or her online threesome, Charlotte stories always will start with her crush on Tyler.
I've been talking with some other players who shared their concerns as to mandatory kinks and I absolutely understand who it could put off some players.
What I mean by mandatory kinks is that, with Charlotte for instance, her trust route leads to an exclusive relationship with her, while her corruption turns her into a super slutty type having sex with tons of people so if you'd like to go corruption route but don't like NTR you're not really going to enjoy any of it.
The idea was that depending on your favorite kinks you'd instinctively follow the route most fitting to you but I'm considering adding a skip button to some more sensitive kinks like voyeur or NTR, although that might create a problem as those kinks aren't present only for one event per route but become quite recurrent in said route. It would mean progressing through one route while skipping constantly and thus not really engaging with the story..
The other option was to have a parallel cleaner route but I'm a bit afraid it just wouldn't make sense with the story.
Like if you convince Charlotte that she needs to be as depraved as possible but also have her be 100% exclusive to you, it sort of breaks the logic of routes.
Also some characters like Iris which is bisexual and very much into threesomes and orgies, I could set up a parallel route where she would give up all of it to be exclusive towards MC but I find it hard to make it a "good" ending as it would betray what is her character's core principle.
I'd be super curious to hear what option you would prefer or what are your thoughts on the matter.
I personally thought the Charlotte corruption route was leading to a Netori style route rather than an Netorare/Netorase route, but I guess that also would happen in the Trust route. I think if possible, there should be warnings of what kinks a route would lead to. Or maybe have a route map in game that states the kink. I think in general, corruption is such a difficult genre because there are different interpretations of what corruption is. For me, I imagine corruption as shaping the LI out of their normal personality to crave MC. For example, my thoughts of Charlotte's trust route would be that Charlotte is still cute and innocent while loving MC, but corruption would have her dress sluttier and more interested in doing naughtier deeds with MC like public sex. But I am a bit biased because I prefer Harem over poly/NTR/open relationships.
Yep the Netori option is planned to be the trust route and Netorase more of the second one. I get what you mean ,the term of corruption for a route might be a bit misleading too because this is very much a corruption game, so whichever way you go there is going to be quite some moral degeneration and the pretty intense sex scene either way..
But in the end, a branching pathway with multiple option might be the best option to allow everyone to have their preferred type of relationship.
I'll try to add warnings or maybe a menu showing what kink to expect with which route...
Yeah that makes sense, in the end it's a corruption game so no matter what path you're taking you're still corrupting them. Thank you for your quick replies btw! I think it's cleared up a lot of my misunderstandings/questions of the game and "corruption" in general. I didn't really think to consider the trust route is still a corruption route. So I'm excited to see where this game goes. Hopefully the feedback is helpful but not changing your overall vision of the game!
I understand why some characters’ core values could make a one-sided harem feel difficult, but I don’t think it’s entirely incompatible with the narrative.
For example, you said Charlotte becomes “depraved ” if you corrupt her, but she could still remain loyal to the dick she’s obsessed with. She might only want to try the most intense, kinky things with him—such as public sex—similar to what another commenter suggested.
As for Iris, I think it’s fine that her early scenes include lesbian sex or group sex since she is not open to the idea of being exclusive but once there’s development with the mc, it wouldn’t be unbelievable for her to at least try. Or, in the case of corruption, she could become so obsessed with him that she feels women and other men aren’t enough anymore.
So I think the two parallel routes are the way to go. Besides, the game is about relationships, as the descriptions say, if the mc has the power to influence the girls, it’s natural that some would try to use it for their advantage to have that fantasy, even if is a bit unfair for certain characters.
I hope my comment was useful.
Well when I said depraved, I was more thinking about something like, gang bangs in the school's restroom, but you're right, there could absolutely be a path for her to be depraved yet staying exclusive, I guess I wanted the paths to be very distinct so I thought an exclusive depraved path might be too similar to the trust path ( because she's going to do some kinky shit there too) but only with a tone difference and some different outfits/expressions.
The good thing is that I could recycle some work from the animation so it wouldn't be as labor intensive than starting from scratch and would take significantly less time.
Branching pathways might be interesting, at least for characters whose route don't go necessarily exclusive.
Comments are always useful :) thanks for sharing your impressions.