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(1 edit) (+1)

There are some choices that don't seem to have a gameplay impact, but have you establish elements of your MC's personality. Specifically, I'm referring to the prologue's "science can't explain the supernatural/science will be able to explain anything with enough data" choice and when talking with Greta, choosing between "I want to fulfill the hotels mission/I want to advance technology and society/I want money lmao". Those seem like pretty big choices for how the MC approaches the world that's left up to the player, yet I haven't seen an impact. Was there a plan to have the MC present a different personality based on these choices that has fallen to the wayside in favor of the 6 backgrounds being the main split? 

And I guess I'm the same vein, just how do you guys handle writing the MC? You touched on this in the build 0.4 Q&A that they have a kinda specific, almost _Chad_ personality, but how do you decide when the player picks a choice versus the MC just handling as part of their innate personality? 

And how do you adjust for the fact that renpy's easy rollback has someone picking a choice in a dialogue branch, reading the response, then rolling back to pick every other choice in turn? Obviously you disable that at some important points, but, like, do you factor in that the player does the rollback to your writing process and style and intentionally plan for it?

I guess in short, I think you have done one of the best jobs writing a 'blank'/no character sprite MC that I've ever seen, so how do you do it? Would you consider a devlog on it? 

(+2)

I think a good way of answering these questions is by taking into account that we designed the game to get the player in a very specific mindset. 

Now, i don't think you need to look at our code (but it could help) to get an idea of how reactive minotaur hotel is to your choices. Writing a guide for minoh is borderline impossible because of how much crucial choices of the game depend on previous choices, and how small decisions snowball into bigger consequences. A huge decision such as who gets to the hotel (Nikos or Pedro) depends on do many previous choices that at most you can have directions on how to get to a particular outcome reliably, but everything else is now up in the air. 

And most of the big decisions have tradeoffs. We mentioned multiple times that it won't be possible to have all guests in one playthrough. 

So, knowing that you can't get everything, and that the best outcome for a lot of choices is subjective, and that your playthrough will always be affected by a myriad of small decisions, you start making choices that make sense to you. 

But, you know, the way this is feasible is if all the choices have small, cumulative impacts. A couple if-elses and small variable increases for a lot of small choices is manageable, but splitting the game into three big branches depending on the MC's philosophy when confronted by Greta? That becomes unfeasible. 0.3 was kind of a nightmare to write because there's a big deviation with the main character being abusive to asterion, we can't have sweet stuff happen when the MC has the day before sent asterion out to get tortured without coming off as videogamey. 

So, yes, there are choices in the game that could have a bigger impact than they do, but that would balloon the scope of the game to an unfathomable degree. I think an underwhelming amount of weight put into a handful of choices is a small price to pay for having the game get you into a habit of expecting responsiveness. 


To answer your other question, we joke about the Mc being a Chad but I think that's an exaggeration. VNs tend to go for more passive, reactive protagonists because it's more economical. Not giving your point of view character a lot of agency means you can get away with not giving him a lot of meaningful choices (that expand the scope of the game) while not having the player feel a big disconnect when the MC reacts in a way that makes you want to jump into the screen and punch him (though it still does happen). Because they don't get to act much in the first place. So, in comparison, yeah the Mc of minotaur hotel comes off as a very competent guy with a lot of agency and say over what happens in the story.

Dont get me wrong though, I'm not dissing other creators, making games is time consuming and we have a five person team writing this, whatever helps get your game across the finish line, you do you pal. 

(+4)

Thanks for the detailed response! I think your first point really does nail it and why Minotaur Hotel has been so engaging: it's not just the writing or the art or the music to put the player in a certain mindset, but even the timing of getting to choose something, no matter if it's a big choice or not, drives home certain mindsets and themes.

I had already been thinking about the times you get a choice on screen when it's the only one option and how that makes the player feel more engaged by actively getting to select it anyway, but even that is just a surface level interaction with the medium compared to something like after the kiss with Asterion: telling the player they have 3 options to stay in the moment and 1 to back away from it sets up their expectations that they get to enjoy the tender scene 3 more times before it ends. Yet when they think the moment has to be over because they've seen the 3 options and that's what renpy said they get, one more choice appears to reward and delight you because clearly the player wants to bask in the moment more, so why shouldn't they be able to? Renpy (and VN expectations) as a medium are a tool that can also be played with to drive home the themes and important messages, and it feels like so many VNs just let it be a delivery mechanism. Kudos to y'all for going above and beyond, it definitely shows.

(+5)

Many choices in the game don't have consequences aside from the brief burst of variation that follows it. Some people would say this is bad game design, that all choices should have some impact, but I don't agree with that. Sometimes we throw in choices to let the player roleplay how they see fit, and some times the choices are precisely because we know they can check what the other branches are like. The differences in reactions between each branch can reveal important details about the characters.

And, sometimes, the choices are there to plant ideas in the player's head. In the case of the prologue they set the mood — the fact that you are given the choice at all to go with "science explains things/I've seen something supernatural" clues the player into what sort of story this is. If the MC answered this on his own it wouldn't stick in the player's mind so well. Same with Greta, her question is planting the idea that the hotel's powers can be used in creative ways for creative goals.

These choices are setup for the choices that do matter, which often times are the ones you'll do with the management mechanic.

It's hard for me to give you a full idea of the MC. There's a sort of trick going on with him, actually. We frame him as a blank slate self-insert, but as a writer I think that is fundamentally impossible to realize. No character can be a blank slate, except a literal vegetable. You see, whenever we make a "blank slate" what we are actually doing is picking a few traits and making them vague, while picking about a dozen of well-defined traits and pushing them away from the spotlight. For example, Link, Samus, Mario, even the protagonists of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, are "blank slates" but they are brimming with character — because what they do says a lot about them.

We have this going with the MC. In truth, the MC comes across as a sort of undefined person, but there's a lot to him that we just don't bring to attention. A few guidelines for the MC:

  • The narration should never say what the MC is thinking or feeling (but sometimes we let it slip, and that's a mistake.) What we can do is have the narrator go on about what someone would think, in abstract, but that's not necessarily what the MC is thinking.
  • The MC is a generally competent person. He's not necessarily excellent, but he's smart and skilled enough that he can at least be expected not to make things worse. Socially, he's outgoing when he wants to but generally reserved. He doesn't need to resort to violence because he can talk his way out of trouble.
  • The MC is never lecherous, or a pervert. Even in his most sexually charged moments, there has to be a sense of class, sensibility, elegance to him.
  • The MC's physical actions should, when applicable, convey a sense of subdued grace. This is often done by invoking some mythological and poetic motifs. He is not a clumsy person.
  • The MC is a profoundly humane and understanding person. He is capable of interpreting and understanding even very complex people, if given enough information to work with.
  • He is a man of action and communicates with deeds more than with words, and there is a high chance that he worked as a detective (or something like it) sometime in his life.

These things may not seem like much when presented in bullet points, but together they paint a somewhat well defined person. The MC, you could say, is a humanist both philosophically and metaphysically. He has made his life's mission to help lost people by giving them the basic conditions to flourish and heal emotionally. He believes in human rights, and in doing his part to make sure they are respected. He is morally upstanding, but not moralistic or imposing of his sense of ethics. He understands the importance of what he's doing, to others and Asterion, and when the narration is not aimed on him he probably gets emotional sometimes. And he has nothing, nothing, magical about him: he is human, and that alone is more than enough.

There's also another trick we do, but this only applies for players who navigate successfully through a lot of the game's hidden challenges: in truth, the MC has independent thought and there is a gap between what he thinks and what the player thinks, much like there is a gap between the player and Pedro. There are rare moments which few players will see where the narrative does not give the player a choice because the MC and Pedro already made a significant, substantive, deliberate choice for themselves.

So, is he truly a blank slate? Is it possible to write a true blank slate? Because when we put it like this, the MC is actually a well-defined character, but we omit the most obvious signs that this is the case.

Mind you, this ties with the rollback thing. It may not seem like it, but Minotaur Hotel is a detective story, except the real mysteries aren't expressly stated in the narrative itself. The rollback is there to let you play the detective and investigate things...

Now, look back at the guidelines for the MC's writing. Do you see the part I italicized?

We keep the rollback so the player can be like a detective; think ahead, build a hypothesis, test it as many times as necessary. The mechanic is there to push you towards trying to understand and investigate what's going on. The reason why you can forgive and hug Argos is to push you towards a more humane mindset. So, in truth, with all those things and more we are trying to project the MC's characterization onto the player.

Sorry if I rambled. I was trying to answer this question before having dinner, and I think the hunger made me a bit disorganized. Hopefully this makes sense.

(+2)

I think it made great sense! Thank you for putting in the time for the detailed answer.

This is awesome insight into the MC! It's amazing that you're encouraging the player to live up to the MC's standards rather than just hoping the player sees themself reflected in him, and it pays off as being super engaging. Coupled with how you play with the VN medium and choices in it, it really does pull the player to really engage with the content and do the detective work as well, since the MC is there waiting to reward them for doing it. Damn, you glorious bastards. That's why this project is something special.

(+2)

This is a very excellent way describing the MC. One of the things I love about it is how sublet the deliberate choices with the MC are.

In terms of the rollback feature, I would compare it to the time rewind mechanic of the first Life is Strange game except that it's more non-diegetic feature of the engine being utilized well by the team rather than a diegetic in game mechanic. You can use the rollback to see immediate outcomes for choices, but you cannot use it to change those choices much further into the narrative unless you reload saves with hours separating that choice and later outcome. And even with the skip feature (which LiS also has something similar) you still have to navigate other choices in between. It's a feature the devs expect most players to do but does not detract from the game or story and it makes for a fun experience exploring the mystery of the game.

(+1)

wow i dint know LiS did QoL, this make sme want to play it^^

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It's part of the gameplay in the first LiS. You can rewind time at the beginning of each map and go through different dialogue options for each character or new ones open up if you learned something from previous conversations from a now changed timeline. It also let's you skip through previously viewed dialogue during the conversation. The only time the game takes this away from you is a very tense and emotionally charged section where Max's powers for reasons never explained in the narrative just don't work (meta reason: for drama and Max's dialogue choices really matter with no "chance" to change the outcome which is very heavy). If you're interested in Life is Strange, I recommend giving it a shot. The first episode is free on Steam, and I think on other platforms.