Under Your Spell
Devblog #75
I am going to be straight with you all here: I didn't think writing a "choices matter"-type story is this difficult. I'm not saying that it is very difficult, but rather that I expected it to be much easier. This might be my personal problem, and I don't mean that I don't enjoy writing these events and storylines, but whenever I get to the point where I need to take into account something that you have done or didn't do, I get this "uuugh" thought in my head. Not because I don't want to do it, but because there are now two main pathways in front of me.
First one is to write a very different part of the event for every possible situation. I do do this sometimes, but when absolutely necessary - but just think about it. I'll have to write two, three, four, or sometimes even more versions of the text, most of which will never be seen by a casual player. That does have a certain appeal - knowing that your game "has depth," so to speak. But also, it's a lot of effort and time that could be spent elsewhere - writing new events and pushing the story forward instead of going wider.
The second one is to write several short snippets for each possibility, that do cover the basic "yes, I remember you did or have that," but don't really go any deeper. But every time I do that I have the same "ugh" running through my mind. Because... why even bother then? Writing several similar lines (or blocks) of text with very slight variations. Feels like a cop-out and another waste of time.
So every time I come to a situation like that, I have to make the hard choice: which of the "ugh" ways I should go today? I hope that every time I make this choice, I do it with the best intentions in mind, but honestly, I don't know. I guess every one of us has this desire to go the path of lowest resistance. I picked up this topic because as I'm writing the ending to the second Trial, I'm getting a lot of those. Lots of things need to be addressed: How did you do on this trial? How did you perform on the previous one? Are you dating anyone yet? Should I address that at all? Etc., etc.... But the writing is moving forward, and it's really only this final stretch that's left.
I actually gave an early Trial build to a few dedicated players, and their feedback has been quite positive so far, so it seems I likely won't have to hold the Trial release back for reworks. Yay!
Violet's date event got a bit more attention from me too, and now it looks like something I can be happy with, so we can add that to the "done" pile too. Now I just have to code in the sprites and do all the translations. Easy-peasy.
Well, I'd better not waste any more time here and get back to the important stuff. I'll see you in a week.
Shady Character One, out!
Comments
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The trick to 'your choices matter' stories is that most of the time the story options diverge, but then return to the same point before the next big choice, so you don't have infinitely spreading branches to deal with.
It's also okay to give different levels of weight to choices. The more the player has to do to unlock that choice, the more impact that choice has on the following events. For example, you just went into the trial and beat it in an expected way with minimal prep? Cool, you get slight variance in dialogue based on how you did it. If there was an option that required more prep and could be easily missed? If the player put in that extra work, they deserve a more unique event / dialogue afterwards as a reward.
You can also look at how much a player has done. So for dates for example. You already have a date? You probably interacted with that date a good amount already, so you don't need a super in depth scene, and some basic variance in dialogue is fine.
You don't have a date? Means you like had less interaction / pay off from your interactions, so let's try to give you something to be invested / excited about. Maybe a potential date comes up to you after the trial, and who it is depends on how you beat the trial. Maybe a character that previously wasn't available as a date is impressed by your performance and comes up to you since you don't have a date, giving you a reward for sticking with the story despite not getting a date yet.
Obviously it's fine for there to be situations where every choice has big variance, or choices where the variance is always minimal, but I think variance in the weight of choices gives replayability without overworking you.
There's also just the possibility of waiting for choices to pay off. Like you make a choice, you don't immediately see anything come from it, but then in 2-3 updates suddenly something you did in the past gets referenced and that also makes it feel like your choices matter and that the world remembers what you're doing, even if it's only a few choices that the game actually remembers.
I totally understand the having to pick from two evils there, and yeah, I agree that there is no general best choice for it. Your approach of going with whichever of the two options seems best suited for the particular situation at hand seems most promising. I've played plenty of games who tried to stick to only option one or option two the entire way and neither worked too well imo. Option one (minimal changes depending on choice) does really feel massively low-effort and reduces replay value to almost nothing (from my experience it reduces a replay with different choices to skimming the text for those 1-2 lines that are different while ignoring the rest). Option 2 (doing vastly different scenes depending on past choices) is the great one in theory, but as you said it's a massive pile of work. It is amazing if a dev has enough manpower/time to pull it off and games that did that were among the best I played, but for smaller projects/solo devs it usually just ends with them being stretched too thin and the game never going anywhere because there is so much lateral expansion that horizontal (aka main story) progess is nil.
Yeah, going with option 2 every time would be cool, but even with how I have been doing it so far, the games script has grown much bigger than I originally anticipated. I definitely would not be able to handle anything more.