Q&A There is a lot of branching in the story, do you think you'll be able to complete all of them, or might it become too much?

Short answer: Yes, I think I can handle it. At least that’s the plan. It might get a bit complicated at times, but it is not as bad as it looks.

Long answer: The complexity of managing all paths and branching is also something that worries me. But I think it’ll be manageable for several reasons.

I am careful to try to not bite off more than you can chew. This means that, whenever possible, the choices provided are more about giving the “illusion” of choice, than actually creating parallel narrative paths. That would be impossible to handle. This is nothing new, it’s the way many of these kinds of “choose your adventure” games work. Especially if they are made by a single person in their spare time.

In practice, this means there are huge chunks of the narrative that are common. The choices made just temporarily deviate from that path before merging with it again.

These merging nodes can be a bit complicated to handle, and there were already some examples of these in Chapter 3 like with Kim, Jen, Emma and even Lea. But it’s mostly about being creative with words, they even use the same renders. And words are cheap. Of course, depending on the route taken, this “forced merging” into the common path might feel more natural or more forced but the idea is that you aren’t even aware that this is a point of convergence. It also involves a lot of little dialogue changes here and there to refer to past choices that you have made or not. But that’s not too complicated to handle.

This game seems to promise lots of choices, but then I can’t really choose not to do this thing that I don’t like. Why?

From time to time, I get questions like this. The reason is that the game branching is not as complicated as you may think. And I really can’t complicated it more than to a certain degree. As an exercise, let’s talk about some events of Chapter 1 and 2.

When we meet Jen, it’s obvious that she will be a “temptation” and the player has to choose if they want to be completely professional around her or… not. And yet, throughout the game there are lots of mandatory “unprofessional” events.

Wouldn’t it be better to let the player choose if they *really* want to be professional or not with Jen? Yes, it would be better. But the changes between both choices would be too big.

For example: what if we don’t invite Jen to go to the pub with everyone else? Then Emma wouldn’t get mad/jealous because of that and the whole scene and the next phone call would have to be different.

What if you don’t invite Jen (or you don’t go) to Jamie’s party to celebrate Jen’s victory in the blitz tournament? Then all sequence of events with Emma would be different. You might not even get mad at her. Heck, why don’t I let people choose if they get mad at her or not? Then the whole chapter 2 would be different, I’d have to basically write 2 different versions of that chapter. You get the idea.

The truth is, there is really not that much "true" branching because I wouldn’t be able to handle it. That’s also the reason why you’ll have to keep being friends with all of the characters whether you like them or not. The more content is common to all paths, the easier it is to handle.

Won’t the branching increase development time?

Probably it will. The idea was that these 1st chapters should take around 3 months to develop and it already always took a couple weeks more than that. This might get worse in the near feature with chapters starting to take around 4 months. Even more by the end of the game.

How long will the game be?

It depends a bit of how long I make each chapter. There’s some wiggling room. I’d say around 8 to 10 chapters.

What about all those choices to see or not see certain kinks mentioned in the last post? Isn’t that unnecessarily complicating things?

Maybe I made it sound more complicated what it really is. You know how in many games, during the lewd scenes, you can choose between sexual positions like doggy, cowgirl, missionary, etc? Well, here you’ll be able to choose what kinks to see in a single scene. 

Examples: soft spanking, hard spanking; praise dirty talk, humiliating dirty talk; normal/rough sex; etc. It’s nothing not already done in other games. You’ll just be able to choose between what kinks you want to see, instead of sexual positions.

What about all the Dom/Sub paths with the girls? Won’t that be too complicated to manage?

There are a few ways to introduce both a Dom and a Sub path in the same game. One would be to just have a girl that is submissive and a girl that is dominant and let the player choose which one he likes better. The other would be to have one girl with two different paths where, depending on your choices, she can be dominant or submissive with you.

I’m not completely sure about this, but I think that having two paths for a single girl is less work than having two independent girls. The reason is that all non-sexual scenes that establish the character’s personality are common to both paths and just have to be written once. Once that’s done, then I just need to make different lewd scenes dependent on the route the player is. This involves a bit of giggling around because the common scenes need to make sense regardless of the path you take, but, once again, these are mainly done with just *words*. It’s easier/faster to write different dialogues than to render images.

There are positives and negatives to this approach. The positives is that tinstead onf just 1 girl with the kink you like, now there are 2, so more choices for you. The negatives is that the characters need to be designed with both paths in mind, which might bring some unwanted “baggage” from one path into the other (for example, one of the girls needed to be in a relationship because one of her paths involves you cheating on her boyfriend with her. The alternative MaleSub path with her wouldn’t require such relationship, and the players would actually enjoy more if she was single, but her common path needs to be the same).

Also, the approach in this game is a mix of the two strategies since not all paths are created equally. Some girls have preferred paths with more content than others.

Which Love Interests are available for a relationship with the main character?

I know that, so far, the different girls have had quite different amounts of screen time. But all of them will have their time. It will be possible to be in a relationship with all of the girls in the banner picture above.

If I reject a girl’s preferred path, is it over with her?

Chapter 3 introduced a new visual element to help players track in which path they are. This is visible in the profile menu. If the girl has no path icon yet, it means that you still are not in one of her paths. 

If the current path from her is greyed out, it means that you rejected her, or you have been rejected. If that’s the case, assume that there will be no more lewd scenes with her. 

Because this game is released in chapters and it’s not completely written (even if lots of things are already planned), there are always some changes that might come while the story develops. If a good opportunity arises to turn a “grey path” into a “lewd path”, I’ll take it. So, this answer is more like a rule of thumb than a 100% rule.

Are you planning on making a walkthrough?

No. The game already provides lots of hints and info to help players know in which paths they are, why some answers are available or unavailable, or the consequences of some choices. There’s even a cheat code if you want to quickly explore completely different paths without having to start from the beginning. All of this already takes a lot of time to make, I really don’t want to spend more time writing a walkthrough. It’s one of those things that’s just better if the community does on their own.