Re: Valentina's Story Ver. 0.01 (Corruption sandbox rpg) [Patreon]
There are to many posts for me to reply to all, but I do read them so thanks for the responses. Now on to this mega post (Wow!).
First of all I'd like to congratulate you on an absolutely fantastic game. I've fully played through it about four times now, and I don't know which part I like the best.
*Snip*
TL;DR: Thank you for inspiring me!
Thanks for the very in-depth reply! Glad you liked it. The concept of this game is the result of my frustration with other RPGMaker games where you either are on rails the entire time, or you are presented with different things you can do but then can only do them at very specific times under certain conditions. Why shouldn't you be able to relax on the beach if you want to? Since I'm working on this by myself, I didn't want a concept so complicated that I wouldn't be able to finish it. So that's why I settled with a bunch of stand-alone side activities, combined with mostly linear story routes, in a short-ish, replayable game.
Freedom of choice was very important to me. The different story routes that you can opt-in to do, or skip entirely, are part of that. I want each route to have a main theme or fetish. The first version of each route probably won't have much in the way of branching choices to keep things simple, I'm trying to be careful in how thin I stretch my time. But I can always add on to them later.
I haven't wrote much about Valentina's past, likes, dislikes, etc. because I want players to project their own idea of who she is onto the character. Besides being a naive college student there isn't much character development there, she's a bit of a blank state.
Also tying into freedom of choice, is the simplicity to do those things. I went over a few different versions of the corruption system before settling on the current one. I wanted a basic, interesting gameplay mechanic that all H events could tie into, giving the player a sense of progression, while hinting at what to do next when they have the stats. I also wanted the game to communicate to the player clearly what things they can interact with (unless it's a secret). So you don't see a bunch of doors to empty buildings (besides the one's I haven't fleshed out yet).
When designing the environment, room for growth was my primary motivation. It definitely needs more small details, npc's, things to do, etc, but the base framework is there for a fair amount of content already. I didn't put things in the city by accident (such as the park *wink*).
Thanks for the feedback, it's good to hear you found the Zach route without issue. I think I'll leave Sam's alone for now. For the next version I added a list of story routes to the Status menu, which should give players an idea that they are available to find. For Zach, I'm going to add an "introduction to the characters" scene on the first day of school so the player knows Zach and Hannah aren't "just another npc", but something they can interact with. I know currently there isn't much to do at school but I want to flesh it out. It definitely needs NPC's to interact with. Maybe clubs that Val can join?
I'm also coming up with ideas on inviting people out to do things, maybe with a cell phone. We'll see!
Glad it inspired you in your work, that's awesome!
