Multiple choices X linear story

This comment was made in my previous post, and I think it deserves to be answered here in a new post because it's something I've been thinking about and it's worth sharing with everyone...

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Verity

Thank you for your hard work, can't wait for Matthew~~!🥰 Just a couple of thoughts - but i think you might be making your life more difficult with trying to keep every story parallel with each other, while trying to juggle interconnections, instead of a more linear approach at least when it comes to characters that appear in the same locations (college, downtown, gym etc). Maybe being more "liberal" with locking certain scene sequences or even whole character events to after certain events have been achieved may make scripting/story writing more effortless, like e.g locking Matthew's entire story to only after a user has successfully finished Josh's story or more specifically locking Matthew's painting club event to only activate if a user has already completed the one for Josh. It'd also encourage users to replay the game while waiting for a future update, trying to discover scenes or scenarios they may have missed in their first run. 🤔

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I came to this same conclusion a few days ago... thinking exactly about the question of the game becoming too complex and taking too long to develop.

In the beginning, the idea was to make a totally open game without a sacred timeline (Marvel feelings here 😂 ). And the stories were developed with this context in mind.

But now that I'm more experienced and the game is growing, I've realized that this becomes impractical, because the “multiverse” is multiplying... with several alternative versions.

I've already started to put the brakes on this proliferation of options and scenarios in Matthew's story

The idea is to make a mix...

I'm not going to give up giving the player the option of following the rhythm and the stories they prefer to play first, but I'm going to create key points in the story that the player will need to pass through in order to unlock other stories of other characters. Especially in the same destination.

For example. In order to unlock Kyle's story, the player will need to at least reach a stage in Josh's story and also make some progress in Matthew's story.

You don't necessarily have to finish these stories first, nor does it matter which path you prefer to follow, but you will have to at least “get through” some dialogue or scene in order to unlock another character's path.

I've already been applying this in some scenes in older stories, but now I'm going to use this feature more and “lock these key scenes” more often

The idea is to follow this line of development from now on:

Each destination, which shares several characters, will have a sort of independent linear story that will need to be followed in a certain order.

This gives me a little more control and predictability over the players' choices.

I'll already know which dialogues and scenes the player has seen. Then I won't have to think about extra alternative scenes just because there's a chance they haven't been seen by the player yet.

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The game is still in development... the idea is to keep improving and refining it.

So I'll be sharing with you the process, the difficulties and all the feedback you give me helps.