The issue with Bri (and other things to improve)

As explained in the last post, the fact that Bri is being picked by so little players as one of their favorite Love Interest is a bit concerning. The LIs are written to feel different from each other to appeal to different kinds of players. Ideally, I’d like to have a more-or-less equal distribution between which ones the different players like. That would mean that the writing/character development/kinks are working as intended: different people will be attracted to different girls.

But when one of them is barely picked, that’s a good indication that something might have gone wrong with her. Mind you, Bri still has time to recover, and we have seen similar things happen with other Lis. And I will try to be extra mindful now to give her better scenes in the future.

Also, maybe expecting all of theLIs to have a good amount of fans was unrealistic to begin with: for better or worse, Emma, Deb, Lea and Jen have (at least so far) a much more preponderant role on the story than Bri, Olivia or Kim. It was a design choice because it’s very hard to give all LIs enough development time per chapter and those last three ended up being used a bit like side-LIs instead of Main-LIs. The plan is still to give them plenty of screen time, but perhaps it was a mistake on my part to expect players to start getting more invested in them this late in the game. Time will tell if, a few chapters down the line, they’ll become as popular as the main LIs, or still stay in the shadows.

How to fix Bri

Regarding Bri in particular, I don’t think there’s much to do besides keep going and hoping that I’ll start giving her more and better material. The alternative would be to go back and add/rewrite some of her scenes, but I don’t want to do that. Firstly, I’m not even yet entirely sure how to do a better job with that. Secondly, it could break save compatibility, or, at the very least, make the interested players have to start a new just to see a few more scenes with a single character. And lastly, it’d take development time away from what is my main focus: future content.

But a better rewriting of Bri is something on my mind. Which brings me to:

How to handle tech debts

It’s a bit jarring starting a new game of Nothing is Forever. The first couple scenes the characters don’t open or close the mouth while talking, there are still some scenes with too thick black outlies, and a couple animations are quite bad. Just like with Bri, sometimes I feel the urge to go back and “waste” some time to fix those things. But I don’t think it’s the time for that… at least for now.

A "deluxe version" some time in the future?

It’s still way too early to be thinking about such things, but I think that, sometime in the future, maybe when the game is finished, or ready to be released on steam, I’d like to go back and fix those things: give Bri something more to work with in these earlier chapters, improve the graphic quality of some scenes, add animations and/or expand some lewd scenes, maybe add some more vanilla/romantic alternative paths for a couple of girls that make sense story-wise, or even fine-tune a bit the skill system.

All of this is very hard to balance from the let go or while the game is being developed. I think that, once the game is finished, I’ll have a much better “bigger picture” of all the story and characters, and it’ll be much easier to do all of these things. And if they are all done at the same time, it’s a much better reason for anyone to start a new save to check the new content.

Conclusion

Right now, I think it’d be the wrong thing to go back and change the previous chapters to improve any/all of those points. We need to move forward, progress the story, make more content, let all the current paths mature, and then, when the game is close to be finished, make this analysis again to have a better idea what worked and what could be improved. At that point, I’ll check again if it is worth it to change all of that for an eventual “Deluxe Edition” or, perhaps, even a complete remake with better, more realistic graphics (the graphics of the game is a common criticism and I can’t help but feel the game would have more fans with better graphics. To be honest, this aesthetic grew on me and I quite like it, but it’s not like the typical, top-notch realistic Daz shaders are bad either).

So, yeah, I don’t know. It’s still too early to make any plans about this stuff. It’s just something on my mind. For now, I can just say that I’ll take your feedback into account while developing future chapters and I hope you’ll like what I have planned for Bri (and all the other girls, of course).