Paardenrust: Valley of Stories

SPOILER WARNING: This post goes into some detail about how the core portion of the game will be structured and how players will interact with it. It includes some minor spoilers. If you want to experience everything through playing the actual game, skip reading any of this.

The text commences below the cat.

So, the one thing most people know about VNs is the route concept: a storyline centred around one NPC who you pursue over a long period of time, often with specific choices needed to continue succeeding at it. It's a nice idea, it works well, and LOTM has several of its own, such as Suri, Werner, Dalarius and a few others. However, there's far more characters than that in the game, and they're all getting a fair amount of introduction to let you get a feel for them. Why's that?

Routes are well and good, but they're intrinsically limiting due to their focus on an NPC. You're choosing to focus interactions on that one characters, typically at the cost of others. This is also fine in and of itself, as it's expected that you'll replay the game to try other routes, but it still boils down to X number of routes. And routes, by dint of their length, are exceedingly time-intensive to create. You want choices that matter, which requires setup, investment and payoff - all played out over an appropriate length of time. Most VNs are developed in a manner where routes advance in lockstep, so you experience the story playing out over time, but you won't usually get a conclusion until the game is more or less finished. Which is *also* fine, but these are loooong projects, so the wait can be frustrating.

The final thing that bugged me about routes was how they're both very time-intensive and also usually the main focus. The characters that the creators want you to interact with are the ones with routes; the rest, if there are any, are side characters. Routes can be made arbitrarily complex, of course, and tell a story of any desired depth, but most VNs do it that way. When I started on this project I knew I'd have no problem with such stories, and pretty much committed myself to doing it that way. At that time I had envisioned something like eight or even nine routes in order to give myself a good spread of options. Those routes would also be rather vanilla to not upset Patreon. It was fine. I wished I could do more, but I knew doing full routes for every character was just setting myself up for burnout. I chose to do somewhat detailed introductions for all characters to a) make sure they would be somewhat familiar when they showed up later in Flax's journey, and b) make it possible to be more flexible in who would get routes and who would not (outside of a core group that I knew I'd always want to do).

Then I had my big forced break start of this year, and had endless time to think. I meditated a long time on the routes, trying to settle on the perfect subset of characters. It was painfully hard to choose, and when I settled on what I felt was a good set, I still felt frustrated that some ideas for the others would never see the light of day. I was also frustrated that I wouldn't be able to make content on certain topics - topics I write a lot of outside of LOTM. On top of all of that, I am perpetually looking for ways to improve my output by better aligning the game's design with my writing style. And so, at some point, I was finally run over by inspiration for how to achieve everything I wanted.

The bulk of the game begins after an event that has Flax choosing (or not, if you want the game to end very abruptly) to stay in Paardenrust for a reason other than just a holiday. A time skip then takes us a month into the future and finds Flax employed at the manor house itself in a new capacity. The manor (and, indeed, the entire valley) will also have a different tone, as residents grapple with what's happened and what's to come. Characters that Flax had originally met and not necessarily expected to spend lengthy time around may suddenly be people he's meeting daily as part of his job. People's attitudes may have evolved from how they behaved when they first met him, and he may have to deal with the consequences of more reckless actions he took when he still expected to be leaving the place after a fortnight.

The game's time flow will change from one based on individual days to one based on weeks. Each week, the game will allow you to choose one thing to focus on, which I imaginatively call a Focus. Why yes, I *am a writer! There will be a LOT of Foci, but crucially, not all of them will be spelled out. Some will be things like "Spend more time with X", which will let you tell the game you want to keep pursuing someone's route. Another might be to put extra effort into your work that week, which will have beneficial effects for certain outcomes (and will play out in scenes, not as an RPG-esque instant stat boost). And the rest...well, that's where it gets fun. They will be intentially vague; imagine Foci like "Explore the forest more". Choosing one of these will tell the game that you want it to pick something that fits from the Story Bank.

The Story Bank is just the internal name for a database of mini-stories set "within the world of Paardenrust". I explicitly describe it that way because the only thing they will have in common (apart from being porn) will be that they take place in the valley of Paardenrust. Some of them may not involve any of the game's other characters at all, for example, and play out in a solo manner. In theory, they could even happen without Flax. Imagine Paardenrust as a sort of literary open world in which all the characters are going about their horny lives, and you get given a variety of ways to intersect their lives each week, and you'll have a good idea of what I'm going for. At least eight to ten Foci will be presented each time - or more, or less, if some of your prior choices open or shut options for you. You'll have to play the game to figure out what does what :) The important thing is that you'll have a lot of options.

Some of the Foci will let you pursue the main routes. Access to those, as with most route-style models, will depend on prior choices. If you wish to follow a route to completion, you will typically need to commit to it whenever you're given the chance (with some leeway). All the other stories in the Story Bank, though, will be my opportunity to do anything else I want. I've mentioned on Discord how I will be creating a simple dynamic content system to allow people to add extra content they'd like to see in the game from files I supply; that will work by adding extra stories into the Story Bank for the game to pick from. Certain of the weekly options will always trigger certain stories; others might trigger one from a potential set. For example, if you picked the "Explore the forest more" option, perhaps the game would pick from the stories available for the characters that it knows are found in that area. In this way, while you might not always be able to force the game to give you one precise story each time, you can help it narrow down the options. (Once I reach that point of development, if people prefer it, I may add a game option to let you choose a specific story instead of letting the game choose for you, but we'll see when we get there). There will definitely be a way to tell the game what kinks you don't want to see, and it will never show stories that are marked as containing those (even if you've not added any extramural content to the game).

Many of these stories are going to be one-offs that play out during the allocated week and wrap up. Some may make permanent changes to the world that will be acknowledged by any content that happens after. Some will be multi-chaptered, kind of like mini-routes, with the game prioritising those in subsequent weeks. The length will vary; some might be an hour's playtime, some might be far longer. The *style* will vary: some might be very character-interaction driven, some more introspective. Some, independent of their word count, might wrap up before the middle of a given week, in which case you might get the chance to choose another action for the same week. There will even be a mechanic that lets me add non-canon in-universe stories, which will allow me to have guest writers contribute stories of their own using the characters of Paardenrust.

The unifying goal for these stories will be to have more self-contained entertainment delivered in a punchier timeframe than a full route, with a bias towards more intense or over-the-top stuff. You can play the game by ignoring all the main routes and simply doing random Focuses each week and seeing what happens. The ability to take any of the characters and any locations and do something fun with them, without necessarily worrying about long-term choice and game impact, will let me create these things very much in the style of my standalone stories - and with greater speed. The routes, then, will be the more grounded and more "invested" options: the well-baked layers of the cake. The stories will be the icing that goes under, around and on top of them, adding flavour, pazazz and flair. You will be able to decide each week whether to keep following a route or do a story instead, but ignoring a character for a week might have adverse effects on your progress with their route. But hey - you came to Paardenrust to fuck everyone, right? It's worth a shot. Legend says there is a single master set of choices that will, in fact, let you do exactly that...

As an example of the sorts of things I'm envisioning for standalone stories: Flax somehow becomes a sentient but speechless feral horse and wanders the valley having thrilling adventures; the Painted Wolf decides to hold an erotic talent show, and you have mere days to develop a winning act; Flax's older brother shows up in Paardenrust to see how you're doing with your first real job; Rav comes to visit and has his heart set on joining the mile-high club with (and on) Inkanyamba; and many more. Maaany more. I have years of story ideas that I never got around to writing, and this is the perfect way to bring a lot of them into existence. I also have years of stories I *did* write, which might be able to be adapted into this model. The sky is the limit.

In this way, I hope to provide a fantastic rate of new content for you all once we get to the bulk of the game. If work is going slow on the routes, I can take a break and write a random little story to clear the mind instead - then toss it into the build and forget about it. The game gets extra "free" content that I don't have to be *too* particular over, and then I can go back to the more carefully curated content. Variety is absolutely key to not getting burned out, and I have high hopes that this model will both achieve that and make for exceptionally fun gameplay that gives something different from the usual VN approach.

As the Paardenrust ad flyer might have said: "Welcome to Paardenrust. Life is hornier here."