But what if it made sense for one pair of branches to both have endings? Maybe a “good” ending and a “bad” one, say.
Some of them are going to lead to “endings,” where the game draws to a close and you can’t keep playing, for one reason or another. Now, here’s a somewhat more spoiler-y problem: these twelve branches would need to go somewhere. If I made the game with twelve branches, I would be encouraging people to play all of them, and I don’t know that I want to inflict that on anybody. But playing the same section twelve times through just so you can see everything I’ve done sounds like a fucking chore, and that’s just to play the game– and that’s without poking through using different combinations of species and anatomy and what have you to check and see if I’ve been doing my homework. They covered roughly similar obstacles in dramatically different ways, and that reflected on the nature of the characters, and that’s cool. Now, I got some praise for the depth of experience that six branches offered. I know that not everyone plays everything, but there’s a pretty large chunk of my playerbase, near as I can tell, that plays the game with a certain degree of completionism. My Very Own Lith isn’t the biggest game around, and I know this. But what’s more, that much non-linear writing could straight up be a pain to read. I can pride myself on being able to take a given subject and look at it in new and unexpected ways, but talking about a roughly similar situation playing out in different ways dependent on who you are and the choices you’ve made twelve times over without all the scenery, description, and basic thought processes blending together has my writing muscles cramping up just trying to contemplate it. This leads to some problems.įirst off, obviously, that’s a lot of bleeding writing.
#My very own lith past full#
And I’m not talking like “oh you can be boy or girl, dragon, horse, or human, and huge dick or no dick” all that stuff will still be tucked in there, I mean that the final segment would need to be written out in full twelve times. Now, what THIS means is that if I include another binary decision (and never mind that it’d be nice to maybe have a trinary or something at some point) then suddenly the story will split into literally twelve different branches. But when I started actually writing it out, I found that the results of these choices actually had pretty profound effects even after you’ve “had a while to catch your breath.” So I’ve ended up STILL having six paths going into this segment. Now, in the next segment, the plan is more or less “do it again, but with, you know, different stuff and what you did before still matters.” Originally I’d intended to draw it back to three branches here and include a few strong mentions of how the outcome of your previous choice has had an effect on you, and maybe changes how you perceive the next choice. From these three branches, each then extends to two branches based on a decision you make, which then play out until that segment ends. The current stone door content starts off with three main “branches,” or possible paths you can take, each written out completely separate from the others, dependent on your collar, which indicates the rough nature of your relationship with Lith. So uh, if you don’t want to find out how lame and straightforward the next big chunk of the game is gonna be, turn back now!
The following is a discussion of some of the design choices behind MVOL, including HUGE SPOILERS that have virtually nothing to do with the plot and just kinda spoil how the gameplay is gonna work out in that it will actually be kinda predictable. Exactly how much of what’s planned to come next will make it in before the big new deadline I’ve set for myself remains to be seen, but tackling the upcoming content with a more sincere and focused attitude toward actually “completing” this portion of the plot has brought me face-to-face with an odd conundrum. So the plan for v0.16 is to focus on the next big chunk of content for the stone door.
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