Disclaimer: I am not particularly religious and I'm not aiming to make any big religion good/bad statements with the game. Religion happens to be a heavy feature of the plot and I'm going to try to be thoughtful and balanced without alienating anyone.
The basic idea is this: You're an assassin for the church, and you've been sent to kill a excommunicated priest who has snuck back from his exile and is supposedly back to preaching on the outskirts of the domain. First however, you need to collect some info from him. This means you're drawn into a discussion, and, as long as you don't kill him immediately, you end up spending quite a bit of time with him, and get into discussions that reveal differences in faith, his backstory, more details as to why he was excommunicated and how it all fits in with the grander church and current war.
Essentially it's a story that's mostly just the conversations between these two characters and learning about the fantasy world and the characters. I'm worried that hanging the entire VN on a single character and people liking them is a bad idea. This is a character I've been developing a long time and I really love him, but I'm worried that general audiences not in my head don't want to be trapped focused on only one main character you're interacting with. I've done written rps with him and he's usually well-liked by the other players but I'm still worried. Romance would not be a main focus at all, I'm debating whether it'll even be something that can happen at all (though as it currently stands the character you're focused on would be OOC if he didn't get a little lovesick due to his poor judgement.) If there's a heavily single-character driven VN do most people feel cheated if you can't go "all the way" to a dedicated romantic relationship?
Also despite the disclaimer, I'm worried having a plot that heavily uses (fictional) religion will turn people off immediately.
Current things I'm thinking of putting in:
- You can choose PC's gender at the start, each one opens a slightly different possible scene: small romance scene with the male, a deeper discussion on the target's backstory as a girl. I'm still debating whether this is a good trade-off.
- You have several opportunities along the way to either finish your mission (kill your target) or continue forward.
- Moral ambiguity in decisions, no explicit bad-guys. Good and Bad endings for both saving and killing your target.
- You have a piety score that increases or decreases with decisions and dialogue depending on whether they match church doctrine. The character you play as repeats their prayers every night; it's a fill-in-the-blank minigame and it becomes more difficult the lower your score (scrambled words, more blanks to fill.) MC can lose their faith (in general or specifically in the church organization) and it will effect interactions and endings.