Thanks for your responses, everyone! I've gotten feedback from here and other places, and it's really heartening to see so many people playing and responding to the game.
Regarding the choices: Yes! I have gotten a lot of feedback about the choices now. The differences are subtle and I was expecting people to die on their first few tries. It sounds like what people want more of is some kind of feedback so they're not left groping in the dark. Granted, it was hard to keep the conversation natural-sounding without making Jory's and Lana's reactions less than obvious.
Maybe some kind of indicator to denote when your choices have made a difference would help? Also, just more time to think everything through... I wrote all of the branches in one go and had to move straight onto debugging; I would tweak the choices more if I had had the time.
@Seigetsu: Yes, I do intend to make more GxG games in the future. Please look forward to them!
@Auro-Cyanide: It's funny that you got Ending 2 without the walkthrough; most people either got 1 or 3 (or both) and then had to look at the walkthrough for the ending 2s.
Regarding your example, one of the choices is meaner than the others ("Shut up.") and if you picked "It won't be so bad." earlier, Lana will mention something about not being in a good mood anymore. Later on that gives the player the option to respond with "Then do you really think you have a chance with her?"/"Aren't you taking advantage of her then?"/"But I'm right, aren't I?", which makes it explicit that she doesn't believe that Jory likes Gladys.
For Ending 2 you really have to go all the way with Lana's crankiness (but still be interested in Jory and convinced that you can kill the monster, hence the "common route" choices), but in Ending 2b you can kind of take a step back by saying "It wouldn't be right." instead of "It's not too late." once Lana finally realizes that she still has feelings for her.
The other two choices in that example don't change anything; one of them just allows you to be snarky. ("Totally." as opposed to not saying anything at all.)
Granted, there are a ton of options that don't lead anywhere, but you peek at the walkthrough you'll see that there are some common "correct" options throughout the routes. Those "correct" options exist mainly because the game is partially point-based. It's pretty complicated. :'D I think if you pay really close attention to the implications of the correct choices, the logic makes sense? But it's probably not that obvious when you're playing the game for the first time and have no idea what's going on.
It's funny that you should mention how the character drama (Lana's reasons for breaking up, Jory's problems with Gladys) could be put into a different context because all that stuff was added
after I came up with the initial concept. I will admit that the concept was more interesting than the execution... There are bits and pieces here and there that explain how their relationship came about and why Jory is so stuck on Lana, though I didn't get to explore their past as much as I wanted to.
Nah, the monster's just a monster. It's a little disturbing to them because it's been so long since the last one, but they know so little about what they were doing in the first place that they end up arguing about stupid stuff to distract themselves. Among other things, Jory was heavily emotionally dependent on Lana while they were fighting, which explains why she's still so fixated on her years later. Lana doesn't want to have anything to do with her anymore, but she forces herself to kind of suck it up and deal with it because they'll die if they can't cooperate. The background drama is pretty mundane, but the main reason they're squabbling is because neither of them want to die and they're falling back on old habits to cope with it.
Yeah, OK, this post is already too long... Thank you for the lengthy response, and I hope you have a little better insight as to how I wrote the game.
