Yearning: A Gay Story (YAGS for short) is a coming-out-focused character-driven slice-of-life game set during your freshman year on a college campus (phew). You'll meet people, make friends, come out, and maybe start dating someone. (The game is part dating sim, with four dateable guys (with good and bad endings for each), but hopefully is enjoyable enough to play even if you don't manage to find a boyfriend.)
The game is free to download and play, but you can donate for some bonuses (including some physical items like stickers).
The game is also quite long. While it does not contain any explicit sex or nudity, it does contain adult language, implied nudity and sex, and uncomfortable situations, and is not appropriate for children.
You can download the game for free on itch.io at https://bobcgames.itch.io/yags
I think of YAGS as being about meeting and getting to know people. As such, I don't want to include any background information about the characters here, but here's a preview of the characters in the game.
(The game itself contains unlockable character profiles where you can learn more about the people that you meet.)
My wehsite has a lot more info about the game, including blog posts from the development of the game.
http://yags.bobcgames.com
I also tweet a lot. You can find me here or use hashtag #yags
https://twitter.com/bobcgames
The WIP topic is here:
viewtopic.php?f=43&t=45826
I can't talk about this game without talking about Coming Out on Top, by Obscurasoft. I'd had a bunch of disparate stories and ideas bouncing around my head for years, but playing CooT kind of gave me the kick I needed and convinced me that I should write them down, try to connect them together, and present them in a way that a player could interact with and play through. At a superficial level, the two games are fairly similar games in terms of setting and general goals. However, it is my hope that I've created something that is also extremely different and stands on its own.
In YAGS, all of the characters you meet are intertwined, even (and if) you start dating one of them. While you can pursue different guys, and therefore go down different "paths", the main "story" remains the same, and you will see the same events from different perspectives and get to know different characters better. That's why I call it a character-driven game: the story as as much about the lives of the people you interact with as it is about your own decisions and experiences.
YAGS is also intended to be significantly darker than CooT, dealing with a lot more of the fear, uncertainly, and angst that surrounds the coming out progress, and attempting to paint a realistic picture of what it could mean to be gay and to find yourself. That's not to say it's a depressive slog, but it tries to have its realistic and serious moments, alongside the light-hearted ones. Has it succeeded at that? You tell me.
YAGS followed an extremely non-standard development process. My goal, originally, was just to get stories from my head onto "paper". However, as the number of characters and story kept growing, I figured it was worthwhile pursuing an actual game release. Given my complete lack of artistic skills, I focused on what I was able to do (primarily writing and programming) and hired a composer and a few artists to do the parts I couldn't.
