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dizzcity wrote:It's actually a mini-example of what I was planning to do for my major project (where it gets even more complicated), but I'm having second thoughts about whether I should continue along this line of development or not. It works in a small piece of fiction with only one choice, but once you take it to the larger scale, it's incredibly difficult to continue preserving that state of undecidedness and ambiguity until the end. (Well, to be more precise, it's a trade-off. I can preserve ambiguity at the expense of telling a good and rich story. So it's either vague but technically brilliant, or technically straightforward but richly descriptive.)

Hmmm, one of River Trap's endings was like this. Things happened and then the protagonist was thinking about how he loves his girl now and that they are together, and final choice was something along the lines of "I love you,.."
... and you could choose Girl-1 or Girl-2. And once you made the choice, THE END would appear. So in effect, you could retrospectively influence the epilogue - it's a bit different, because at that time the player probably already had made up his mind which girl he likes, so that means when reading he might have been thinking about her - but nevertheless, that part of the story was in effect influenced by the player in a similar way.

It's a difficult terrain though, and I think that it would probably work better in short sequences - when you construct the story in a way that it can have many meanings and then invite the player to decide, it's certainly a great narrative and construction-wise achievement, but you'll most probably lose a lot of emotion (although you won't lose thoughtfulness) if nothing is fixed and the player floats in insecurity. And, it can be the case that at the end players may feel cheated - they played it as a story and now they find out they have to fill the blanks (and considerable blanks) themselves.

So I would probably limit that device to very short and most of all closed sequences. It's tempting and IMO in theory it looks very good, I'm just not sure that it would play out quite as well as it sounds on paper.

To be honest, my initial reaction after finishing both endings was "What the hell?"

I mean, imagine if in real life your thoughts and feelings by themselves could influence the outcome of events!

It would have made better sense if, say, the player decides to go visit the hospital or something, which would eventually lead to the 'better ending'. That's what many visual novels have conditioned me to think, or at least the pro-active bishoujo games.

The way this is done reminds me of a very few 'otome' games I've played. But even in this case the protagonist, usually a girl, still does some action to influence an outcome. She may cause certain things to happen which in turn will influence other things to happen to their desired event, but she definitely doesn't just rely on her feelings and thoughts. If she did, she'd be God.

Unless, the whole point is for this to be a God-game.

If I were to use a metaphor, it's like designing a circuit using electron flow instead of positive energy flow. It's true that the way things really work is through flow of negative charges, and in very simple circuits that's how it's analyzed, but when it comes time for hundreds of components, the convention and ease of use is set by positive flow.

DaFool wrote:If I were to use a metaphor, it's like designing a circuit using electron flow instead of positive energy flow. It's true that the way things really work is through flow of negative charges, and in very simple circuits that's how it's analyzed, but when it comes time for hundreds of components, the convention and ease of use is set by positive flow.

Finally, it's so clear!

I think it's something like the thing I was saying with the players feeling cheated. God game is a very good metaphore though. Imagine a novel that ends with a few blank pages and tells the reader to write their own ending. It's cool, stylish, a good idea and in theory it lets the player participate... But in reality...

The problem may be in the fact, that this system in effect doesn't just let the player experience the story, it lets him create it. And not many people want to do that. As I said IMO it's fine with small stories, but not great when your story is longer.

A workaround would be to allow just one path - no replaying. This way the player wouldn't even know that the events he lived through were part of something completely different to what he experienced. Though this is already knocking on the doors of random story generation. Which isn't great, and it's always generic.

Hehe. Nah, it wasn't a God game. But I think you're right, in that this is a bit different from normal bishoujo games. Normally, your choices and actions in the game act forward, meaning that it will change the plot in the direction the user wanted to go. Here, it wasn't really the forward plot I was focusing on, but the user's perception of the plot so far.

Essentially, what I wrote were two separate stories running in parallel, with enough uncertainty in the beginning that you couldn't tell which story it actually was until you made a statement as to how you, the player, had viewed the story. Did you see all that you have read so far, and interpreted it as love lost or love separated? Those were the meanings behind the sentences that you had to pick. The story then gives you the ending most suited to your perception of what had happened so far. In a sense, mikey, your experience is the creation.

Btw, the metaphor I would have used is Schrodinger's cat-in-a-box. If there is a cat trapped in a closed box, the uncertainty principle states you won't know whether the cat in the box is alive or dead until you open the box. And until you do, the cat is neither alive nor dead... it exists as some sort of weird half-collapsed cat-wave object. The act of opening the box forces the cat inside to be alive or dead. (Yes, I know that makes no sense... go sue the physicists, not me.)

To use the circuit metaphor, though... what I designed was a full-rectified AC circuit that could run either way. I just left it up to the player which way to connect the battery (or something like that...).

-Dizzy-

I finally played it, it is a very sweet game. I finished it about 2 minutes, 30 seconds (I read fast, because I'm really used to longer descriptions ...)

I really loved the imagery at the very end, with the sunset and the pier. I thought it was very fitting.

Also, at first, when I selected "wish she was here now" and then read that she never showed up, I was certain that it was one of those trick choices where the ending is the same, with only minor variation in the player's feelings ...

Thanks, glad you liked it. Yeah, the sunset with the pier was the most fitting scene in the entire story, I felt. I deliberately chose it because of the sense of finality it gave - the pier gives you the sense that the protagonist is walking away from the lake, from the sunset. It was the most meaningful scene to me as well. I just wish I could have found better pictures for the other ending, but I had to make do with what I had.

-Dizzy-

Played it a while ago, but haven't managed to post about it... It's a nice story and I liked it (an got good ending on first try). But as I understand this is finished thing so why you din't post in "Finished games"? I don't think the shortness of this is a problem, there were even shorter games.

Btw: I had a bit of free time yesterday and made Czech translation of it. Can I publish it?

Well, I didn't post it in finished games at first because I still had some problems with the menus, and I technically cannot use Flora's character art as it's copyrighted. However, I've already fixed the menu problem in the next edition of this VN, and once Vatina gets back to me with the new character design for Flora, then I can include it into the package and republish it as a complete game.

Absolutely no problem with other-language translations of my work. (Yay! Got a story translated into Chinese, now something into Czech!) However, I would like to ask you to wait until the replacement character art is done, so that the copyright violations are removed. Once I post the finished package, feel free to publish a Czech version of that.

-Dizzy-

I see. Before reading, I was thinking that maybe you were already working on your next project and will just let the release be if it were not to be tweaked further. Because the copyright thing will only be a major factor if the game were not free (which means, a much longer game), as well as being hosted on renai archives. But as general, the guidelines for renai archives are something nice to abide by.

Well, actually, I'm doing that too. (Technically, I've got three stories in the oven at the moment, all half-baked.) But since I had asked Vatina to do character art just before I moved on to a new project, I'm okay with officially releasing it once the "polishing" elements have come in. I work like Taleweaver. Keep on writing script after script, and let others handle the polishing of old scripts while I move on to something new.

Technically, the copyright thing is a problem whether it's free or not. Unfortunately, I've had to study Media Law and Regulation as part of my major course, and the lecturer really drilled the importance of copyright into our heads.

-Dizzy-

I've played this game, wow, the story somehow touched my heart

I'll wait for bigger project.