Feedback on Future Project Ideas

[Jackkel Dragon]

Now that a lot of the game projects that I've been working on for the past few years are pretty much wrapped up except for Flowering Nightshade and updates to the previous games, I'm starting to look into ideas for a new project to begin planning and prototyping for. The thing is, I've been focused on Eldritch Academy and Eldritch University for so long that I'm having trouble with deciding which ideas to invest more time into. Part of my reasoning for wanting to plan out another project before Flowering Nightshade is finished is so that I have something I can work with coding and art for, since most of that kind of work is pretty much finished for Flowering Nightshade unless I decide to put more money into a free game. While I'll have to make the final decision myself or I won't have the motivation to follow through, I thought I'd ask for some opinions on the ideas that I've been considering so far. Maybe if there is an interest in one of the ideas, that could help me find the motivation to commit to that project idea. (Alternatively, I could scratch ideas that would not be interesting to anyone.)

At any rate, I don't think many are too interested in the full background of why I'm looking into ideas for future projects. Unless someone wants those details, it's time to move onto the ideas themselves:

[TTL]
A psychological horror adventure game.

Story: Years before the story begins, A was involved in a ghost story where she ended up murdering another student and trying to kill her boyfriend. Her fragile mental state got her sent to a mental institution, and now she's starting to be reintegrated into society. However, the town she moves to is claimed to be haunted, with people disappearing on foggy nights. On one such foggy night, A is attacked by a ghost and is saved by I, a woman who has a program for tracking ghosts. Thinking that one of the ghosts might be connected to her past, A insists on joining I in investigating the urban legends and ghost stories about the town's disappearances.

Both women have deep regrets about their past that they refuse to let go. A's sketches and notes in her therapy journal depict her attempts to reconcile her thoughts with reality, while I's deep feelings of guilt show in the way she pushes forward with little regard to her own safety. The ghosts behind the disappearances try to use these flaws to prevent A and I from ending the haunting, but these ghosts have their own grudges and regrets that they can't seem to let go of.

Gameplay: Visual novel story segments with point-and-click elements for explorable locations. When exploring, the player is shown highlights around items that can be interacted with, and must find certain items or objects to progress. When in an exploration room, the player also has the option to ask the other character for a hint or move to a different unlocked location. (The map itself may be modelled as an exploration room, to make things easier to work with.)

Aside from simply clicking on items to trigger events, a major component of gameplay would be to find certain documents or similar items that explain the history of a location. Some of these are required to advance, but there will also be other documents that expand on minor characters and such.

At certain points, the player will encounter powerful ghosts that must be confronted or "fought". These encounters will often involve trying to appease the spirit until it can be exorcised. The player will be given a list of their discovered documents, items, and facts and have to pick the one that matches the point of conversation to progress. The final confrontation is different, where making a wrong decision (or too many wrong decisions?) will lead to a bad ending, and there are two options on how to defeat the final ghost.

Aside from a few one-scene locations, there are two major locations in the story. Based on the story outlines, the game would be roughly 90 minutes per location on a first playthrough.

Inspirations: Fatal Frame III, Corpse Party, Root Letter

Notes: This idea has been in prototype hell for years. I originally wanted a game that was closer to Fatal Frame, but I couldn't find a way to do most of the things I wanted in a 3D engine. I tried RPG Maker next, simplifying a lot of things to work similarly to Fatal Operation, but I couldn't find a way to make it feel like fun. Locations were either so small that you could run through them in seconds or so big that they felt devoid of content. And combat simply never got very far, real-time or turn-based, because of story limitations on the way combat would have to work. Thus, I arrived at the most recent iteration, where I use Ren'Py to make a visual novel with adventure game elements, allowing me to focus on the story while still allowing some optional exploration (such as collectible documents). This prototype still feels fairly weak as a "true game", but since a visual novel doesn't often need strong gameplay I feel like this isn't as bad as it was in the previous prototypes.

Also, I concealed the names of the main characters because they are returning characters that I don't want to reveal just yet. I suppose people can figure out who they are pretty quickly if they tried, but... I don't think that will be too likely.

[LD]
A romance/coming-of-age visual novel.

Story: A continuation of the story of Cho Fukuda, from Eldritch Academy, around ten or so years after that game. Now a costume and clothing designer, she feels like she's been typecast and no longer finds jobs that allow her to be more creative. After losing a commission for going off specifications, she is convinced by her girlfriend to take a break and try something different for a bit.

There would be a different storyline for each of Cho's potential love interests, splitting off immediately after the prologue. In each storyline, Cho is exposed to two potential career directions to take, leading to six different endings.

As the characters would all be in their mid-twenties, I'm also considering including scenes that are more sexual in nature than what could show up in Eldritch Academy. If such scenes were included, they'd likely be optional branches (similar to Eldritch University).

Notes: While outlining and writing for Flowering Nightshade, a part of me wanted to see the main cast of Eldritch Academy as full adults as well. Since that didn't fit the scope of Flowering Nightshade, I decided it would have to be its own game if it was made. As for the focus on Cho, I felt like I didn't give her a lot of attention in Eldritch Academy compared to the other love interests, since her role and personality changed a lot between drafts and I had trouble keeping her personality consistent. And since Yue was a pretty divisive vierwpoint character, I felt like the more idealistic Cho might be an interesting change in perspective.



I also have some other ideas that are on indefinite standby or are potentially scrapped, but I'll include a few of them for completeness:

[GS], a magical girl VN/RPG. The idea was to combine a number of ideas (magical girl warriors, magical boys, three-way conflict, clothing damage, no evil villains) into one game, but some of the ideas required a level of complexity that was difficult to work with. For instance, the standard JRPG combat system assumes lots of fights, but it's hard to create a lot of diverse and interesting enemies (in story or gameplay terms). And people love to talk about how they want to have lots of things to do with no time limits or railroading and also have multiple endings, but trying to wrangle a narrative together without knowing who likes who and who hasn't met and who has been defeated before is difficult. (Even Alpha Protocol, one of the kings of reactivity, railroads you for most of the game.) By the time I had enough other projects out of the way to focus on this idea, I wanted to move away from having the leads be Japanese high school students. I briefly considered aging everyone up to college age, but I didn't think that would be enough to make everything else work out as well.

[RI], an idol/girl group management game. This idea came out of liking the idea behind Idol Manager, but wishing it focused on smaller types of groups. The idea eventually became flexible enough to not necessarily be about idols, but still had a base idea that came from small idol groups. The premise is that each playthrough is a certain number of turns, and you have to find a way to raise the resource/money stat "Influence" to pay off debts. (The reason it's not just a money amount is to account for potential alternate scenario/difficulty modes. So a "school idol" club would be trying to convince the student council not to shut them down, while an indie band would be trying to raise money and get attention for the place they work at.) At the end of each run, you get points based on how long you survived and can use these points to unlock things. Some of the unlocks affect gameplay (like improving the stat randomization of the characters) and some open story events for each character. The main stumbling block with this game is that I'm not sure how exciting I can make the base game, so the project would live or die by the characters. And if I went with the idea for different modes, then each character would have to at least have art for each age range, if not more. I'm also not sure if my gameplay motivations are interesting to others; the reason the game is played in runs that unlock things as you play more is to have some of the feeling of persistent unlocks (like a lot of mobile and MMO games) while still allowing mid-playthrough progression (like level ups). I feel like this gives more replayability at the "endgame" than doing the same raid battle until the next one comes out.

[??] Lastly, I sort of want to make an investigation game where there are multiple endings based on which information is found, without retconning the backstory in each ending like some games of that type will do. This is likely a ways off, though, because the character I want to use is slated to show up in another story and I want to know how that turns out before I start writing another thing about her. (I already had a character reference Eldritch University in a story I released like a year or so ago...)

Anyway, those are the ideas I'm working with right now. The top two are the most likely to go somewhere, but I'm interested in feedback for any of them. Thanks for reading this far!

[Zelan]

I think you already know that I really like Cho lmao, so I'd love to see a game about her. I'm curious, who's her girlfriend at the start? Would it be Yue or someone else? And if she has a girlfriend at the start, is that same girlfriend one of the potential love interests? How does the potential breakup affect her?

You don't have to necessarily answer those now, especially if they're spoilers. Just stuff that makes me interested to play the full game. (:

On the other hand, having a lot of games that are sequels/spinoffs of one another might make it hard for people to get into your games if they feel they have to start with the first one? That's usually how I feel about it, anyway, although I think most of your games can still be enjoyed standalone if the player doesn't mind. If that's a concern, though, it might be better to focus on TTL first, since that one isn't as closely/obviously connected to previous games.

My second favorite idea overall is the idol group management game, but I'm sure a game like that takes a lot of time and resources, and it's on your backburner, so it might not be your primary focus.

[Jackkel Dragon]

I think you already know that I really like Cho lmao, so I'd love to see a game about her. I'm curious, who's her girlfriend at the start? Would it be Yue or someone else? And if she has a girlfriend at the start, is that same girlfriend one of the potential love interests? How does the potential breakup affect her?

Maybe I phrased things too generically, because I think I created some confusion here. I think the best way to resolve that confusion is with a chart of the current outline:

Prologue
--> Akomi's Route
-----> Akomi Ending A
-----> Akomi Ending B
--> Kagami's Route
-----> Kagami Ending A
-----> Kagami Ending B
--> Yue's Route
-----> Yue Ending A
-----> Yue Ending B

While I feel like I should include at least one or two new named characters in each route, these wouldn't necessarily be love interests. Similar to what the main routes of Flowering Nightshade turned into, the idea is to start with an established relationship and show the struggles of that relationship, not start a new romance.

(So, to answer your initial question, Cho would start in a relationship with one of the girls she could be paired with in Eldritch Academy. My idea is that at the end of the prologue, Cho would be on her way home and be thinking of how to tell her girlfriend what is going on. The player then picks which route to play, which leads to Cho returning home to greet the selected character.)

On the other hand, having a lot of games that are sequels/spinoffs of one another might make it hard for people to get into your games if they feel they have to start with the first one?

That's a bit of a concern of mine, since many of my ideas that take place within the same universe build on each other. (That's part of why they're all set in Japan, even though some of them make reference to a Canadian character that was going to have a game. Eldritch Academy and Shireishi managed to lock me in early.) While these recurring characters are what I'm most interested in, I can't really assume that enough other people like them to justify focusing on them too heavily. The tricky thing is that to create an entirely standalone game I'd have to create a new set of characters, which can be a risk if I don't find the new characters interesting enough to work with. (For instance, TTL was built from the ashes of a story that had an entirely new cast and only one connection to other stories in the same universe. I feel like my incentive to finish the story in some form or another was greatly increased when I decided to bring back some returning characters instead, especially since said characters were left with dangling plot threads the last time they appeared.)

My second favorite idea overall is the idol group management game

Of the ideas from that list, that one is probably my favorite as well. GS could quickly become a nightmare that needs a bigger team to do well, and the detective idea is too vague right now. The only thing that's keeping this idea from being a major focus is that it would need a new set of characters, and potentially at different age ranges. Even if I went minimalistic, I'd probably want at least six named characters with variants for two or three different scenarios. I also would need to make sure that the gameplay is different enough from Idol Manager to be worth being a separate game. (My current notes are already different from IM in a lot of ways, but not necessarily in a way that would be fun.) I also would have to make a big decision early on: Japan, or literally anywhere else? (This is tricky, because I feel like too many of my projects are set in Japan already. However, if I set the game somewhere else, I'd need to expand my research to that location and figure out how to get the concept to work there.) I suppose the cop-out answer would be to set the game in Korea, but that opens up a number of other things I'd need to think of.

At any rate, this is the idea that is most likely to be prototyped at some point and become a possible focus like TTL or the Cho game, but I don't want to make any promises this early on. I've been involved with enough Kickstarters to be afraid of making claims too early.

Thanks for the feedback! I'll try to keep these things in mind as I think of which idea to focus on next.

[Zelan]

(So, to answer your initial question, Cho would start in a relationship with one of the girls she could be paired with in Eldritch Academy. My idea is that at the end of the prologue, Cho would be on her way home and be thinking of how to tell her girlfriend what is going on. The player then picks which route to play, which leads to Cho returning home to greet the selected character.)

OH OF COURSE. I don't know how I forgot that the girls pair up with one another in each route, that was one of the things I thought was really cute lmao. Anyway, yeah, I'd be really interested in this, because I liked Cho with Akomi a lot, and I'd also be really interested in seeing her relationship with Yue after it was developed a bit more. And tbh I liked Kagami with Yue the best, but mostly that's just because I really liked Kagami, so I'm sure I'd enjoy her relationship with Cho as well. Regardless of when you end up working on this game, I'll look forward to playing it. (:

[Jackkel Dragon]

I ended up making a potential prologue for the Cho game and prototyping a story/route selection screen. I decided to make it a bit more involved than "pick a name and hope you like that character", even though that's pretty much how Blooming/Flowering Nightshade works. My idea is that the story selection screen will show a short bio for each character, hinting at their personality and mentioning their current job. This will help returning players catch up while also allowing new players to get a basic idea of what each character is like. (Kind of like what the BN/FN prologues turned into.) (The draft entries are written from Cho's perspective, to try to keep it in-character with her other prologue expodumps.)

I also went to my notes about the idol management game and simplified the nightmare the thing had become to something that is more possible. Thing is, while I would likely make the game with Ren'Py, it's shaping up to be a gameplay-heavy (if very "casual" in difficulty) game. Since this forum is more about story-heavy games, I'm not sure whether to go into more detail. The biggest "story" thing is that I ended up coming up with three different scenarios for the story mode, all of them ripping off ideas from more popular franchises. Those scenarios are: an idol club at a school, needing to convince the student council not to shut them down; an indie band that's having a hard time getting gigs and will probably break apart if they can't impress the manager of the venue they can reliably get booked at, and a small theatre troupe that is at risk of losing their funding. The idea is that the main characters are the same for every scenario, but have different appearances and slightly different backstories for each scenario. (This means I can make three variations of six characters, instead of coming up with 18 characters.)

I'll play around with these ideas a bit more, but I probably won't commit to one of them until I'm further along with Flowering Nightshade. While I'm taking a bit of a break to avoid burning out, I don't want to leave that game hanging too long, now that my other major games are finished.

[Jackkel Dragon]

I did some mock-ups for the idol/girl group management game's UI. I decided to show off the most recent version to see if anyone had some opinions about it.

Basically, the idea is that this screen would be the main screen the player sees each "turn" of the game. Therefore, it needed to show this kind of information:
- The current turn number
- Number of turns until the next "venue" (event that generates influence)
- The details about the next venue
- Current influence and how much will be deducted after the next venue (the current goal)
- Stats for all the active characters
- Controls for scheduling a turn's activities and learning specialties

To break things down a bit more:
- To keep things relatively simple, I decided on having only two stats for characters: Appeal and Skill. The former is about how much the character can impress the audience, while the latter is actual skill at performing. Therefore, each venue has a "focus" stat, which shows which stat is more important to that venue.
- To avoid making the game a purely numbers matter, I also decided on having "specialties". Styles are modifiers for the Appeal stat, while Talents are modifiers for the Skill stat. Each character can have one active specialty of each type, which are bought with Idea points. Every venue has the potential for having favored or disfavored specialties that change the influence gained from that stat for characters with that specialty. (I plan to let the player discover the next venue's favorites and disfavorites via spending influence.)
- To make each character more unique and thus up the complexity of strategy a bit, my plan is that each character has a specific set of specialties they can learn. So not everyone can learn "Cool" or "Cute", and so on. I also think tying some of the specialties to the post-run unlocks might be a good idea to give a feeling of progression, kind of like "roguelite" games that give benefits after failing a few times.
- As seen in the attached image, the idea for scheduling for each turn is to pick a stat for each character to focus on for that turn. They will then get a random boost to that stat at the end of the turn, once everything has been locked in. The player can also, optionally, pick a group task that raises the stats of all characters at the cost of influence.
- I originally wanted to have a slightly bigger group (6 characters), but the UI mockup became really crowded. I may go back to an earlier idea that there are six total characters, but you can only use three per run.

Some things that come to mind now that I've written all this out:
- Is this actually something that would be fun? Or is it too much focus on building up numbers for very little reward? Would someone WANT to play multiple runs and/or endless mode?
- As I said before, I feel like this is an idea that lives or dies by its characters. So far, I've only come up with mathematical gameplay concepts. I'm not even sure this game idea qualifies to be on Lemmasoft, considering how story-light it is right now. How do I get characters to be a bigger part of the game? (I could have little animations that play when a turn's schedule is put into effect or something, but... that requires hiring an animator.)
- What kind of unlocks would people be interested in? Right now, the only gameplay unlock that doesn't feel like it would unbalance the game is locking off some of the specialties. My other ideas involved character stories and outfits, but I'm not sure what would motivate people to keep playing.
- How significant should the story be? This is a game that could easily have a barebones script that only sets up each venue and shows the success or failure afterward. But depending on how I program the turns, I could also potentially have a story scene each turn and maybe even reference character stats in the storyline. I'm not sure what the preferred story/gameplay ratio would be for a game like this, and I fear the situation where a purely story-based game would be considered more fun than what I'm thinking of here.

Anyway, that's enough rambling about that. In other news, I outlined some more ideas for the Cho game that might work. I also looked into TTL a bit more, but I'm having a hard time trying to figure out a way to present the game that feels right. I'll have to look into it more...

[Zelan]

You worry that the game is too much numbers with little reward. To me, the "reward" would either be progressing in the game by winning and/or unlocking new stuff, if you want it to be more gameplay-heavy, or unlocking more story if you want it to be more story heavy.

Pretty much the only story-based management sim that I've played and really liked is RockRobin. Maybe it could give you some ideas on balancing gameplay and story.

[Jackkel Dragon]

Not sure it's pretty enough to be good screenshot material yet, but I did some more screen prototypes for the girl group game. In a way, most of the "gameplay" is in place now, though none of it is balanced in a way that would be fun and some of the stats don't calculate properly yet.

What works:
- Starting a game into story mode (5 venues) or endless mode (theoretically up to 100000 venues right now), with 4 turns to prepare for each one
- Picking characters for the current campaign/run
- Setting character/group schedules for each turn
- Buying styles/talents for characters with idea points
- Turn effects and pre/post turn hooks for story events
- Success or failure of venues
- Post-run rewards (trophies)
- Buying unlocks from the main menu with trophies
- Ability to "give up" to free the save slot, getting trophies as if a loss on that turn

What sort of works:
- Venue generation, except for favored/disfavored specialties and their effects (added)
- Character generation, except for proper specialty lists (everyone uses one list right now) (added)
- Non-character unlocks don't actually do anything yet (added)
- The numbers for everything implemented so far work, but aren't very fun

What doesn't work at all:
- No menu for sidestory unlocks yet (added sidestory functionality)
- No menu or buttons for spending influence to learn about a Venue's favored/disfavored specialties yet (added)
- No logic for selecting story scenes beyond basic hooks to call labels for that logic (added an idea for story scene selection)

As for what the unlocks are, these are what I've put in as types so far:
- Characters, to give a sense of overall progression by unlocking different characters
- (once a character is unlocked) Character specialties, which get added to the base set they start with, allowing for better adaptability within a run
- (once a character is unlocked) Character sidestories, perhaps going into the backstory of certain characters

And the my ideas for other potential unlocks:
- Themes/Scenarios, which change the names and looks of the characters and specialties to fit different themes (this could be hard for specialties, since not everything could be a 1:1 name swap while still fitting the related characters)
- Outfits for unlocked characters, which are then added to a menu (or the config settings) where the player can change the way certain characters look in story events

That's about all I could manage before I started feeling worn out by trying to get things to work. It's difficult to judge the best way to go about certain things, since I intentionally made the main gameplay simple. If I try to make it more complex, I risk breaking what I already have. But if I go with this setup, I really need to make sure the art and/or story are good, because the game doesn't feel very exciting in the current build.

At any rate, what kind of rewards would other people expect from a game with this setup, beyond the ones already mentioned? Maybe there's something that I overlooked that could be used to make things a bit more interesting. (One loose idea I had was to go full mobile game with it and add content every once in a while, like introducing a new character later on. But that's ultimately more of the same type of reward.)

As things stand right now, I suppose I should put some thought into the potential story for the game. I can't keep going with placeholder names forever if I want to have a story mode. Somehow, I feel like coming up with a good story for a game like this will be harder than coding the rest...

Edit: Forgot to mention that I may need to look into that RockRobin. Sounds like a more complex version of the same basic idea that I had...

Edit 2: Crossed out some things I added to the prototype since I wrote this.

[Jackkel Dragon]

As can be seen in the edits I've been making to the previous post, I've been crossing off bits and pieces of functionality for the girl group game and refactoring the existing code to be easier to extend later. And now, the game is "fully playable". You can start a game, experience story scenes based on your team and progress, earn rewards for how far you made it, and use those rewards to buy new characters/upgrades/sidestories. Said story currently has riveting lines like "ki-yeon story event 1", nothing is balanced to make story mode a challenge or endless mode possible, and the UI tries to gouge out your eyes, but this is technically a game that exists now.

Which... leads me back to my original problem of "need a break from Flowering Nightshade, kind of want to make something that needs more coding". I now have fully-functioning prototypes for the Cho game and the girl group game, but still haven't really gotten far with the story of either of them. I guess now I work on trying to make the girl group game fun, or else try to figure out how to make a TTL prototype that I'm happy with. Because the writing burnout isn't going away yet, and the proof-of-concept phase is over for the most likely games on this list to get made next...

[jjzhang9]

The whole idea of having outfit unlock features is very compelling, perhaps also adding a variable for "levels" of unlocking, so when you unlock everything that's possible for a certain character, you can unlock something special that contributes to the game? It can somehow relate back to the character. This is a super vague idea, but it could be really cool if implemented.