Ideas Dump

[Jake]

Except I don't know if the player would necessarily see that they're supposed to play through again.

Another reason to string the multiple playthroughs together as one single playthrough, really. Not only might the player not know that they're supposed to start again, they also might re-load a saved game and explore the entire decision tree looking for where they went wrong, possibly eventually getting pretty frustrated that the game appears to be unwinnable. Which would also probably be a source of much frustration for the programmer, trying to make sure that someone who reloaded a play-1 game but had 'finished' three times before didn't get play-4 content, and didn't reset their finished count to '1' if they played through to the end...

...and how would you 'reset' it, in case the player - or someone else on the same computer - wanted to start from scratch?

[F.I.A]

...and how would you 'reset' it, in case the player - or someone else on the same computer - wanted to start from scratch?

Delete the persistent file?

I think it is codeable by using a "+New Game". When accessing via the "+New Game" option, it will bring the player to a label before progressing with the actual game, where the persistent is checked. The persistent will later on trigger other variables.

However, such coding is not totally perfect, since it only allows either a total New Game or a permanent +New game.

[Jake]

...and how would you 'reset' it, in case the player - or someone else on the same computer - wanted to start from scratch?

Delete the persistent file?

Mm, but can you do that easily from within code? I mean, I know it's possible to do it in Python, but it's probably also beyond most Ren'Py coders. And what other effects will this have? It'll mean you couldn't have any unlockables, since that information would also get lost.

A better approach would just be to provide some in-game mechanism to reset the counter and store the reset value in the config, but then that suffers the same problem as this:

I think it is codeable by using a "+New Game". When accessing via the "+New Game" option, it will bring the player to a label before progressing with the actual game, where the persistent is checked. The persistent will later on trigger other variables.

...which also gives away the gimmick that subsequent playthroughs are different from the first from the word 'go', which defies the point of having them as subsequent playthroughs rather than tacking them on to the end of the first one in one long continuous game. So why bother with all the extra work?

[Counter Arts]

Hmm... do the fate/hollow axteria thing.

At the beginning, let users pick a ticket before they even get to the main menu.

[F.I.A]

Hmm, reminiscing games I played before, actually none of them ever bother to include a reset system. Examples(Spoiler-ed, view at own risk):

In Come and See Me Tonight 2,

The harem ending is not accessible unless you had gone through all girls' routes. Failing to do so will lead you to the bad ending. However, when you have completed them, you will never be able to get the bad ending...

And in Figures of Happiness,

When you have unlocked the necessary paths, Minamo's true ending will always be included at the very start of the game.

Also, in Elf All-star Datsui Jan 3,

Every scenes you have gone through will be recorded, even when you started anew. This can be frustrating, especially to track back which scenes you have not done yet.

Last but not least, in the doujin game Wanderers in The Sky,

Once you are through with the game at least once with a good ending, a scene will be included at the very beginning of the game, spoiling you with what happened to Mikoto(sp?).

Guess that the maker expect a clean re-install for a total renewal, eh?

[themocaw]

Hmmm.

How about:

The first time you play through, the game ending would state, "WAIT, this isn't the way it should end!" and, perhaps, restart at the very beginning immediately instead of kicking you back to the menu screen. Through this run-through you see the new situations. Perhaps there is a note at the beginning, when you wake up, that this all feels very familiar, or a menu when you choose a new game that allows you to reset the persistence level back or forward, if you choose.

Or we could use something more like Breath of Fire, Dragon Quarter, where you can return to a prior moment in the game. Perhaps make saving and reloading part of the gameplay: I imagine something like a situation where you need to get a password for a safe, but the only way to get it is to go down a path of no return: run into a burning building, from which there is no chance of making it out alive. You save before you enter the building, run in, see the password, and die. This trips the "password seen" persistent variable. When you reload your save game, you go directly to the safe, and the password you hadn't had the option of using before is now available.

Something meta-gaming. Or is that a little too Metal Gear Solid for peoples' tastes?

[Jake]

The first time you play through, the game ending would state, "WAIT, this isn't the way it should end!" and, perhaps, restart at the very beginning immediately instead of kicking you back to the menu screen. Through this run-through you see the new situations. Perhaps there is a note at the beginning, when you wake up, that this all feels very familiar, or a menu when you choose a new game that allows you to reset the persistence level back or forward, if you choose.

Again - if you do this, there's no point to the gimmick; it would work exactly as well having the 'second time through' part of the main script coming straight after the 'first time through' part. And I use the word 'gimmick' intentionally; it's a separate thing. One thing is the story, where the protagonist loops over the same events multiple times seeing a bit more each time; the other thing is the gimmick, which tries to tie this looping time to the 'new game' button. The gimmick makes it far harder to write and program, so it has to give some benefit in order to be worth doing - if it's known about by the player, there's no real benefit in doing it, so it's a waste of effort; if it's not known it could be a powerful device, but it also jeoparidses the player's enjoyment of the game in all those problematic scenarios described above.

To my mind, the only way you could really make something like this work for a VN would be to disable saving and rollback, so none of the problem scenarios come up... which then necessarily limits the length of the story and the impact of the changes.

Perhaps make saving and reloading part of the gameplay: I imagine something like a situation where you need to get a password for a safe, but the only way to get it is to go down a path of no return: run into a burning building, from which there is no chance of making it out alive. You save before you enter the building, run in, see the password, and die.

In my experience, gamers hate it when behaviour like that is necessary to progress in the game, and it obviously makes no immediate sense from a story point of view. It would work, but I think it would alienate significant chunks of the audience unless the 'save and load' functionality was excused and made consistent in the in-game universe.

a little too Metal Gear Solid for peoples' tastes?

... eh? What does MGS have to do with it?

[themocaw]

In my experience, gamers hate it when behaviour like that is necessary to progress in the game, and it obviously makes no immediate sense from a story point of view. It would work, but I think it would alienate significant chunks of the audience unless the 'save and load' functionality was excused and made consistent in the in-game universe.

a little too Metal Gear Solid for peoples' tastes?

... eh? What does MGS have to do with it?

Point taken. I forgot that, unlike me, most people HATED Bof Dragon Quarter.

As for MGS: MGS II has been described as a postmodern video game. Jack/Raiden is, essentially, the player. When they refer to him reenacting Snake's missions as part of training, they refer to you playing the prior MGS games and VR Missions. As a video game character, he has no past and no life outside the game, which is why Rose gets so creeped out by the fact that his room has nothing in it. The same fourth-wall breaking themes were also seen in MGS I: the infamous "Plug the controller into the second slot to beat Psycho Mantis" trick and "Don't use a turbo controller or I'll know" thing in the torture scene notwithstanding.

Two games that did something similar were Contact and Kill.Switch: in the first, the player is acknowledged as an outside entity who is giving the main character, Terry, his orders through his DS. In the second, the player is the villain of the piece: a hacker/evil overlord who is manipulating the main character through a neural link into starting WWIII.

. . . you know, both of those games didn't do so well. . . Hmmm. . . maybe that means something.

[Doktor Per]

Post Modernism is for smart people. That's why everyone hates Raiden (who will most likely NOT be post-modern in the fourth installment) and Metal Gear Solid 2.

That being said, I want more Post Modernism, damn it.

[Recca Phoenix]

post-modernism is awesome for literature and films, but as y'all point out, it's difficult to pull off well in a game, because sometimes there appears to be no plot and if there's no plot there's no resolution which means the game never ends.
I played that piece-of-sh*t "Ephemeral Fantasia" game for PS2 in which you had to go around doing all this stuff, but if you didn't figure out the big problem in the world and fix it by the end of the 6th day you had to START ALL OVER AGAIN (because the king has the world stuck in an infinite loop) It was totally annoying, and even though it felt like easygoing and you could do whatever you wanted, the reality of the game was completely different.
I am a huge fan of existentialism, and an existential game could be neat....except if you really wanted to give the player total freedom to do what he wants, that's pretty much impossible. What if he wants to throw the girl out the window? There's no button obviously for "throw girl out window" and the infinite number of choices just totally kills such a game.
Trying to adapt a great existential film like Blow-Up to a game could also be interesting, but the problem is..... what do you do? (Not to mention the fact that almost none of the characters have names) Let's say for instance that *don't read the following unless you want to spoil the movie for yourself*

in the film, Thomas decided to actually initiate a relationship with the woman from the park. Yes, you could write something about how they have a relationship, but where would it end? It would probably go into a tangent different from the murder, which we don't even know *happened* or not.

This supposed adaptation of the movie would also digress into fan-fiction, which is not something I would like to do to the recently-deceased director, Antonioni.
A game could certainly integrate a Murakami-like surrealism as part of its premise, though.

[themocaw]

Then try this variation on for size: how about a game that plays more like Groundhog Day? It starts off at the beginning. It ends with disaster. . . then you wake up again in the beginning. Each time you play through, more options get opened up as you remember what came before. Essentially, instead of playing through to an ending and then starting a new game, you play through to an ending and return to start to try again. Achieving the true ending requires you to explore all possibilities to piece together all the parts of the mystery, and then you can unlock the critical choice that allows you to break the cycle. This would tell the same story without resorting to gimmicky tricks, and if the basic storyline is short enough, it could keep it interesting without boring the player by constantly forcing them to replay areas they've already seen.

[DrakeNavarone]

But that can still be simulated with a "jump start", a second playthrough of the main script. It isn't necessary to use persistent variables in that case. One of the only examples coming to mind to me at the moment where persistent would be necessary for story telling is if something changes outside of the main script, in some other part of the game. For example, Kagetsu Tohya's main story is a constant loop, and this could be simulated by second (or more) playthroughs, but after you've done everything you need to in order to complete the main story, to break out of the loop, you actually have to return to the prologue where a new choice opens up. Since the prologue and main story are seperate, you can't really simulate it with a second playthrough (unless you get real clever, and create a psuedo-main menu in your main story route where you could access the prologue).

[themocaw]

But that can still be simulated with a "jump start", a second playthrough of the main script. It isn't necessary to use persistent variables in that case. One of the only examples coming to mind to me at the moment where persistent would be necessary for story telling is if something changes outside of the main script, in some other part of the game. For example, Kagetsu Tohya's main story is a constant loop, and this could be simulated by second (or more) playthroughs, but after you've done everything you need to in order to complete the main story, to break out of the loop, you actually have to return to the prologue where a new choice opens up. Since the prologue and main story are seperate, you can't really simulate it with a second playthrough (unless you get real clever, and create a psuedo-main menu in your main story route where you could access the prologue).

Well, that was basically the idea: if not using persistent variables tells the story better, then why use them? Unless, of course, you want to give the option of letting the player start from a different runthrough when they start a new game: i.e. if they've already played through the first runthough, then you could start up a new game from the second, or even third iteration, or perhaps from a final iteration with all choices opened up.

[themocaw]

Fresh Idea

**********

TACTICAL BREAK

CONCEPT: The Player is the commanding officer of one of those mecha-squads piloted by mostly-female teenage pilots. Each mecha requires a three-man crew: Pilot, Engineer, and Gunner. Your unit consists of three vehicles, for a total of nine combat troops, plus your support staff. Things are mostly going well, and unit cohesion is good. . . until one day, when your unit recieves a new recruit: Clarence "Ren" Aizawa.

Ren is a mostly ordinary cadet: slightly shy, a bit sarcastic, but largely decent. There's not much about him that seems to stand out: for one thing, he tends to wear his hair over his eyes, and his expressions are usually a bit bland. The problem is, for some reason, all the girls in your squad have started to gravitate towards him, rather like. . . oh. . . female characters in a Ren'Ai game gravitating towards the player. Unit cohesion is beginning to disintegrate. Teenage drama begins to unfold. Meanwhile, there's a war to be fought.

In essence: what is it like to be one of the characters on the sidelines of a Ren'Ai game who has to deal with the repercussions of these events unfolding? This isn't so much a love-seeking game so much as it is a matchmaking game: in fact, I think it would be a great idea if the Player in this game were an older married man. . . whose sporty pigtailed daughter, the top pilot in the squad, also happens to have a massive crush on Ren. . .

. . . just a thought.

[DaFool]

Re: Tactical Break... we would need an RTS integrated in renpygame, and I don't know if anyone is willing to do that.

It is a great idea, though. It's been done in a few Japanese examples I am aware of. The love-stats of the girls can affect their combat performance. In addition to matching the girls to their boy counterparts, you have to match them with mechs, and some pilots will do better with one mech than with another.