showing player progress

[Scribbles]

I'm just wondering what everyone's opinions are when it comes to letting the player know how their choices are changing the story?

currently my VN has small graphics that pop up based on the choices made (different colored hearts depending on if you increase or decrease the love interests affection)

I was considering adding a call to progress when the player "sleeps" so that every night they would see something that would indicate how their game was going. Maybe affection bars, or something.

but then I thought maybe that was too much?

should I do the progress call instead of the heart indicators??

what do you guys do in your games?

[Carradee]

I've seen the at-choice affection alerts + page where you can view current stats on a Winter Wolves game. I've also seen a MoaCube game where a graphic in the corner indicates when a scene is a consequence of a choice earlier in the game.

The overall gameplay affects if I like that sort of thing or not, in games I play, so I don't really have an opinion for if you "should" do it.

You apparently want to, so I assume you like it. If the issue is that you aren't sure if readers will like it, what about putting the ability to turn it on/off in settings?

[Zelan]

If the issue is that you aren't sure if readers will like it, what about putting the ability to turn it on/off in settings?

This tends to be a good middle ground if you can figure out how to code it. I believe the team working on Cinderella Phenomenon is doing something similar - they have a "right choice" indicator that can be turned off and on.

[Scribbles]

hmm I'm not sure how I would go about turning the graphic on and off, I think I'll just leave it in, and maybe see what beta testers say...

I was just curious about what other people were thinking and doing for their projects

[gekiganwing]

I'm just wondering what everyone's opinions are when it comes to letting the player know how their choices are changing the story?

You can use graphics to show the player how close they are to reaching a goal. Use them if you want players to understand how they've progressed in gaining the trust of a person or a faction. Many video games have used stat meters to show things such as the level of a character's sanity, notoriety, or moral alignment.

However, perhaps you do not think love should not be measured by statistics. Maybe you want people to question whether the protagonist and an NPC care about each other. If you want to discourage your players from thinking "gotta get to affection level four," then don't use graphics to show things like this.

what do you guys do in your games?

The first two Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side games let the player see the protagonist's love and friendship levels quite often. This is done by talking to an NPC who also provides additional information.

Hakuouki provides a correct choice indicator, as well as two different variables. In other words, if the reader makes a decision which gets the protagonist closer to one of the guys, there is a graphic effect which displays it. The variables in this visual novel are affection (necessary in order to get a positive ending) and corruption (too much leads to a negative ending).

Sakura Wars 5 includes a correct choice indicator (upbeat or downbeat musical tones), and two relationship charts. In between sections of the story, it shows the relationship levels between the protagonist and the heroines, as well as whether the heroines trust each other.

Love Hina Advance includes a life meter. Not only does the protagonist need to develop a relationship with a heroine, but he needs to stay alive. It's possible to take too much damage and get a bad ending.

[Mammon]

I've beta-tested Scribbles' game, and as I commented in the review I thought it worked well. There were choices relating to someone's route that weren't very obvious, where MC does something that one of the romances likes but they're not around to show that they like it. If those choices wouldn't have the little hearts I wouldn't be able to tell which answer actually has effect on the romance and which don't, and getting a perfect end would require me to skip through the game again and again trying different combinations of choices until I'd guess right. Not very fun. With those hearts however, those choices actually defined the romance further by showing which behaviour had their preference.
So I'd say that the affection bars wouldn't work as well because you can't actually tell which seemingly non-romance choices have a romance effect after all.


About showing choice effects in general:
It really comes down to your game. A lot of romance games do not actually expect the reader to struggle with the choices or get results through trail-and-error. The story is the game, the choices are meant mostly for the reader to pick their favorite route and are therefore usually rather obvious. You want to follow Character C's route first, then pick the choices that they prefer and spend time with them over A and B. The writer doesn't intend and the reader doesn't want to struggle getting on someone's route.

So when the choices are a bit more complicated than: three people just expressed their preference /or/ with whom do you want to spend some time? and it's not obvious which choice belongs to which romance, an indicator like that would work unless it's the writers intend to make the audience work for it and make them figure out the system of preference through the story. But with anything romance related, that's rarely the case.

With non-romance this is different, in those cases it's quite possible that the writer doesn't want to make the choices and their effects too obvious to the reader. They might even intend to fool the reader the first time by giving them choices only to make the obvious ones turn out to be the worst. Sometimes there aren't even any right and wrong choices, only different outcomes/moods. With those, indicators might be too much of training wheels. With romance, helping the audience be successful right away is usually not a bad thing.

[YonYonYon]

I saw people complaining about lack of romance indicators. I saw people complaining about the presence of romance indicators. So, whatever you want to do, do it. Just do it well.

Personally, I dislike it when it's too hand-holding in VNs. And like it when the romance isn't the main gameplay, like in RPGs. After all, I don't want to replay 50 hours of grinding just because I didn't get a couple of romance points.

And about the "Your choices will affect the future" indicators, meh, I'm indifferent. Like, yeah, I'd expect from the game to remember my choices, no need to tell me.

Life is Strange did something well though - the choices with huge impact were framed differently than the mundane ones. The mundane ones were the usual choice wheels, while the important ones made the whole world freeze in anticipation. Noice. I liked that.

[wyverngem]

I've played games where it would chime every time you "made the right choice" in dialogue and so I got to a point where I was playing to hear the chime and not actually responding the way I really wanted to. If I didn't hear the chime I would roll back to make a different choice and not both to hear read out the choice I made. Eventually the gameplay changed at the end of each bachelor's story and the chime didn't indicate the best ending. It would trick the player into thinking everything was all right with the choice they made and then I'd get the alone ending.

Generally, unless it's a stat building game I don't like to show the relationship meters or progress bars. I like having it open and behind the scenes working for or against you. I prefer subtle hints more to outright telling me. The subtle hints would be, for example in otome games, an extra dialogue from the player or seeing that certain characters hang around more often then others.

I outright choice ding way isn't appealing to me.