Real SMS or mail features in a VN

[Darim]

I would like to hear your opinions on following features:

While you play trough the Visual Novel, the characters occasionally will send you mails with extra game content like background information, letters and pictures on your real mail account.
Same idea for SMS, only smaller obviously. I want to break the boundaries between reality and the game

A few case scenarios:
- Otome game: your are on a date with Boy1 and Boy2 sends you a sms.
- You're the mc of a game but, at the same time your are the pen pal of one of the characters. For example, you will get to know the real thoughts and feelings of a girl. Things you can't know being the mc.

What do you guys think about that?
Total bullshit or would you like to see this feature in a game.

[Ghost #9]

Personally, I think this idea has a ton of potential! There are a bunch of fun ways it could be implemented, and I love to see games trying out new things.

[Selidor]

I wouldn't want game content mailed to me. I get enough emails as it is, and it would be a pain to go digging through my folders if I wanted to look back at it. I would be happy to see an in-game mail/SMS system along the lines of Mystic Messenger, with all the content stored in game.

[andrewngn13]

I think it would be interesting to have the feature; just pertaining to within the game though. It would feel a bit too 'encroaching' if it was sent directly to my own mail account.

Honestly just switching out the current point of view(mc --> whoever else/Person B) should be enough to add dramatic irony to the situation in my opinion. That is to say, something that the reader knows that the main character doesn't.

[Rosstin]

I've been considering doing this for MONSTR. I doubt I'll have time to do it though. I built a Twitter bot recently @DadsBirds so I could possibly make something similar for MONSTR if I had the bandwidth.

If you figure out how to do it from a technical standpoint, I'd love to hear about it. I built services to send emails a while back so it's definitely possible. Our service could even do weird, impossible things, like pretend to be coming from a different person or an email address that wasn't real.

I'm not sure how I'd do SMS though.

[Darim]

I'm not sure how I'd do SMS though.

There're a few service provider which let you send sms using their API for example Twilio.

The basic version for example:

Code: Select all

from twilio.rest import TwilioRestClient

account_sid = "{{ account_sid }}" # Your Account SID from www.twilio.com/console
auth_token  = "{{ auth_token }}"  # Your Auth Token from www.twilio.com/console

client = TwilioRestClient(account_sid, auth_token)

message = client.messages.create(body="Hello from Python",
    to="+12345678901",    # Replace with your phone number
    from_="+12345678901") # Replace with your Twilio number

print(message.sid)

[sake-bento]

It's a fascinating idea. There's at least one company I know that sent physical mail to some of its customers like a small "Valentine letter" or something from one of the boys. SMS would be interesting if it could be integrated into the game in a meaningful way. Would definitely have to be up front about it, though. I can see a lot of people not liking the idea, or even turning their phones on mute while playing and totally missing it.

[Anne]

You can get mail from characters in any of Voltage games (they ask you to input the address if you'd like to get them), some of these were pretty nice.

[Morhighan]

I'd be super interested in this. It has potential.