Fourth set of AMA answers

Here's the 4th set of answers.

Q: Each of your character's have a distinct personality. How do you keep the characters consistent with the story you want to tell? Or do you have your story mapped out already and the characters perform consistently within the framework of the story? Let me know if my question is confusing!

A: I'm not sure if you're asking about keeping a character consistent within a game, or if you're talking about across an arc of games. I'll touch on both.

Before I write a story, I work out a high level outline of it. And, if the characters are new, I work out their histories and personalities, etc. On some days I've got a scene in my head that I want to get down on paper, and I gleefully write that scene. On other days, I'm not feeling able to stare at a blank page. On those ones, I read through what I have already written, editing for grammar and sentence structure. I have those kinds of days rather frequently, which means that I'm frequently reading through everything I've written so far. That makes it pretty easy to keep a character's personality consistent.

As for across arcs. If I have a character from an earlier game show up in a later story, I'll often go back and read the earlier story to remind myself of all the details.

In other words, I read my own stuff a lot. This is one of the many reasons I write the kinds of things I want to read. If I was writing something I didn't enjoy, then my whole workflow would fail.

Q: Your older games was very dificult. It took days to reach one final and a little lest the other. Not to mention the secret ending (without a tutorial i would never reach Christine's). I realy apreciated this dificult, and feel like it is lost. It diferenciated your games from mayority. There is some reason for it?

A: Yeah, the early games were pretty tough, weren't they? Before I started writing Coming to Grips with Christine I went back and played the first game. And I failed! At my own game! Those games were brutal.

There are a couple of reasons why they've gotten easier. The first is that people kept asking for walkthroughs. It always felt to me that if the majority of my players need a walkthrough to enjoy my game, I was doing it wrong. So I naturally gravitated to making games easier, or at least consistent. Some of the reasons the early games were hard was that you had to kind of "read my mind" to figure out what you were supposed to do. Those kinds of things were the first to go.

Another reason is that the games changed. They started out as puzzles to make it hard to see a sex scene at the end. I didn't start trying to write an actual story with somewhat interesting characters until the first Christine game. As the story and the characters became more important, it started to make less sense to lock the story behind puzzles. Imagine reading a novel where you have to do a math problem to unlock the next chapter.

And, finally, the audience has changed. What's expected of a game is different now, across the spectrum of games (not just erotic ones). When I was a kid, I played adventure games where I needed graph paper and a thesaurus next to my computer. I'd meticulously graph out the whole thing and spend hours working on a particular puzzle. I loved it then. But these days I don't have patience for that.

My games are already a niche of a niche. If I went back to making them super hard (side projects like Puzzle Date notwithstanding), I'd limit my audience even more.

Q: Out of curiosity: In what ways were your own Adventure Creator framework better than Ren'py? And what does the tool do that you wrote to be more productive in Ren'py?

A: The biggest advantage to AC was that it was straight HTML that ran in a browser. This meant I could program anything I wanted to. I could tie animations to mouse movements and tie effects to specific frames of animation, etc. For example, in the HTML version of "DwE: Learning to Fly" in the falling animations you had to click Elsa at the right point in the cycle to advance. There's no good way to do something like that in Renpy, so I had to remove those things when I ported the games to Renpy.

I also had the ability to have hit targets and menu choices on the same page. So you could "say" something by clicking one of the dialog choices, but you could also do something by clicking on the main picture. A classic example of this is in DwE there's a point where you can say one of a few things to Elsa, or you can click on the book and choose to read it. Another is in RfJ where Sarah and Sylvia are on the couch and most of the screen is a hit target to have you do the wrong thing, but if you click on yourself, you do the right thing. In Renpy, you either have hit targets or a menu, and you can't mix them. So those mixed pages became a single menu.

Also, because the games were HTML, it was really easy to host them on the web so people wouldn't need to download them. This also meant that I didn't need to make a Mac-specific version.

Finally, I find the localization support in Renpy to be really annoying. In AC, you'd click a button and it would update all of the languages. In Renpy, every time you make changes to the English you have to manually update each language, including typing in the name of the folder, every time. You don't even pick it from a menu. Crazy.

That said, there are things that Renpy does much better than my engine could. Unlimited saves and rollback are more than nice features, they're table stakes. AC was based on using cookies for saved variables. It was never going to get to rollback. I also like the format of the rpy files. I can easily find passages in my story from my code editor. AC separated out the text in such a way that it was hard to read in order.

As for my Renpy Helper app, it does a few things that help me. First, the Renpy file format uses code "strings" which are text wrapped in quotes. If you have quotes in the string, they need to be escaped. Since I write in novel format where dialog and narration mix, I have quotes around my dialog. Renpy takes "writer text" and converts it to "code text." This lets me write the story in Word and convert it to code on the fly. I'm both a writer and a coder, but I wouldn't want to code in Word and I wouldn't want to write in VS Code. This lets me use the tools for their intended usages.

Also, I brought over the "choose image" code from AC. The way Mortze and I work together is that I send him the text, he creates the images, and I integrate them in the code. RH has the text in one window and the images in another window. I then move the cursor to the page that needs the image, hit CTRL+I, and it puts the right code in the right place to show that image. I can also generate Renpy animation code. And I can graphically create hit targets by drawing boxes on the image.

None of it is rocket science. But it makes my life much easier.

Q: Regarding first question, what do you mean by player agency and meaningful choices breaking ability to tell a good strory?

A: Many people now only consider choices as "meaningful" if they cause a branch in the story. But branches either shorten the story or lengthen the development time. Consider the Elsa-verse game "Gemini." At the start of the game, you make a meaningful choice. Play as Michael or Trisha. For the most part, that takes you down one of two different paths, each with their own text and images. That effectively doubled the amount of work in the game compared to a single path. If we don't change the amount of work we would have done on a single path, then the game will either take twice as long to make, or each path will be half as long. That's for ONE choice. If you have two choices, each path will either be a quarter the length, or the game will take four times as long to make. For 3 choices, it's either an eighth as long or eight times as long to make.

Our games tend to take around 6 months to make. Add 3 "meaningful" choices while keeping the story as long as it would be without them, and the game is going to take 4 years to make. Or, we can make it in 6 months if the story on any one branch is 1/8th as long.

Yes, the impact is smaller if you put the choices near the end, or if you have some branches be shorter than others. But, no matter what, branches affect some combination of the wait time between releases or the length of the longest branch.

And, if you go crazy and have a ton of choices, you quickly get to a place where you're writing multiple unrelated stories and bundling them all together.

Q: Do you prefer scifi, modern or fantasy settings for your stories ? Or do you prefer something entirely different?

A: I'm of the opinion that "Science Fiction" and "Fantasy" are the same genre (called "Speculative Fiction"). The defining aspect of Speculative Fiction is that it "speculates" on what life would be like if there was something fundamentally different from the real world. Maybe the difference is that we have warp drives. Maybe the difference is that there's magic. The important part is that we can't really know what would happen. We need to speculate.

I hear people say, "I don't like that Fantasy junk, I want Science Fiction, like Star Wars." But, is Star Wars "Science Fiction" or "Fantasy"? It's a story about magic wielding people in robes that fight with swords. It's Fantasy, despite the space ships.

I'm a Speculative Fiction writer. I've written a lot of Science Fiction, I've written a lot of Fantasy, and I've written a lot of things that are somewhere between them. I like it all.

One challenge for us, though, is that we're limited by environments and models available for Daz. Mortze has a lot of modern day city environments and outfits. He has a smaller amount of futuristic environments. And he has very little in the way of Dungeons and Dragons-style environments, outfits, and weapons. So that impacts what kinds of stories we tell in our AVNs.

I think that's all of the questions we currently have. I'll keep doing this as long as you folks have questions.