Finding Miranda: Gameplay

This is the third and final post about our upcoming game, Finding Miranda.  It's the final one because you're going to be able to play the game yourselves soon.  Mortze has finished with the pictures and I've finished with the writing and coding.  All that's left is a lot of testing and fixing the issues we find.  As with the prior two articles, I'm not planning to write any actual spoilers here, but if you want to be completely surprised by the game, you might skip reading this.

If you squint, you could say that the gameplay in most of my games amounts to "Say nice things to the woman to convince her to have sex with you."  There have been variations, but largely they've been changes in what is considered "nice."  And, in general, if you don't say enough nice things to the woman, she doesn't want to have sex with you.  

Something this formula has never let me do is tell a story about a woman who's already attracted to the guy.  What if she wants to have sex with him? Where is the gameplay going to come from then?

The formula isn't changing much in Finding Miranda, but I have reworked things a bit.  For the most part, this isn't a game about saying nice things to the woman.  This is a game about being true to yourself.  At the start you'll make a few explicit choices about the character you're playing, and then most of the "points" will come from you doing and saying things that fit with those choices.  I'm hoping you'll say to yourself, "If that happened to me, this is how I'd react."  And then, when faced with dialog choices, you'll say, "Well, if that's how I had reacted, then this is what I'd say here."  The game is a bit harder than earlier ones, because the choices tend to be subtler than in those games, but I've tuned the difficulty by adjusting the required percentage to be successful.  And, of course, you can use the save games to mechanically work your way through if you want to.  Finding the right balance between "enjoyably difficult" and "frustrating" is important to me.  

I'll be interested in hearing what people think about my solution to the problem that the story says these two should have sex, but the gameplay may say they shouldn't.  I've always found it kind of awkward that you'd be doing okay, and even had sex with the character once, and then she suddenly says "Forget it," and the game ends.  A struggle for a game writer is that we need to give you the ability to screw it up, but that gets in the way of the story.  What I'm doing in Finding Miranda is that the story happens the way it's going to happen, but if you don't play the game well enough, you won't get to see the sex scenes.  I'm sure this will lead to long discussions on Shark's Lagoon full of words like "agency," but that's going to happen regardless of what I do.

As an aside, I want to call out the tremendous effort Mortze put into the art for Finding Miranda.  I don't know if it's been clear, but he rendered the entire game (almost 1300 images) in iRay.  Many of those images took 30 minutes (each!) to render.  Some took two hours.  I don't know if anyone has done anything of this scale and magnitude in iRay before, but it looks fantastic.  I mean, it's Mortze.  Of course it looks fantastic.  But, wow.  If you do the math on the render time, you'll get a pretty good indication of why this game took us longer than our previous ones.  It was worth it, though.  I hope you folks agree.

Tlaero