AcademyOfFetishes
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Poll: Long scenes or more choice?
🕑 Added 2021-10-17 02:02:06 +0000 UTCTL;DR:
Do you like the long scenes as they are?
Pros:
- Scenes have more depth.
- Characters' personalities are well defined.
- If you are really into a scene, there'll be a lot more of it.
- Long scenes could be a defining characteristic of the game.
Cons:
- Too much, and it turns into a CYOA instead of a game.
- Higher odds of getting bored.
- Less interactivity.
- Less replay value.
Do you want shorter scenes with more choice?
Pros:
- More content per release.
- More interactivity.
- More choices that make a difference.
- More replay value.
Cons:
- Short scenes cannot be as in-depth as long scenes. Story, character development, etc. may suffer, or be inconsistent from player to player.
- There will probably be more bugs. More choices means more possibilities, and the more possibilities, the more chances there are for me to not anticipate one.
Hello! I'm still on a long journey to make the game more game-like. As far back as my first game, I've had a weird relationship with scene length. Compared to most textbased games, my scenes are relatively long with relatively few choices. I think this makes them unique, but unique doesn't equal good (doesn't equal bad either).
Let's take the latest scene for example: when it comes to the lewd part, I spent considerable time on it, and it only has one path: butt stuff. If you're not into that, the lewd part poses no interest to you. What if instead of going about it the way I did, I spent half as much time on the butt stuff and used the remaining time on lewd non-butt stuff. One release would appeal to a wider range of people's interests.
This doesn't just mean more content, it means more choice. "Do you want to see this path or that path?" Reducing scene length to the extreme, the text/choices could look like this:
This is a GIF from a textbased game named Sorcery 4 that I really enjoyed. Notice how short each response is. Notice how many choices you get after each response. This is feasible because each response is 1-2 paragraphs and each paragraph is 1-3 sentences. It's also worth noting there is less character development. You don't get a sense of the personality of the trader or of the main character.
Compare that to Monster Girl Farmer. excluding encounter reactions, I bet the average response to a choice is over a thousand words. When it gets that long, the sunk cost fallacy comes into play: "I spent so much time writing this, do I really want to give players a choice to skip it?"
It's possible to have some long scenes and some short scenes in a single game, but you'll only be allowed to make one choice. That's because it's useful to me to know which of these two is more important to you. Regardless, I don't plan on a major pivot, just thinking about what to do in the future to make the game more enjoyable to people.
Comments
Bawdy Ink Slinger
For sure. I think about these things a lot.
Piotr Bohdziewicz
I appreciate how considerate you're being about the players' experience :)
Bawdy Ink Slinger
It doesn't, but the more kinks there are in one scene, the more likely there will be something in it people don't like. You may not like butt stuff, but others may hate it so much they would skip the whole scene even if 50% of it is non-butt stuff.
Piotr Bohdziewicz
Regarding that "butt stuff" dilemma, another possibility is to combine butt-stuff with non-butt stuff into a single long scene. A scene doesn't need a singular focus on one type of lewd.
Bawdy Ink Slinger
Thanks for the feedback. It's not obvious to me why that would be more difficult than either option. It seems like I should take the same amount of effort and time to me.
Whisperers
Given the results, I'd say try to mix the two together. Moderate length scenes with a medium amount of choices. Of course, that's far more difficult than either option and the choice is, ultimately, your choice.
Bawdy Ink Slinger
actually I had a question: you mentioned character development as a scene that should be long. In your opinion, does that apply to lewd scenes too?
Bawdy Ink Slinger
I think that's along the lines of what I was thinking, too.
While I have selected more choices, I would like to add that perhaps a balance can be struck. More choices would be nice but would need more long-term benefits and consequences to the player. For example, a choice at the beginning might affect the late-game content the player experiences. This would improve replayability as people often replay a game to experience the various paths of the story. That being said some scenes do need character development and should be a little longer with fewer choices. Example environment might limit the number of choices a player can make, I can only do this or this in this scene because they only have certain options available to them. So in that setting it would not be apropriate to give the player more choices.
