As I was preparing last week’s blog post, which refers to The Pillars of Arcade Spirits, it brought to mind a topic I’ve been pondering lately — signposting success and failure.
One of the pillars of our game is clear signposting. We want you to make an informed choice. Maybe we won’t tell you EVERYTHING that lurks behind an option, but you should have a good sense about what will happen if you pick it. You’ll increase your Gutsey, Naomi will like you, you’ll pick one thing over another, etc. It’s never a vague mystery which then punishes you for not knowing you fell into a trap.
I liken it to LucasArts adventure games, versus Sierra On-Line. (90s kids will know this.) In Sierra games, you’d die constantly just for trying different things. The default method the game had of teaching you “No, that’s not the right way” is to kill you and force you to reload a save. But LucasArts did away with that — if you mess up, things simply don’t work, and you can keep trying until they do. It doesn’t punish you for experimenting.
I want Arcade Spirits to do the same thing — to have very, very few legitimately punishing choices, to allow you to experiment or run wild, and have the leeway to make a few mistakes without ruining everything.
But how do I signpost that…? How do I tell the player, “Hey, don’t fret so much about what you pick, you literally can’t fail this.”
For example, in our demo, there’s a point where QueenBee says “I hate seeing people get yelled at” and then looks sad. I have literally never seen anyone pick the option of telling her “Don’t you yell at people all the time?” which is a shame, because it’s got a funny response. They’re too scared of saying the wrong thing and ruining their chances with QueenBee, or think that you have to default to the nicest response because other games punish you for being even slightly jerky. As a result they get a fairly toss-off answer from QueenBee instead of a more interesting one.
Even if you do miss a “point” with QueenBee, the game is scored in such a way that when it comes time to choose your romance path, it’s VERY tolerant of failure. As long as you chose to spend time with a person and generally said things they agreed with, a few fumbles won’t wreck everything.
But again… how do I signpost that? How do I reassure the player that they can explore the game and not feel they have to take the safest, most cautious choices they possibly can out of fear of everything exploding as punishment? How do I do it without breaking fourth wall and telling them to just have fun with it and not worry?
Not sure. Not sure at all. If you’ve got any ideas, let me know. I’d love to hear your opinions on this. Thanks!
This isn’t a hurdle you’re going to surmount perfectly for every player, and I unfortunately think it’s partially because of what you keep returning back to in this post — i.e., your conception of choices in other visual novels versus how you think of choices in your own. You comment in your reply here that you’re worried players will be limiting themselves to less fun if they min-max is, in my opinion, where you’re getting a little bit too hung up on theoreticals and trying to exclusively cater to a very specific model of engaging with your visual novel.
I don’t think it’s less fun for a lot of players to try and figure out what to say to someone, and you will lose the inevitable interest of some players who either like a challenge or just want an experience more reflective of turbulent social dynamics; in fact, in your specific example, I would wager that at least half of the people who didn’t choose to be snarky to Queen Bee weren’t min-maxing choices or anything. That scenario reads much more like a player just not wanting to be rude to someone who seems upset, and I don’t think it’s an otome-exclusive problem — look at how many posts about Dragon Age or Mass Effect are “I tried to play an asshole, but I just didn’t have it in me!”. That’s just how people are.
You mention the generic category of Other Visual Novels At Large pretty frequently in your posts, so here’s my answer to your questions here and elsewhere about how to make yours stand out: Unless you’re finding features in visual novels that you like, let go of trying to counteract misconceptions as a whole and focus more on your game as it is. As a reader who plays other visual novels, it is a little bit tiring to hear over and over what Arcade Spirits ISN’T before what it IS, and that unfortunately has begun to read (at least to me) as the backbone you lean on to talk about choices or romance routes or mechanics for Arcade Spirits way too often. Not every artistic/etc decision you make needs to be an answer to or a defiance of the mechanics/etc Other Visual Novels At Large, and I think (like you have here) you’ll get lost in the weeds of indecision by trying to approach development that way.
TL;DR, I would say you should just implement your choice system as it is and let players engage with it on their own terms. Players will surprise/disappoint/excite you quite literally no matter what you do, and that’s a wonderful thing you should be embracing by offering them exactly the story you personally want to tell, exactly how YOU want to tell it.
I think that a huge part of people not choosing the option you mentioned has a lot to do with how most Otome Games are written. With most games, there are three ways to respond to something. The ‘good way’, the ‘mediocre way’, and the ‘bad way’. It makes romancing a character more of a one-way street; there is one way to get the best ending and that’s by choosing the best answers. An answer that potentially calls out QueenBee on hypocrisy, which is how I personally read that choice, feels more like a bad answer than the other two.
As players in any game, we want to succeed. That means unless you either have a walkthrough handy or are trying to make a character hate you, players will try and go for the safest solutions because they stand a higher chance of getting you a good outcome.
Let’s take a look at that scenario. When QueenBee says that she hates seeing people get yelled at, we get three options. You then choose from these three options:
– “But…you yell at people all the time.”
– “QueenBee, are you doing okay…?”
– “I’m not going to pry.”
To me, this looks like a typical Good, Mediocre, Bad choice for getting a character to like you. First option lowers affection, middle boosts it, and last one doesn’t do anything. It’s the formula we expect out of games like this. The phrasing also plays a part as well; the first option makes our character seem hesitant, like the game is trying to warn you against a bad idea. The location of those three dots signals to me that this is the bad option of the trio.
But that’s just me. I can’t speak for everyone who plays. But I hope this helped a bit!
It’s a good point — genre conventions do inform a player, even before they approach our game. Unlike traditional otome games we’re trying not to be a punishing because we want players to have freedom of exploration in conversation. There are definitely ‘bad’ answers but picking one doesn’t doom you for eternal loneliness, either.
I might rewrite this one interaction, but rather than rewrite every single interaction, I’d rather make it clear to folks up front that The Rules Have Changed, and if they go into this trying to min-max like an otome game, they may be limiting their fun. I’m debating ways to subtly hint to the player that they should feel safe picking some out-there options. Obviously you don’t want to constantly antagonize a character, but there’s room for give and take.