Choosing dates vs replaying content

[saolo996]

I think I used two.
Four is really more than enough, and more important not having unlimited slots makes you think carefully whether to save or not, not abusing of it.

[JFR]

Agree with the above. I used the save slots but didn't run out. I don't think more would make any difference.

[kessie8dn]

Thank you for all the feedback, folks. I'm curious about one thing, though. Many of you have suggested save slots. Has it not been clear that all of my recent games have had 4 save slots? If anyone played DwE or RfJ and didn't realize there were multiple save points available, can you tell me (either here or on PM)? No need to be embarrassed. If you don't understand the UI of a program, it's the programmer's fault, not the user's. If all of the people who suggested save points here didn't realize they already had them, then I definitely need to do something to make it more clear in Finding Miranda.

Tlaero

There are saves but in a multi path game they're pointless unless you know which decision was the bad one - otherwise you just have to start over again.. Too many games with various "good" endings (or paths) have points where paths are cut off by a choice, until you reach a point where all paths are closed and you get to the bad end... Or keep arriving at the same "good" end over and over again. Saving these games makes little or no difference.

From your original premise I understood there would be a point in the game where you would choose Path A or Path B, which is why I suggested putting all the preamble into "Part 1" of the game, to save having to play that over again. You've since enlarged on that point, suggesting it is not so straight forward.

I am also a little confused by the results of your poll which suggests most people don't mind repeating sections, yet when I read their comments they are full of statements which suggest that actually they don't want to repeat actions - they're talking about save games and other ways of avoiding it. How they equate that to "I'd rather choose" is not clear - I'D rather choose, but I don't want to be repeating the same scenes countless times.

It seems the only fair way is to make it clear when we're choosing and make sure that happens before we've screwed our options one way or the other, so we can at least be confident that saving the game at that point means we're not going to have missed anything vital... Fair enough?

[tlaero]

I'm not worried about people knowing that they're making an important choice. It's easy to make that clear.

What I'm trying to judge is this. Taken very simply, imagine the following two possibilities.
Intro
Date1
Date2
Date3
Date4
Ending

Intro
Date1 or Date2 or Date3 or Date4
Ending

The latter simply can not be as complex of a story as the former. The characters themselves can be equally complex in both because you can learn different things about them in the 4 dates, but they can't change or grow as much over the course of the story in the latter. If you have a choice, then the dates can't build upon each other. On top of that, you have to redo the Intro and Ending 4 times in the latter. But, as people pointed out, you've had to redo parts of my stories in the past anyway, even though I didn't give you an explicit choice on what to do.

Redemption for Jessika followed the former path. Maybe it makes sense to have Finding Miranda follow the latter one. Then we'll have an apples to apples comparison to base future designs on. Of course, it won't actually be apples to apples, because Mortze is doing such an amazingly awesome job of rendering Miranda that she'll color people's opinions. But people will just need to struggle to be impartial... (-:

Tlaero

[DiTo]

I'm not worried about people knowing that they're making an important choice. It's easy to make that clear.

What I'm trying to judge is this. Taken very simply, imagine the following two possibilities.
Intro
Date1
Date2
Date3
Date4
Ending

Intro
Date1 or Date2 or Date3 or Date4
Ending

Ehmmm Tlaero, you always could ask Mortze to make'em both
D.

[muttdoggy]

I like replaying to try different paths. Replaying can be awesome since our moods and desires can change over the course of minutes, days, or weeks. One day someone may desire to take a riskier approach or decide that they want to chase the redhead.
The amount of saves I would like would be from 2 to 4. In my opinion, a save system that's similar to Brad's Erotic Week would be the best. I don't think it should take more 3 clicks total to load or save a game.
I did find the save slots but it was Menu>Extra Saves and Restores>Extra Saves OR Restores>Then click the slot to save to or restore from. What if the menu was "Save Menu Restore" but instead when you click on Save or Restore it takes you right to a list of your slots that you can label that are date and time stamped? That's just 2 clicks to load or save.
Your games get better and better over time. With more replayability and a simple save system, maybe even the Japanese companies will sit up and take notice of what you're doing.
Edited for grammar and to show how I did save/restore. My fingers have never ever caught up to my brain.

[JFR]

...

Intro
Date1 or Date2 or Date3 or Date4
Ending

The latter simply can not be as complex of a story as the former. ...

It might if you changed to:

Intro
Date1 or Date2
Date1 leads to Date3 or Date4
Date2 leads to Date5 or Date6
etc.

Of course, that would mean a lot more renders from Mortze and more story from tlaero to cover the additional options but that can only be a positive for the players who enjoy your work so much. It WOULD mean more work for both of you but I'm ok with that.

Seriously, your stories are so good that either method will please the "fan base."

[Xyzzy987]

Thank you for all the feedback, folks. I'm curious about one thing, though. Many of you have suggested save slots. Has it not been clear that all of my recent games have had 4 save slots? If anyone played DwE or RfJ and didn't realize there were multiple save points available, can you tell me (either here or on PM)? No need to be embarrassed. If you don't understand the UI of a program, it's the programmer's fault, not the user's. If all of the people who suggested save points here didn't realize they already had them, then I definitely need to do something to make it more clear in Finding Miranda.

Tlaero

I, for one, was not aware that any of your games had multiple save slots.

I just performed a small test. Playing RfJ via the PF1 site using Firefox. Partway into the game I clicked Save. No reaction, no indication of any particular save slot being used. A bit later I clicked on Restore. No request for which save slot to restore from, the game was just restored back to where I clicked Save. Played a bit more and clicked Save again. Still no indication of any save slot. Again, a bit later I clicked Restore, and the game was automatically restored to my second save. I then clicked on Menu, and saw "Extra Saves and Restores". Clicked on that, tried both Extra Saves and Extra Restores, and saw three, not four, save and restore slots displayed. It didn't matter, though, because only Save Slot 2 and Restore Slot 2 had anything in them, even though I had done multiple saves at different points in the game. Am I not understanding how this is supposed to work? Or is there a bug, at least with Firefox 47.0? Or something else?

Thanks,

Xyzzy

[karrek]

Think of it like a quick save/quick load versus regular save/load. If you just hit save or restore on the main game page it will just keep saving and restoring the quick save slot, whereas if you go into the menu you can create multiple save files.

[tlaero]

It might if you changed to:

Intro
Date1 or Date2
Date1 leads to Date3 or Date4
Date2 leads to Date5 or Date6
etc.

These are variations on a theme. We can make x pages in n months. Everything after that is tradeoffs. At the extremes, people can have a long linear game with a lot of character development, or they can have a short branching game with little character development, or they can wait longer for the game to come out. Clearly, the balance between those variables can be tweaked. Instead of short with 4 paths, you can have medium with 2. Or we could wait an extra few months and get another branch, etc. But there's no way around the math.

What's separate from the math, though, is the extra issue of needing to replay content in the branching case. What I'm learning from this thread is that people don't mind replaying within reason. I'm sure that few people would want to play the same scene five times to get two or three sentences of dialog difference. But maybe playing through 4 times to get 4 significantly different scenes isn't bad. I'll keep thinking about it.

Tlaero

[tlaero]

Think of it like a quick save/quick load versus regular save/load. If you just hit save or restore on the main game page it will just keep saving and restoring the quick save slot, whereas if you go into the menu you can create multiple save files.

Karrek is right. The only difference between the save on the main page and the one in the menu is how many clicks it takes to get to it. Clicking a save in the menu doesn't change the main page save at all.

Personally, I use the menu saves at the start of major scenes and the quick save for decisions within each scene.

Tlaero

[Xyzzy987]

Think of it like a quick save/quick load versus regular save/load. If you just hit save or restore on the main game page it will just keep saving and restoring the quick save slot, whereas if you go into the menu you can create multiple save files.

Karrek is right. The only difference between the save on the main page and the one in the menu is how many clicks it takes to get to it. Clicking a save in the menu doesn't change the main page save at all.

Personally, I use the menu saves at the start of major scenes and the quick save for decisions within each scene.

Tlaero

Ah, okay, so it was the former, I didn't understand the mechanics of the save process. Thanks for the info, karrek and tlaero.

I will say, though, that I think not having any indication of the save slots on the main game page tends to hide that feature from the player. It was only when I went "exploring" and hit the Menu item that I discovered their existence quite by accident, and that was only when I went looking for the extra save slots as part of this discussion. There is no "help" facility to explain how they work, nor even their very existence. As I said, I had no idea they were there simply because I had never gone to the Menu before. Maybe "A word about saves" in the intro where you explain changing image sizes?

Thanks for listening, and thanks for all the great work you and Mortze have done.

[tlaero]

Thanks Xyzzy. Yeah, in light of this, mentioning the menu saves somewhere in the intro seems appropriate. Does that mean you didn't see the achievements either? In most of my games there's a bonus scene for getting all of the achievements. People quite liked the one in Redemption for Jessika.

Tlaero

[Blue]

Thanks Xyzzy. Yeah, in light of this, mentioning the menu saves somewhere in the intro seems appropriate. Does that mean you didn't see the achievements either? In most of my games there's a bonus scene for getting all of the achievements. People quite liked the one in Redemption for Jessika.

Tlaero

Some route and achievements are really was not easy to get.


And about:

intro
Date1
Date2
Date3
...

or

Intro
Date 1 or Date 2 or Date 3 ...

In that way - i think linear(first one) way of story would be better. I mean - if you choose the route you want to get, you take the course and start try all variants in it. And if the build would be not linear, so i think it can be too easy to lose your way and too hard to find one or more endings.

By the way, you do a great games! Thank you both!

[TheGreatJoeGargery]

Out of curiosity, if you had all dates in a single playthrough, how much would the actions in earlier dates affect the following dates?