Dating in a World on Fire 0.40 finally

 Spent the summer on another project of course, and now time to go back to Dating in a World on Fire.
You can get the new version at https://arianeb.itch.io/dating-in-a-world-on-fire/patreon-access

Biggest changes:

1. All pictures are now 1440p so the game looks bigger and better.

2. Added a trio of new introductory scenes, player "origin stories" if you wish.

3. Signed up for https://www.epidemicsound.com/  which was recommended to me for royalty free music. Because I'm using it for games and not just online videos, I had to sign up for the commercial level at around $200 a year, but considering the biggest source of gaming music is Premium Beats which asks for $200 per song, Epidemic Sound seems the way to go. So I picked out an opening theme, a meet relay theme, a first date theme, and a couple of dance loops for the dance scene. Music seriously enhances the Visual Novel experience.

My music idea is to combine the retro future sound of "Synthwave" (the world on fire part) see https://youtu.be/IGqeyQhBPMI as an example, with blatant acoustic romantic songs as a contrast. Epicdemic sound has a lot of both, but I know adding too much music to a game is bad (made that mistake before), so I'll be playing around with it a lot, maybe switching out stuff when I find better etc.

Tell me what you think of the music?

An Experimental Change

I've been playing other AVNs recently, and while some other games play like my games, almost none use the "comic" style color coded text that I use. They all use the text at the bottom of the page with the name of the speaker.

So, I'm experimenting with letting you try both. This is a choice you can make at the beginning of the game, you can also try changing in the middle via Preferences, but this has unreliable results.

Which do you prefer? Comic style allows you to look around the screen, but has no character names in the "history" section. VN style is more traditional.

The Player Origin Story

While thinking of the future plot of the game, I decided I wanted to have a "caper" of some sort with Relay and Alex. The problem I was having is why would they bring the player with them besides the lame "relay likes you" excuse?

Making up a quality for the player out of the blue breaks the head canon of the game player, so inspired by Cyberpunk 2077, I came up with 3 to choose from at the beginning of the game:

• A techie character who knows a lot about the latest technology, specifically about AI devices. I've already established that Relay uses an advanced AI of questionable origin, so one player choice is an actual expert.

• A character who grew up in a rich family. Unlike Ariane in Paradise where the rich character has access to a lot of money, this one got disinherited and struggles for money, but has deep connections on the rich side of the tracks.

• I struggled to figure out a third (rule of threes, you have to have three) but borrowed from "Finding Miranda" and gave the character a gift for solving problems. I decided to tie this in with my recent interest in "Creativity" as a key component for the future.

Each one also covers a theme I'm hoping to cover in this game. Each origin story introduces that theme in an interesting way, ending with "You really need a girlfriend" message which introduces Relay as a potential girlfriend.

Code Tinkering

Been playing with the code a bit. I'm using the Date Ariane convention of establishing points for, 4 traits but the choices to make to get the points are not always clear, so I added emojis to the choices to indicate the traits of nice (smile), wit (laugh), smart (nerdy look), interest (think), the results of these choices will determine what happens in the next part of the date.

So 0.40 ends the same way 0.35 did, except I added the complete song used earlier in the game with lyrics called "You Set My World on Fire". It's not a bad song, I just picked it to feature because the title is close to the title of the game. If you want to hear it don't play the game in "auto" at the end of the holo experience.

Next part of the story involves the end of the date, and my ideas on this front are currently lacking but I have "concepts" of ideas. After that is the final discussion of the date with Samatha, and the introduction of Alex, both of which I thought about a lot since they are the end of the "first act". All coming soon!