Choices, choices...

Hello, everyone and welcome to the weekly public update.  As writing and coding on Chapter 4 continue, this week, we're going to take a look at some of the emerging paths in the game, and talk about what they mean for the development of the story.  This is a subject on which there's quite a bit of confusion, I think, so I hope this article will clear some of that up.  Please note, this piece contains spoilers for The Bad Girl's Bitch, Down with the Bad Girls and In Loco Parentis, so if you haven't played these quests yet, you have been warned!

Meaningful choices are more popular than ever today in video games.  I grew up playing games that were totally linear, but later came games like Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, and I loved the freedom they gave me to play the game my way.  Be a good guy or a dickhead, or anything in between, the game's designed to handle it all!

Now, of course, the limitation here is that whereas in a game of D&D, you can immediately respond to any curve-ball your players throw you (and I certainly have had to, many times,) a computer game can only do what it's programmed to do.  This means that choices have to be anticipated and paths clearly set out.  As I've developed Missy, I've started to turn vague ideas into branching paths that may eventually lead to very different places.

We start with some seemingly innocuous choices.  What underwear will you put on?  Will you follow school uniform rules or immediately set your stall out as a rebel?  Next, we may choose to help the girl in the town square to further humiliate Kaitlyn, and to help Annie to get her lunch money back from the bully.  These are optional, but the next choice to stand up to Jess or let her have your seat isn't, unless you messed around for too long, and made yourself late, angering Miss Paris instead!

Some of these choices are fairly short-term.  If you choose to annoy the teacher, she will punish you.  If you choose to annoy Jess, she will remember it, and her antagonism will go up.  This is a longer-term consequence.  Sometimes a choice will simply be remembered for a later point in the game, seeming to affect nothing for now.  However, none of these choices commit you to a path.  The first choice that does comes another morning in the schoolyard, when we meet Poppy...

Early in the game's development, players split into "subby" and "dominant" camps, with each wishing to take Missy in quite a different direction.  My response to this was Poppy's storyline, which we'll be returning to throughout development.  This can be thought of as a "side-story" like the Dark Brotherhood or Thieves Guild questlines in Elder Scrolls.

In Poppy's story, you will have the choice to either capitulate and serve her, becoming her de-facto slave, or to stand up to her, eventually getting the better of her.  Either way, in so doing, you are drawn into the power games between her and the popular girls.  The next quest of this will pick up from where you left off, playing out differently depending on whether or not you are Poppy's bitch, and who you helped before.  This takes you down either the "subby" or "dominant" route, and it should be noted that other decisions you make outside of this questline do not care whether you are on the subby or dominant path with Poppy, and will, at most, simply refer to your subbyness stat.

The second major decision you will make comes in Chapter 3.  Missy is asked to help bring in her mothers, then when Renée asks Missy to leave Sapphory City with her, the player is given the choice to agree or not.  Later, during the slaver base attack, Missy is given this choice a second time as she must now make a decision.  You probably anticipated that I would not actually allow you to leave with Renée as this would require me to effectively make two games from that point on (remember those limitations of a computer program I talked about?)

The real choice here is actually obscured.  What you must decide in that instant as the gunfight breaks out is whether or not to heed Renée's warning not to change your mind.  If you do, she will hesitate in the confusion, Captain Elysee will corner her at the overlook, and she will leap to her death rather than be arrested.  If you stick with your first answer, then no matter what that answer was, she will escape to safety.  The game will remember whether you were sincere in your attempts to capture her or not, but as Captain Elysee is none the wiser, your deal with the guards and the court remains intact either way.

I hope this casts a little more light on how the choices and consequences for the game are playing out.  These will by no means be the last important choices you can make, and at the end of act one, (after chapter five,) a massively important choice will be presented, affecting your relationships with several major characters.

No matter what you do, of course, Missy will end up getting naked a lot, so don't worry too much - nothing you do can screw up your playthrough so badly that she joins the Church of Mara and becomes a nun for the rest of her life!

Until next week!
Trinian