Saving Chloe: Points and Choices

If you haven't already read my "Paths and Agency" article on Saving Chloe, you can find it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/saving-chloe-and-15094287 

As our patrons know, we're in the home stretch for the game.  (All patrons get weekly progress updates.)  The entire script is written, the hard programming is done, and all of the actual paths through the game are done and tested.  All we have left to do now is the pictures and pages for the bonus scene you get when you unlock all of the achievements.  

In terms of pages and pictures, Saving Chloe is longer than any of the other Elsa-verse games.  As I said in the other article, there are ten intertwined paths of varying lengths. To get a feel for how long it really is, yesterday I played through the longest path as if I were a player.  I read every word carefully (I didn't skim) but didn't make any mistakes.  Different people read at differing rates, but it took me and hour and fifty minutes.  Today I played through the shortest path and it took twenty-five minutes.  There are varying amounts of overlap in the paths, but that should give you some indication of the game's overall length.   

Depending on how you count them, I've written between eight and ten of these games, and I've learned from each of them.  I've been trying to apply what I learn to future creations.  On the downside, this means that they're not consistent from a gameplay perspective.  What you need to do to be successful in Dreaming with Elsa is quite different than what you need to do in Redemption for Jessika, and that's very different from what you need to do in Finding Miranda.  On the upside, hopefully I'm learning the right things, and the games are getting better.

One thing I've done in all of my games so far is have success depend on "points" or a "score."  It's a game, so obviously it has to have a score, right?  I'm no longer sure about that.  A huge number of the Xbox games I play don't have a visible score, and the concept of failing later for something you did or didn't do earlier really isn't done in games these days.  (Although that was a huge part of the adventure games I played as a kid.)  So, at the risk of making the game "too easy" I've removed the score from Saving Chloe.  There are paths.  The paths will lead you to differing outcomes.  And some of those outcomes are bad.  But the outcomes will not be determined by how many times you said a nice thing vs how many times you said a less-nice thing.

So, to all the people who hated the mechanic in Finding Miranda where you got to a sex scene and weren't allowed to see it because you didn't make the correct choices earlier, you can rest easy that this won't happen to you in Saving Chloe.  

That said, people did like the ability to choose different responses in Redemption for Jessika.  The feedback I got was that this mechanic let them play more the way they wanted to.  So, I've kept a variant of that in Saving Chloe.  In many places in the game, there are three similar responses for you to make, and you can safely choose the one that suits your tastes the best.  A purist will say, "If there's no wrong choice, then the choice doesn't matter."  I'd say that said purist is taking life a little too seriously…

I'm hopeful that we'll have the game finished and released "soon."  A few days?  A week?  A week and a half?  Something like that.  And I'm very hopeful that you all will enjoy it when it's done.  

Tlaero