Plot path?, I coudln't really fit this elsewhere

Well, before the Last Great Announcement, I started working on this.

Then I heard that there were "things happeneing" and that I was potentially a "poisionous person", so I held off.

But, with me being who I am, I figured I'vd finish it and throw it to the winds.
Long story short, this is how I envisage the game, based on what I've been reading here.

http://images.shagtech.com/z-s.png (excuse the shitty CAD)

Note that this is a skeleton of a game, and is pretty simple, however I think somehting like this is required as a framework for all of the contirbuters to work off. It also simplifies the scenarits' job by quantising what has to happen.

A couple of quick notes:
The "Grid of Doom" is something that I proposed in this thread:
http://z8.invisionfree.com/Zettai_Shojou/i...topic=288&st=15
Where you play 5 scenes out of about 30, allowing you to meet all of the girls, but in a choice-based fashion. I may finish a scene from the "grid" tonight and post it as an example.

The "getting to konw you" phase is similar ot hte grid, however it is totally unguided, meaning that your choices alone determine who you talk to and what yo ufind out about them.

Both of these grids also give you "points", depending on your choices. For example, joining the track team to meet Emi will gain more "points" than accidentially running into her in the corridor.

After this is the "Culmination event".
I'm envisiaging a season-based event; a beach visit for summer, a sakura party for srping... something like that.
Basically, the points leader will "ask you out" (as a friend, of course), to join her and a friend or two at the event. Now, either all 5 girls can go there as a group (say, away to the beach or a school trip) or you can accidentally run into the others at the event (say, going to a festival, then running into the others, ala kekeke's pic in this post... what? kekeke needs more props :p).

Anyway, at this event, there is some soul-bearing etc, and you start on a relationship proper with one girl (you know, first kiss style or something).

After this, the game becomes more scenario-driven, and most of the choices will choose one out of two scenes, but not affect the further game (eg, stopping at a shop on the way home or not). However, I think these scenes can be used for "setting flags" to get to certain endings.

The "Second Divergance" is a point in the game where the final character gets a chance to "switch girls" for the last time. However, since we're still fairly scenario based, this will probably be limited to one other girl per path (eg, you can switch from Emi to Rin).
I'm thinking that it will be something like Lilly having a concert but Hanako has just had an accident... something like that, where your choice determines what happens for the rest of the game.

After this divergance, we return to the original scenarios for the girls, until we hit the Crisis.

This can be anything, ranging from someone needing surgery, to being transferred out... you know, a standard plot crisis.
Depending on your actions at this point, I'm thinking we can have a "short end", something that isn't good, but isn't bad, yet still terminates the game. That can be left up to the scenarist.

Finally, act III. You've selected your girl, you've saved her from disaster, and this act basically wraps up the story.
I think the easiest example would be Shuffle!, after you've got Asa- suddenly she starts fainting and getting her Death on, yet you need to find a way to save her.
Anyway, that's what Act III is all about; creating a scenario to bind the MC and the girl together.

From this, I've put three endings per stream. There's the "normal" ending (if not used at the end of Act II) where everyone holds hands, says "hooray", but doesn't actually achieve anything.
There's the good end where you get hospital secks and the bad end where you get the shit glassed out of you.

All of these endings need to be a vaild conclusion to the scenario, even if you have deus ex it a bit (like the Hanako Bad end I wrote; she just comes out of nowhere).

Also, being on one path doesn't mean you're totally isolated from the others; you're just not going ot end up banging them. As I mentioned in
this post, I think that we should also set these up so that the five scenarios aren't concurrent, allowing for it to be "technically" possilbe that the MC actually experiences all 5 scenarios without collision, leaving scope for a gooey harem ending etc.

So, there you have it, my skeleton for the game. I have thoughts about actaul scenarios for all of these, however until the Last Great Annoucement resolves itself, I think I'll backpeddle a bit and just leave this lying around to hopefully inspire others.

That's looking really good. I've held off on writing for lack of ideas, but a concrete plan like that would really help.

It seems a tad long though. There needs to be a lot of writing to fill a grid like that out, and it's going to take ages to get every ending.

Yes, it's probably going to be a bit long, but if you've experience my wirting style, I think you'll ahve figured out that I don't like keeping things short...

And it's not *that* long to get to the end. I suppose if you're looking for a game where you boot it up, jam one hand down your pants and start clicking furiously with the other, then this scheme won't work.

However, if you think about it, you're looking at about 60-70 scenes per play-through here. That's about 2-4 "episodes" of a standard TV show, which I think is a decent length for a "path". All up, that's around 380-450 scenes, which is what I predicted in.. well... some thread. It would take about 4-5 writers to achieve that in the timescale laid out in the Last Great Annoucement.


Also, to answer a question posed in the IRC channel, the secks would occur at the following points:

(Minimal approach) -> Good end
(Standard secksing) -> Good end, After Crisis resolution, and shortly after second divergance
(Fuckfest) -> the above, plus just before second divergance, and at the first divergance (ie where you first pick a girl).

Finally, I think this is probably pretty similar to what people have already got in mind, however once it's on paper like this, it gets everyone thinking the same, and rules out ambiguity (which means we save time).

So yeah. Any more questions?

Goethe once said that following the rules will make anything decent, but only breaking them will make anything truly great. Of course, he was a German and never played H-games, so I wouldn't trust his opinion too much.

I like what you have. It's methodical, and lends itself perfectly to a scene-by-scene breakdown that people can eventually contribute to.

By the way... Last Great Announcement? You flatter me, really.

Wish I had gotten around to looking at this thing sooner.

Pending finding out what the programmers can actually do, I like that concept, especially the early game breakdown (besides, who doesn't love things "of doom"). I'm a bit iffy about the "second divergence" part though: if you've already set out on a particular girls path, that would make it hard to gain regard with any of the other girls, so if you switch, in order to get a good ending you would either have to make the regard threshold very low or it would be almost impossible to switch and still get the best endings. Most of that phase could be covered in the same manner as or as part of the "getting to know you" phase.

The concept, though, and most of the chart itself look pretty good though. It's easy to break down into individual scenes, which is the most important thing, and the beginning is flexible enough to allow plenty of choices, as long as we don't get too bogged down in making too many of them.

This is actually almost exactly how I envisioned the game, split into three acts, first act is variable, etc.

Now, it seems that we've got the approval of everyone that's replied so far. What are others' opinion on it? How would you improve it?

I'd like to get some kind of consensus/decision on this ASAP so we can actually get started on the specifics of the game design.

HOLY SHIT. FUCKER HAS A FLOW CHART!
Im impressed: this is pretty much how one H-game i once played moved. How ever, it had a lot less choices.
So for each girl, its a set path? or are there multiple directions that lead to one of the ends. I can see this getting complicated, especially if you switched girls after the first choice...
anyway, form what i read, this is a very solid proposal to the path system.

*Gendou Pose*

An excellent idea, good sir... if it will work in the engine then I'm for it.

There's technically nothing that can't be done with ren'py. Anything that is too crazy would be done with python and I don't see anything there that would be too taxing either way.

Okay, I'll admit that I took a 36 hour absence wihtout telling anyone, so sorry aobut letting the questions pile up.

Firstly; Second Divergance.
I suppose my copypasta CAD didn't really lend itself to scale.
Two points to note about this:
1) it happens early in Act II, probably before the player realises that they're actually bound to a path. That's one of the main reasons I think it's important; you wouldn't want only one chance to pick how the rest of the game plays out.
2) it would be partially scenario based. By that, I mean that the "other" girl is wound into the start of the scenario. For example, say you started down Emi's path, you'd expect to have a bit of contact with Rin as well. Then, you get to the 2nd divergance (which doesn't have to be obvious to the player, mind you), and are then able to choose between the two.

I suppose you could think of five "Trunks", a Rin-Emi trunk, an Emi-Rin trunk etc.
From that, you narrow down to the one scenario.

This would also feed into the "Bad End" type scenario with Hanako and the glass and stabbing... (Sorry, but I *like* that scene )

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"Last Great Annoucement" Heh, allow me some fun at your expense XD
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As for the "in-stream" choices, I'm thinking that these would be things like the "Goto shop on way home" (as discussed in the Babies thread here.)
It also give the player something to do other than click and fap. They could also be used to add points to determine the ending.
The internal structure of each "branch" would be pretty simple, (*cpl_crud cracks ascii art fingers) like: (ignore periods...)

........................... / Scene 2 \
Scene 1 - Choice <..................> Scene 4
............................ \ Scene 3 /

So, the choice doesn't affect the outcome, just gives you something to do.

This also means that each girl only reall has one "path", just with little diversions. So, still only 5 scenarios, each with 3-4 possible ends.

The "Act II end" is something that I threw in as an afterthough, is we wanted to be bastards (Think NHK, when whats-his-face first plays the H-game). You get a little loving, but you obviosly aren't good enough to get the rest. However, this ending can also be handled at the end of the path (I just think it would be a touch unrealistic to play through the entire scenario and not, er, "win".)
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Programming:
As I was gogin through this, I thought of a number of ways that it could be handled in flash/java/C, so I figure the gurus that make sweet ren'py love would probably be able to figure it out.


Finally, as I've said above, something like this gets all departments thinking the same, and also gives us an indication of what is/isn't done. Without something like this, we'll be submitting scenes until each of our accidental children are finishing this off for us to earn their inheritance.

This post has been edited by cpl_crud on Apr 16 2007, 10:52 AM

I thought it had been decided that harem ending was out?

Or this could be in the vein of Tsukihime's better bad ends, where life just goes on as normal and nothing particularly amazing happens. Like, you walk off into the sunset with one of the girls, but you didn't do well enough to pound her on screen.

That's kind of similar to another Japanese H-game I played a while ago called "Sweet Pleasure", where there were two different paths with each girl, an "H path" where you train her to become a sex maniac, and a romantic path which is exactly what the name says, without the H-scenes.

Yeah, I was thinking that the "Normal" end would be the "hold hands and walk away" end, whereas the "good" end would be hospital secks.

And, whilst I think a harem ending is out, I'm saying that we could set it up so that it would be conceivable for all 5 paths to happen at the same time.
I did come up with an eloquent way of saying this a couple of weeks ago, but the drive seems to ahve shaken it from me

So if we go with that idea, one path would have no sexing, and the other would have plenty of sexing. This would mean that in act 3, we'd split up the path into two, which means ten different paths in act 3. That may be a bit much, but it may be worth it. Although I don't think Anonymous would like the fact that one of the paths doesn't have sexxxing in it.