Musings about changes to the Conway Gallery (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

I wanted to take a moment to do some dev talk here about something that's been on my mind for a while. Namely that I want to make some changes to the way the gallery functions.Right now in the game we have a pretty standard VN gallery, you see the scenes that are locked, you can unlock them and then either view the artwork or replay the scene. Though for a while now I felt it just ended up creating incentives that were antithetical to what we actual want to achieve and create with Conway. With Conway, and the comparative "sprawly-ness" of it, we want to create a feeling of it actually being a story steered by your inputs. Of course there are limitations to that, we have a very limited budget that we try to get the most out of, and so some things just have to be scaled back. So, major forks like the stay on the ship / leave the ship, just aren't possible very often. But we always try our best to try and make sure that we pay back choices to varying degrees. Whether that's behind-the-scenes stats, brief mentions in the text or even more major variants to scenes or extra choices.And in all of that we make the choice to not spell things out too much, so that during play choices aren't being made simply because Option A has +2 attached to it, while Option B only has +1.And now you might already see where my issues with the gallery lie. The only time we surface information in a very obvious and noticeable way is in the gallery. You get to see at a glance which images you haven't unlocked yet. A carrot dangling right that you're missing something. Somewhere.And that then often ends up clashing with us not surfacing information during actual play.The intention isn't to have some difficult-to-reach rewards with some of the scenes that are trickier to find, but rather to have situations that are rare.Situations that very few people will have in their playthroughs to provide responses even to rare situations.And so with that clash, my thinking is to try a change to no longer surface the "locked" images in the gallery. So that when you play Conway you just unlock what you unlock, and the game doesn't create that feeling of FOMO. Or things being out there somewhere and you have to go hunting for it.I'm not quite sure if I'll manage to get it implemented for this current Update or not, or how exactly it'll look, but yeh. I wanted to just have my thoughts written down so that you all can take part in that, and share your own. Currently the plan also has been to provide some unlocking feature when finishing the game (we just don't have any ending implemented yet.)I'm not quite sure if it'll be a case of maybe unlocking character specific scenes, so a Julian ending of some sort unlocks Julian scenes. Or maybe it'll be a case where after having one ending of each main character everything unlocks. Those details we'll still need to figure out when the time comes, but for now it's about the surfacing of information in the gallery.So yeh, wanted to write that down, lemme know what you think and how you view galleries, whether in Conway or just galleries in general in the VN space and I'll hurry into my weekend. :)