The moment of introspection: The decisional mistakes we did in VIRTUES (Patreon)

Hi, everyone, this is Agang.

After 2 years of development, now VIRTUES can finally be considered a complete project. I want to give my most sincere thanks to all the people who support us and enjoy our work. We could never have done this job without your love!

But we won’t stop here. We are not complacent about what we’ve done in the last two years. We take every support with reverence and we are desperate to repay you with more games and updates.

I will post the early peeks of PHOENIXES v0.1 and the plan for VIRTUES v17 in a few days. As for now, I want to be completely honest with you and review what we didn’t do well in VIRTUES. I believe learning from our own mistakes is important for our further progress.

This post may be really long, please forgive me. Feel free to ignore this post if you are not interested in reading a long article. I’m just here sharing my thoughts. There is no announcement or news about the games in this post.

First of all, I have to admit that we are not satisfied with the quality of VIRTUES at all. VIRTUES is our first project, we have put so much love and passion into it during the past 2 years, and it will always have a special place in our hearts. But still, I’m not gonna lie to myself, VIRTUES is far from being a great game. During the first few versions of VIRTUES, we made so many rookie mistakes in building the story framework, designing characters, crafting gameplay, etc. If we compare developing a game to building a high-rise, then VIRTUES is a building built on a badly unstable foundation, and this limits its ultimate height and quality. I wanted to rework its foundation completely, but I didn’t have time to do it because I had to spend most of my time making new content in every update cycle for our fans and supporters like you. I couldn’t just suspend updating and tell you guys to wait for many months until the rework is done, that would be irresponsible.

Thus, we decided to keep constructing this building on its humble foundation as best as we could, and now, after 2 years, this building of VIRTUES is finished. It is not as fancy or high as the other buildings in town, but we have done our best. I hope you enjoyed v16 and the overall game, but if you didn’t, well, we are sorry for that and we totally understand it. We will learn from our mistakes and we wish you will find more pleasure in our next game PHOENIXES.

So, now, it is the moment of introspection. As I said, we have done so many rookie mistakes during the first few versions of VIRTUES (story framework, writing, controversial plots, gameplay), but now I don’t want to talk about them because first, there are too many of them, and second, only rookies make rookie mistakes, we are not rookies anymore, so we won’t make same mistakes again in PHOENIXES and there is no need to introspect them. Now what I would like to talk about are two big decisional mistakes we made. If we say that the rookie mistakes brought the building of VIRTUES an unstable foundation, then these decisional mistakes brought it a rough rooftop. As you see, Irene, Elisa, and Rachel’s solo endings are missing in v16. It was all because of these two decisional mistakes we made. I have to keep them in mind and make sure I don’t commit similar mistakes again in the future:

The first mistake, Rachel.

The design of Rachel is definitely my biggest failure. She is the least popular one among all the girls, and her storyline couldn’t go as far as the others.

In the beginning, she was designed as an “energetic idiot”, an outgoing girl who is good at sports but bad at social contact. It is a common role in anime, there is nothing wrong with it. But things went wrong when I began to write her story. I accidentally made her a little… too “idiotic”. She became a girl without even basic common sense. It was too unrealistic and it made her background so hollow that no one including me could resonate with her story.

My initial plan was to let MC guide her in life and teach her everything she should know, their relationship will improve during this time, and eventually MC will teach her things about sex. It sounds like a workable plan, but no, it didn’t work at all. MC and Rachel are all college students, they are in an equal relationship, so he doesn’t really have the position to be her life mentor. It would make more sense if they are in an unequal relationship like “big brother & little sister” or “master & servant”.

So, what would happen when they are in an equal relationship but MC acts like her life mentor? I complained about it in the game through MC’s tongue: “It looks like I am coaxing an innocent girl with a sweet tongue or something.” He wants to make love with Rachel, but first he has to tell Rachel what love means… … That sounds creepy, right? It was too easy for MC to cross the line. I have to be extremely careful when writing their story because I don’t want you to feel like MC is a despicable r*pist or something.

For example, let’s imagine a scene of MC and Theodora having sex outdoor. MC acts aggressively and mischievously, and Theo be like “stop, what if people see us?” but she enjoys it at the same time. This is a common scene, right? If you replace Theodora with any other girl, such as Senning, Vera, Elisa, this scene still works. However, if you replace Theodora with Rachel, then well, it won’t work anymore because it will make MC look like a jerk who takes advantage of an innocent girl who knows so little about sex.

Thus, every time when I wanted to write more about Rachel’s story and progress the relationship between her and MC, it felt like a pain in the ass. It was so hard to make her story titillating enough but at the same time not to make MC look like a r*pist. In the end I had to admit my failure.

In the future, I will avoid giving any characters extreme personalities. Every girl should have multiple faces and can’t be defined with only one or two words.  In PHOENIXES, there will be at least 15 main girls. I am very careful with their design and I promise I won’t make the same mistake I did on Rachel.

The second mistake, the engagement between Theodora and MC.

How many of you still remember that Theodora and MC were engaged since the beginning of the game? Why were they engaged? No good reasons. Is their engagement important to the story? Not really.

This engagement is completely useless to the story. No, not only useless, but also toxic. It deprived Irene and Elisa of the legitimacy of developing romance with MC. They are literally cheating on Theodora.

Honestly, it was not really a problem when I wrote Irene and Elisa’s storyline. Both of them had fair reasons for this “cheating”. Elisa was deserted for two decades and she couldn’t resist MC’s charm anymore. Irene likes MC since they were very young and she doesn’t want to be an outsider to MC and Theo after they get married.

But the problem showed up when I began to design finales. I realized that Elisa and Irene could never have a happy solo ending with MC because of his engagement with Theo. In order to give legitimacy to their romance with MC, Theo has to show up in their endings and be like “Mom/sis, I forgive you for taking away my fiancé. You have my blessing. Me? No, don’t worry about me, I can live with it.” Shit, how could that be a happy ending? The happiness of MC and Irene/Elisa is built on Theo’s loss. I will never be able to write anything like that.

In the future, I will avoid making any girl ‘naturally or legally close’ to MC at the beginning of a male-protagonist harem game. MC can choose to have a romance with only one girl instead of having a harem, but the other girls should not be considered losers in this love story.

… … … …

Oh dear, this post is even longer than I thought. I’d better stop it here before it gets too tedious. Sigh… … I wish I could write my history paper for college with 1.4k words in a day too… …

Anyway, thank you so much for reading my messy thoughts. I hope they make some sense. Now I should go catch some sleep~