Housewarming #02 Dev log: Choices (Patreon)

A lot of you asked for choices. I want to explain why that took me a while to answer, because the honest answer was not a simple yes.

When I started HOMECOMING I planned it as a kinetic novel. No branches, no menus, one authored story from beginning to end. That was not laziness. It was because the thing the game is about, Sam and Ryss and what happens between them, was not a feature I had bolted onto a story. It was the story. So when people said "give us the option to skip that part", what they were actually asking for, without meaning to, was a different game. Take that out and there was nothing underneath it holding the thing up.

So I sat with it for a while, because I did not want to give a fake yes. This genre is full of games that promise you a path and quietly do not have one, and I would rather disappoint someone honestly than string them along for three updates.

What eventually unlocked it was realising I had described my own game wrong. The engine is not the kink. The engine is the relationship. The kink is how that relationship expresses itself and how it grows. Once I flipped that around, the part that has to stay fixed got a lot smaller, and there was suddenly a lot of room around it.

Here is what I found when I looked properly. There are two ladders in this game and I had been treating them as one thing.

Ryss has hers. She drives it. That was locked in from the very beginning and it is the most important design decision in the project: nobody talks her into anything, ever. She is not being corrupted, pressured or tricked. That is the difference between this and the thing people usually expect when they see the tags, and I am not trading it away. That ladder is the story, and it is not up for a vote.

Sam has his own, and that one is yours. It was always Ryss who holds the switch on his side, so every choice he takes is one she opened, and what he does with it is entirely up to you. Some players will send him one way, some another, and I do not think there is a correct answer.

What I am not going to do is let him take none of them, and I want to explain that one properly because it is the decision I went back and forth on longest.

This is a story about two people doing the same thing. That is the whole premise. They both want it, they both know exactly what it is, and they both know they are coming back to each other at the end of the night. If she goes and he never does, that symmetry breaks, and what is left is a man sitting in a chair watching his girlfriend live a life he is not part of. That is a different game with a different name, and there are plenty of them. It is not this one.

So, concretely. Every scene in the game is now one of two things.

Some scenes are anchors. They happen. They carry the story from one beat to the next and you cannot skip them. Everything that moves Ryss,Sam or the story forward lives here.

Everything else has a dial on it.

And here is the thing I want to head off, because it was the first question I asked myself. A dial does not mean the rest of the household is sitting in a waiting room. Ivy, Claire and Amara have their own arcs and their own appetites, and those are anchors. They happen. They are not rewards that unlock. What you are choosing is Sam's part in them, not whether the women exist this week.

Here is how the machine actually works, because I would rather show you the shape than say the word choices at you twenty more times.

Every scene has a floor and a ceiling. The floor is what happens no matter what, because the story after it needs it to have happened. The ceiling is as far as it is ever allowed to go. In between is where you live. Some scenes have a lot of room in there and some have none at all, and the ones with none are not me being lazy, they are load bearing. There are moments inthe game that must happen exactly one way for everybody, because if they can be turned off it is not a progression scene any more and the game goes nowhere.

What decides where you land between those two lines is not a menu asking whether you want the long version that would be less of a choice and more of a flavour text or immage addition. It is how Sam has been behaving. A Sam who has been more direct and proactive goes further when the moment comes, a Sam who has kept it to himself and been more carefull stalls earlier, because he hesitates. You picked who he is.

Then those decisions carry into the optional scenes and decide whether they happen at all and how deep they run.

One more piece, and it is the part I am most confident about. A chapter settles its own business. The next chapter opens from where this one genuinely ended, not from a spreadsheet of everything you have ever clicked. That means you are never quietly locked out of the rest of the game by something you chose in an early scene, and Sam is never frozen into a personality he picked once. He can change his mind, in either direction, the way people do. I have watched games in this genre collapse under variables they accumulated for years until nothing could be changed safely, and I would rather build something I can still steer in three years than something that impresses you this month.

Two things about how you will be asked.

You get asked per scene, not once. There is no point early on where you pick a lane and live with it for twenty hours. If you turn something down, the game will put it in front of you again later in a different situation, and Sam gets to explain why he changed his mind. You can go the other way too. I wanted saying no to be a thing you do on a Tuesday, not a route you commit to. This is why there is a limit in both a minimum and a maximum that will happen in a scene, especially a story progression one, becouse this way these choices are available , if you could chose yes or no it would branch infinitly and it would not be sustainable for me.

Now what it will not be, because this is the half that usually goes wrong.

No stats. No meters. No affection points, no corruption bar, no numbers going up in a corner. I went and read how the games in this genre actually do this, and the ones that get into trouble do it by accumulating variables every chapter until nothing can be changed safely. One of them writes to its stat system a hundred and fifty five times and reads it four. That is a HUD, not a mechanic.

No branching endings, and no route splits. The rule I have given myself is that a scene you cannot skip is never allowed to depend on a scene you can. That single rule is what keeps this from turning into a spreadsheet.

And no settings menu switch. If a choice matters it happens inside the story, made by Sam, in a moment. It does not happen on an options screen before you start.

It is a handful of flags, not a system. The story got more flexible. The machinery did not.

And the part I want to be completely clear about, there is no switch that turns the sharing off. It is the spine. This is an NTS game, not a game with an NTS path as things stand and for the story and game i spent moths planning and learning from scratch how to bring to life. If that is a deal breaker for you, it is genuinely better that you know it today and i am sorry about it, maybe in the next one ill see you again.

For everyone who asked for more extreme content behind an opt in, that is exactly what the optional scenes are for, and that is probably where they get most interesting, thought how extreme that will depend on where we are on the story and lets be clear i wont do anyhting that would get the game off the platform or that makes absolutely no sense for the story.

One last thing, because it is the sentence I would want to read if I were you. Nobody in this game is being taken from anyone. Nobody is being humiliated for real (maybe as a kink in one scene later on?) . They are both going out and they are both coming home, and they both know that is what is happening. The choices decide how the two of them get there. They do not decide whether they are still each other's at the end of it, because that part was never in question.

Also look forward to the story as i have arrived to what i think is a really intresting idea and am happy to say that this game will not be only sex scenes bringing forward the plot but it has an actual plot and storyline that will develop alongside plenty of the lewd stuff we all love.

No dates on any of this, as usual. Chapter One now has its full structure written down, including where every choice sits and what each one costs to build. so i will start the work as best as i can and as much as i can, as always i will keep you infrmed and dont miss the teasers when i have them ready and the other artworks that are coming weekly like ivy prank on amara this week.

Thanks for pushing on this. I would not have found the second ladder if nobody had asked.

Happy rest of the day and thank you for being here LuminaLewd