The title’s still a wip, but I didn’t want to just slap ‘Working on title’ up there, so I came up with that.
Play as a noblewoman cursed with the form of a demon from childhood to adulthood. Probably. I dunno, this thing’s still really early in development, and my story ideas rarely survive to the end intact.
A while back I had the idea to do a gender flipped Beauty and Beast scenario. The beast would be a woman, and the beauty a man.
I tried to write that story a few days ago. And it just… wasn’t working. I was planning to give the player the option to play as two distinct characters, either the beauty or the beast, and move forward from there.
But, I found myself really, really not caring for it. So I cut out the male character, and focused on that female one. It was an interesting idea to me, playing as a girl who’s spent her life hidden from the world by her parents.
And I seem to have gotten the ball rolling on this one. There’s almost nothing here yet, but I’ve got a good feeling about it.
Good writing! A few things bug me - how even as a rough-looking ‘beast-version’ noblewoman, her skill options are limited to singing and painting…
You seem to do this a lot.
One sentence and then *page_break
It’s actually really annoying.
You should use page breaks less.
It looks like you’re not using fairmath for handling character relationships. Using fairmath is easier in my opinion, you don’t have to worry about going below 0% or above 100%. Under fairmath, negative values hurt more if a percentage is high and vice versa.
ok so i usually play as a male character, but i tried the demo and i liked playing as the little demon and i just wanted to know what your planing on doing will we be playing her through her life as a child or will we be able to go into her teen years and since it started of as a love story(beauty and the beast) will there be romance and will we be to romance male and females?
pleasantly storybook-like! it’s got a certain charm to it. i like some of the *page_breaks, as they can give sentences a different emphasis than just a line break (but then, italicization could probably do the same job), but i do agree you’re using them a little too often. there isn’t enough content yet for me to really form a deeper opinion or point out many things others haven’t, but i suggest getting rid of the text informing the player of stat boosts. it’s a bit jarring for a game like this and disrupts the flow.
oh, also, it would be great to be able to customize sylvia’s demonic attributes a bit! a couple of extra eyes, cloven hooves, things like that. maybe they could add a stat boost or have a part in solving puzzles, or something.
This was actually something I’ve been thinking about. When I described her appearance I wondered if I should give some customization options for it.
But, then I thought about the idea of her form progressing as time passes. I think at certain points in her life I’ll give the player the option to decide how she changes. Basically her demonic appearance is slowly spreading.
Maybe I’ll make it start when she hits puberty or something. We can make an analogy and totally score brownie points with Professors of literature. Or something.
I do agree with the previous comment about less one line’s though.
Any reason why there’s +++ after the painting options?
Personally it doesn’t bother me that there’s no option for her appearence/gender but that’s just me. Some players really do like that option so if it’s workable to write that in, go for it. (Even just human appearence rather than demonic stuff, it might make the writing trickier if you have to write in options as to whether she has a tail or not, unless you wanted to make it a choice option later in the book. Ie if you have a tail you can use it like an extra limb, if you have an extra set of eyes, it allows you to see better in the dark… Otherwise colour is probably easier to implement- ie a black or silver tail.
If she already has horns, claws, and a tail… And your stat boosts are gained through more demonic features showing up… She really is going to look like a total monster eventually.
For me at least, giving the player some sort of superhuman ability in exchange for her demonliness would make the story a lot more comfortable. If it’s all uphill struggle without some kind of tradeoff what’s the point?
It could be interesting if you let the player decide between medium-demonic and REALLY demonic. Do you want to minimize the monstrosity, so you look closer to normal but have less special abilities? Or do you want to have powerful wings, strong goat-legs, scales like steel armor, even though people will hate and fear you more?
It was an indication that painting would be improved by 3, but I’m thinking of ditching that. Not just showing that the option would boost painting, I mean skill levels in general.
Instead of having a painting skill of 1, 2, 3, etc. I’m thinking of making it binary. Either you’re a painter or you aren’t. It’ll keep things nice and simple.
Yeah… that’s usually my biggest concern with it. If I give the option to play male/female I get the sense I’m going to have to be very gender neutral when it comes to writing the main character’s action.
In theory I could, when necessary, write totally different scenes depending on gender, but that’s potentially a ton of extra writing.
My general plan, as much as there is one, was for her to be more powerful than most humans. The more her demonic traits show, the stronger she’ll get.
This would be a really interesting tradeoff you should think about: Look humanish and get less severe distrust, or look demony in exchange for extra power and ability.
If you go in some other direction, it’s your game of course.
You could probably start earlier when she started talking about her appearance in the first place. It doesn’t even have to take away the demonic attributes you’ve already given her. It could just be another way to describe her humanoid features. Sort of a way to flesh out what she really looks like. Customizable or no. It may also flesh out some of the breaks, so it seems like you’re not breaking after such short scenes.
Huh, this is an interesting little beginning to a story.
While I generally am all in favor for more player customization, I think you should go with what makes you more comfortable. If you think you can write a better, more engaging, story when the character is gender locked then by all means please do.
On the flip-side, I actually liked the constant use of *page_break and *line_break.
I felt that the constant page/line breaks prevented the text from cluttering the current page and helped to maintain my attention.
The writing is looking very good.
I don’t mind gender-locked protagonists.
It wouldn’t bother me if I couldn’t name the protagonist; a “default” name suits me just fine.
At the very end was like a stab in the heart. It must be so hard for people always leaving. I really hope there will be someone who doesn’t leave. Ok, now I am going to go be happy.
Who knows, maybe Nicole will come back. They are pretty young yet and depending on what OP has going on with the story, our little demon may possibly have a friend for the first time.
