A Study In Steampunk: Choice by Gaslight

Heather,

First of all, thank you for the games you’ve written. I believe that you have worked some of my favorite games, so this is awesome.

Second, how do you feel about fan fiction? Since I’ve gotten Finch and Dr. “X” to a happy conclusion at least three times now, I am rather interested in what happens next… obviously, this would be for my own enjoyment primarily, but I thought I’d ask, since I think creators should be able to say yay or nay on fan fiction.

Third of all, do you think you might work in a bit of smoothing in some of the fixed scenes – it seems to me that some of the text does not take into account what injuries Dr. “X” has taken in the prologue – I would expect the scarred face to make a difference during the airship part, for example; and possibly when meeting the opera singer. Just as the leg injury should cut our doctor out of running (I liked it buckling during the dance, but then it was ignored when it should have come up other times (i.e., at the embassy party) . It’s picky, but since I have played the game a good seven or eight times, it has started to grate! (I still have to get some of the trickier achievements and I love the characters, but since I have some of the set scenes memorized, the little things start to become more obtrusive.)

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I am on Android version 5.1.1. Since first reporting the blank screen bug, it has happened to me several times at different places in the story, not just after the Finch romance scene. Ultimately, though, it is not too terribly important, as closing the game and reopening it does work every time.

And, since I did not say it before, I absolutely adore this game. By far my favorite COG. I love Sherlock Holmes, both the original books and the recent(ish) show on BBC, and I loved playing as Watson. Being able to romance Finch also partly fulfilled my HolmesxWatson ship, which will never sink.

And as a now avid fan of this game, how do you feel about fanfiction? If I were to write a continuation anywhere in this story, it would be at both light eater ends, especially the ending where you are a brainwashed light eater .

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@Twila_Pricewell technically you can have a war time love affair with Pierce if you choose to prefer men so thats why I thought he was an RO , and that I thought he’ll return possibly after the presumed death of your love Finch. It might be fitting to meet him after solving the cholera outbreak when a group of people tries to kill you(that part when you can choose to kill using light eating) and if you refuse to resort to light eating you hear gun shots and find out that Pierce had killed them, he then informs you that he had joined Woodward’s team and that you should go back to serve the empire through Woodward’s. If you choose to return to Woodwards you can romance him and fight crime but then Finch suddenly returns and Drama MAJOR DRAMA!

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Can u save Grace and her not hate u ?

Hi Twila_Price,

  1. You are very welcome! So glad you like them.

  2. I’m totally pro-fanfiction! Have a good time!

(I’m sure I don’t have to actually say this, but for the sake of completeness: by this I mean fanfiction you write for your own amusement or freely distribute. I have a very different feeling about someone selling derivative works based on my intellectual property. Don’t do that.)

  1. Your scarred face and weak leg do impact the later scenes, because they are part of your Charisma and Athleticism scores respectively. You can totally fail certain stat checks in the opera singer encounter, for instance, if your Charisma is too low.

At that stage of the no-pun-intended game, your Charisma might be low for a number of reasons. It might be low because of your scarred face; it might be low because you’ve chosen the “blunt” or “shy” option every time and lowered it that way. Your Athleticism might be low because of the injury you took in the war; it might be low because of damage you’ve taken since. This is why the failure text in those later scenarios doesn’t specify whether it’s your “bad leg” or something else that causes your low Athleticism, because the farther into the game we get, the more causes there could be.

I included specifics in the dirigible encounter because that encounter is so early that a low score there really is largely because of your starting stat, so I could get away with the text specifically saying “your bad leg buckles” if you dance, “you have to work against your leg or shoulder injury” if you choose to climb, “you have to work against your clumsy fingers” if you reconnect the cables, and so forth. In similar situations later, the text is more generic because there are many more possible reasons for the low score.

As far as the two specifics you mention - I figured you don’t stumble dancing with Madame Albescu because by that point, enough time has passed since the war that your leg wouldn’t necessarily buckle if you tried to dance. (This is based on real-life experience - I broke my leg very badly eleven months ago, and although I personally can’t dance or run without stumbling yet, I expect to be able to do both eventually.) And I don’t think a scarred face would scare Grace off - a handsome face isn’t the quality Grace values most in a partner. It might possibly put off Madame Albescu, but then again, quite possibly not - not if Dr. X has the confidence (i.e., Charisma) to carry it off.

Thanks so much for the thoughtful post - I can tell you’re really into this if you’re picking up on details this small! I’m flattered as hell. :smile:

Heather

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Hi Katarina,

Does it ever happen not on a save screen?

And as I said to Twilia_Price just now, I’m totally okay with fanfiction! Have a good time! Just don’t sell it, because I’m not okay with that.

H

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I agree. I’m not a big fan of the “Flip all the genders” approach that some of the CoG games take. It would be better I think to just have a male or female protagonist and where necessary use a bit of hand-waving to gloss over the historical differences.

That said if an author feels their work absolutely has to have a gender locked main character - be obvious about it in the sales fluff somewhere. It took me too long to discover choice by gaslight was gender locked.

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Heather –

Thanks for the answers.

Obviously, well, obviously to ME, selling fanfic is not on. I might post it on my livejournal, but that’d be the extent of the sharing.

Apparently I tend to keep my hero in tip top shape, because except when I specifically chose the options that ended the game early, I can shoot and sneak and have charisma high enough to get the storyteller ending every time. Grins. So maybe I’m just expecting more difficulty than I should. I do have a tendency to do the heroic thing whenever possible. Which maybe I should experiment with not doing, but then I get cranky about not being a good pseudo-Victorian protagonist.

And I hope that your leg heals fully and that you don’t break anything else… ever. That sounds really unpleasant and miserable to live with.

Twila

But it’s so obvious in the description! Well, okay, maybe I’ve been steeped in A. Conan Doyle and H. Rider Haggard and other Victorian writers so that of COURSE a Holmes pastiche would only have male protags – it would feel really off if it didn’t…and I would never expect a game with this particular flavor to let females be the protagonists. A different set-up, sure. I’d be happy if we got a heroic nurse (a la Mrs. Hester Monk in the Anne Perry mystery series – she’s damn tough and has dealt with a lot of heavy and scary stuff, but she still has to deal with the mores of the time) who investigated mysteries/foiled evil doers, but she wouldn’t be ex-Army, or living with someone not her husband/father/brother, etc. etc. etc.

And it’s just … weird … to hear folks want the paradigm to change. I like playing male characters when it fits the paradigm, even though I’m a woman… (i.e., in the King Arthur Pendragon tabletop RPG, either you played a knight, or you didn’t have much to do – and I had the knightliest knight going) – because it mirrors the historic and traditional tales. That’s part of what makes this game so addictive, in my humble opinion – it mirrors the fiction that it’s emulating really really well. Which is hard to do, and I applaud Heather’s efforts.

Edited to add: As you can see, I have VIEWS on genre which might not match yours. I do not impugn your views at all. They are valid, but I still prefer my own way of looking at things.

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I just feel that when you are making games, there is leeway to shuffle things around a bit for the sake of fun. This way, whatever your feelings on gender and accuracy, you get to play the way you want and the author gains more business.

I didn’t think it was even slightly obvious in the description. And no offense, but as a woman who also likes to play male characters myself, you’re coming off a tad rude here. It’s not at all unreasonable for someone to expect to be able to play a woman in a game where:

  • It’s part of a large collection of similar games where you can play male, female, and sometimes even third genders.
  • It’s explicitly stated you can be gay in the description, which implies to the reader that this game is a progressive one trying to cater to a wide variety of personal tastes.
  • It’s perhaps vaguely based on Victorian England but is a heavily edited fantasy version thereof - I certainly don’t remember any magical psychic healers in the original Sherlock Holmes - which also leads the reader to assume standard gender dynamics may not apply.
  • It’s by the author of two other similar games where standard gender dynamics did not at all apply; in Choice of Romance’s fantasy Spain you could be a tittering bimbo social butterfly male courtier, or you could equally easily be a cold ruthless power-hungry female one, either of these gay or straight.

It is just plain silly to assume it should be so glaringly obvious when it’s not actually stated in the description that you could only play a male. Pretty much every single person I’ve recced this game to has been taken by unpleasant surprise upon finding this out. I only play male characters in stories myself so I didn’t actually mind, but it was definitely unexpected based on the overwhelming body of information here.

Personally, if this game had gone the route of letting you be a woman and changing absolutely nothing except to flip everyone’s gendered pronouns, I don’t think it would have changed the flavor in the slightest.

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Loren,

I was stating my reaction/opinion, not dictating what anyone else should
feel. I am an odd duck in many ways, in terms of what kind of stories feel
right to me, and I would never presume to say that everyone should match
my experience or taste. To ME, it felt obvious and the correct reading of
how the game would go. To someone else, who didn’t grow up reading
Victorian literature, or who isn’t interested in that extra bit of
versimilitude, it’s a design flaw. To me, it makes it that much more
addictive. But we are all allowed to react in whatever way we do.

Oh, definitely not. I write fanfic for my own entertainment, and occasionally others, if I feel it is good enough to post somewhere. I would never sell it. (cough Fifty Shades of Grey cough).

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Man I love this game so much! :heart_eyes: @heather I loved all of your previous games such as Choice of Romance: Affairs of the Court, but I feel like this surpasses that game on so many levels! I loved all of the characters especially Garrett FInch. This game truly deserves the 5/5 I gave on Google Play and I will for sure recommend this to all my friends!!!

This probably has been asked already but… Is there ANY other way of saving Grace without killing horn?

No.

No more than there is any way of bypassing that damn 20 character limit.

Oh, well, goddammit, I guess i’ll just… Romance finch…

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You can save Grace that way? Oh. I didn’t know that. But I suppose that she leaves you after doesn’t she?

Yeah, if you do that she hates you and leaves you…

Ungrateful woman, one more reason to never marry her. Why should the PC stop being the medic/soldier/detective badass for her?

In the end my PC got a better woman and is the second in command of a terro… I mean a rebel group.

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