It’s giving Good Girls vibes with Rio and Beth! I’m gonna play as Beth and finally romance my Rio lol. Im excited to try this.
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Yes! This was inspired by Good Girls as well as Breaking Bad.
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Fantastic so far — looking forward to seeing this develop.
Only advice I’d like to give now is that at certain points, the dialogue gets confusing because the speaker will switch within the same paragraph. Especially toward the end when talking with our spouse, I found myself re-reading to make sure I knew who was quipping and who was being dead serious. (It was me, I was quipping)
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yesss, cant wait to be hella messy and to get my rio
ETA: I’m loving this so far! The relationship with the husband/wife feels very real and lived it; it’s challenging to jump into a pre-established relationship but you did it so well!
I also think you did a great job at not making the spouse too pathetic- I was set on hating them from the jump but your writing left me feeling empathy for them. Still gonna have my MC cheat on them for V 
Will there be a cheating route? Or can the MC make a clean break from the spouse?
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Thanks for the feedback! I have been made aware of this and am currently working on fixing it.
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This looks so interesting, promising and intriguing! Just a few questions, though, cos I have some things that can trigger severe anxiety for me: if my MC is a woman and her spouse is a woman, can we choose who gave birth to the kid? Or is it set to MC?
And another question: will SA happen to MC anyway or is that choice dependant? I read trigger warnings but couldn’t understand that part clearly (I’m not a native English speaker).
Is the abuse that happened to MC a sexual abuse?
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Hello! For your first question, it depends. If you play as a fem MC and choose the teen parent route, the MC is the one who gave birth. If you play as an older MC, you’ll have more options, such as adoption, surrogacy, or, if A is female, A can be the one who gave birth.
For your second question, the SA is entirely dependent on choice and can be completely avoided.
As for your last question, none of the childhood abuse the MC experienced was sexual. Just physical and emotional.
Hope this helps clear things up for you!
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I feel like if you chose the poor background, with the rough neighborhood and terrible home life, you should have some knowledge of who the gang is, or at least not say things like, “That’s how it is in movies.” If you grew up around that shit, you would know damn well real life isn’t like the movies.
In the same vein, I feel like there’s an opportunity for an MC background where they were either intimately involved or just well-versed in “the life,” and managed to find a way out. Either through the spouse’s job, or the military, or something else. It would make the decision to get directly involved make a bit more sense (with the poor background as you’ve written it).
Basically, I feel like there needs to be a reason to involve yourself beyond just “because I will.” You need to have some skill set or something you know you bring to the table.
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Thank you, yep that totally answered my questions!
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There is a reason. They need to pay off the debt, and their family is in danger. 
I’d say that’s an urgent enough reason to get involved. Its not “just because i will.”
The whole point is that the MC is a normal person thrust into a life of crime, so having a background where they were already involved in gang life wouldn’t fit the story I’m trying to tell.
As for the low-income aspect, not everyone from a low-income neighborhood is knowledgeable about gang activity. Speaking from personal experience, it’s easy to be unaware of which gangs are which and who does what. Not all violence and crime in every low-income neighborhood is directly tied to a gang. When the MC said, “That’s what it’s like in the movies,” they were referring to the specific inner workings of the gang. Something they, again, don’t have much knowledge of.
On that last note, the MC will be able to use different skills to their advantage, including their street smarts if they come from a low-income background. Not every criminal starts out with experience. They have to learn along the way, just like the MC will.
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I didn’t mean they would know everything about them, but the spouse’s reaction of being shocked you didn’t know felt very out of place when there were choices that had you knowing when to fight, when to run, who to avoid, etc. There is a choice that has you watching people beat a man to death. One of the unlockable skills is literally called Street Smarts. Yes, people can keep to themselves and have no knowledge about any of this, but a kid who has Street Smarts in an area where there is active gang activity would probably be able to tell you what routes and people to avoid because they know they mean trouble.
I can’t speak to your experience, but I can definitely say there is a difference between living in a low-income neighborhood, and living in a dangerous neighborhood. I’ve lived in both. They way you have described the Poor Background sounds like it classifies as dangerous to me. In my experience, living in the murder capital of my city, you know exactly what areas and people to avoid. My immediate area has slowly become more gentrified over the years, but when I first moved here there was one house on my street where known criminals lived. You didn’t walk past that house, especially at night. They were arrested a few years back and it has changed hands several times since, but that wasn’t something I had to be a criminal to know.
I could go into more details about how dangerous my neighborhood is (because it’s actually crazy and my family half-jokes about it all the time), but the point is that a part of Street Smarts is having knowledge, if only so you can be safe. Sorry for the rant. 
So basically I could imagine a conversation going like this:
“I gambled at the casino.”
“You went to the casino? Why on earth would you do that? If I had known, I’d have told you to stay away from there. Everyone knows it is run by criminals.”
Edit: total sidenote, but the part in the poor background about people setting off fireworks all the time for no reason at all totally hit home for me. It took me a few months to learn the difference between the sound of a gunshot and the sound of fireworks, but once I did, I was surprised by how often I’d hear fireworks lol. I hear gunshots all the time too, but some people really just be out here lighting shit off in their backyards all the time lmao.
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So will we get to pick what Job we did before we became a stay at home parent.
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It’s so funny you mentioned the fireworks! I was wondering if anyone would pick up on that. For some reason, people in these neighborhoods love setting them off no matter the occasion. I don’t get it, but it’s nerve-wracking.
As for the other thing, I get what you’re saying. What I’m trying to communicate is that the MC didn’t grow up in a neighborhood with frequent gang activity, not by MC-14, at least. While they know how to adapt and avoid dangerous situations, they never had close experience with gangs. Most of what they encountered were small-time drug dealers and petty beefs. Knowing about gang activity would require specialized knowledge, whereas the MC’s knowledge consists of more general street stuff. I don’t know, you bring up a good point, and I might change some things. But I hope you understand what I was initially going for.
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Yup! Unless you do the teen parent route.
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What Jobs will there be?
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I’m still brainstorming, but so far it’ll be along the lines of things like nursing, military, law, tech etc.
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Simple solution might be that the couple is from out of town and moved there for work. MC would still have their knowledge from the life they led, but would be new to the area and wouldn’t know the players.
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That wouldn’t really work, MC grew up in Ridgepoint. There’s certain aspects of the story that connects them to the city. I’ll probably just add in some flavor text for Streetsmart MCs to make them seem less naive about it.
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That’ll work too. Definitely remove the part about “how it is in the movies” lmao. That comes off as “I’ve never been in a dangerous situation in my life” level of naive. Would theoretically work for the wealthy background (haven’t read that one yet), but with the poor background being as dangerous as you described, homie wouldn’t be caught dead saying shit like that.
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I’ll keep that in for a wealthy-background since it makes more sense for them to be naive about that lifestyle. Thanks for your feedback either way!
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