I think it’s character customization the same way eye color is?
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Probably but even eye color show up more, especially in romantic scenes with cheesy lines about them.
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True, but my comment was about “does the plot depend on this”, not “how often does this get mentioned”.
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I mean, I’m of the opinion that only story-relevant customization really matters; that includes things like eye color, hair color, favorite food, etc. If it’s not going to be mentioned at all, or mentioned once (like at creation), then I’d rather it not be included. Just my opinion, though.
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Idk, I think it’s quite neat that you can eat kosher and halal since that’s about more than simply food preference. And I can’t remember ever playing a game that offered all these options.
I could also imagine that beta testers reacted positively to these options and that’s why the game was advertised as such. Not because the game is “empty” but because these options were recognized as appealing (= marketable) to a larger group of readers.
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I can understand small customisation details being neat but there’s a world of difference between having it as a neat thing and pointing it out as one of your game’s selling points.
Like there’s a reason not a single game has ‘Choose your eye color!’ in their bullet points.
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Yeah, when a game offers some choice, you think that matters, but it usually turns out that is just some flavor text at the best.
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Re: the food options, I think it’s a way of telling the reader what the story is about, whether implicitly or explicitly. It makes sense that it’s mentioned in the blurb since the game is (partly) about working at a teahouse.
Personally, if the points mentioned in a blurb don’t interest me, in most cases it just means I’m not the target audience. Different stories have different things they care about and prioritise.
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I actually think that bullet point does some heavy lifting marketing wise. Food isn’t something that’s usually highlighted in these descriptions so it drew my attention. It’s last on the list amongst other more heavy bullet points (“discover the secrets of your past life”) so as a more light hearted element it intrigued me and made me wonder how it all meshes together. It also shows consideration of inclusivity.
I’m not super familiar with the game, but I’m not sure it’s fair to assume that that customisation is automatically going to be the equivalent of setting your eye colour in Chapter 1 and never mentioning it again. After all it’s a game about working in hospitality (albeit supernatural). It would make sense that food is a big part of things.
It’s not my “most hated element” particuarly but on the topic of customisation, I do sometimes find very granular MC appearance customisation difficult to visualise. If there are too many elements I can end up picturing my MC as a bit of a Picasso painting! It’s a balance I think about when writing and go back and forth on a lot.
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Yeah, definitely. I remember my days of hating writing character descriptions because I hadn’t learned how to give the broad strokes of how they looked and insisted on describing every single piece of clothing they wore.
Thankfully, I’ve gotten better at it - I can now explain that a character is of medium height with tan skin, dark hair and grey eyes, has a light scar on his cheek and several more all over his body, and his only fashion sense is varying degrees of military fatigues because he’s spent the better part of his adult life as a soldier of some stripe or another.
(And yes, this is an actual character of mine. His name is Stefan Orian, he’s a high-ranking officer in his homeland’s Imperial Guard, and he’s one of the edgiest characters I’ve made to date, parents-murdered-by-assassins included. He would’ve been a bartender after getting out of the army, but then the Imperial Guard wanted to recruit him, so he decided to go back to being a soldier because apparently he just can’t get enough of almost dying in combat, oh boy! (The actual reason is because he’s indebted to the imperial throne for safeguarding him from the assassins who killed his parents, and joining the Guard was his opportunity to pay back the protection he was afforded with interest, but him being a fightaholic is funnier.))
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Ok but the game is about food, isn’t it? I can see why a game about food would advertise that since most ones don’t account for these things.
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I wouldn’t know about that specific game, it didn’t interest me so I didn’t play it. My statement was an in-general sort of thing.
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I guess I thought of something else, I think this is mostly for other games though.
I dislike the player seeing/knowing something that the protagonist doesn’t, be it switching pov or a very obvious thing is about to happen but you can’t act on it.
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Interesting. I’m not a fan of that either. It makes me feel powerless, which is good if that’s intended I suppose. What is your opinion on the inverse-the protagonist aware of events that the player isn’t? Say, a tragic backstory revealed agonizingly slowly over the course of the story? Do you find that this creates a disconnect?
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Both points are tricky to work around, too.
For the former, you want to keep your reader informed, and let them know that the protagonist is not likewise informed, but it’s a balancing act to keep it interesting without the reader getting fed up that their meta knowledge can’t be transferred to the protagonist, so they just get to watch as the protagonist stumbles into a solution they’ve known from the start.
For the latter, while slowly revealing the big drama of a character’s backstory has been well-established as a good storytelling technique, there are times where I feel like what I know of a character immediately falls to shambles thanks to a sudden new (old?) development, and instead of seeing this familiar face with fresh eyes, I’ve looped all the way back around to looking at a complete stranger again.
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For me, in a choice-based game, it’s important for the player to know at least the general background and previous life events that the character they’re playing has been involved in. Otherwise, there’s no way to properly make choices that the character would, which would obviously be shaped by what they’ve done and experienced.
That goes for “seeing” other events as well; if it’s not something the character I’m playing would know, despite trying to not let it color my choices for that character, it invariably will at some point. To me, the whole point of IF is to be able to experience the story from a character’s perspective, and make choices from that same perspective based on their knowledge.
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well, I’m not actually aware of the thing the protagonist knows until it’s revealed, so it’s not as if I’m going to be thinking about the backstory before then. Now, if I’m being constantly told there’s a backstory and the game just refuses to tell me the details then I’d find that more annoying than immersion-breaking
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There sure is. I haven’t seen the referenced thread but I can guess given what Eric’s last unusual project was. If people want less homogeneity, you need to throw some support behind those projects that deviate from the popular norm. Otherwise creators just kinda go “Well that didn’t work! No one liked it at all!” (at best they get ignored, at worst criticised) and unless they feel like doing another hobby project for themselves, they’ll more often than not head back to the popular formula.
Have no idea why it’d be a selling point, but it is a little thing that can be appreciated. I’ve seen people get quite vocal about being told their character is eating meat or drinking alcohol when there’s no reason they’d have to be. An if statement can nicely fix that and takes little effort in most cases to code in an alternative. (I’ve done it in my own games, it’s usually just an immersion thing).
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This is literally the only reason I made a point of watching Knives Out in the theatre instead of waiting for it at home. I WANT more movies like that, so I need to throw money at them so they’re successful. So you can all thank me and my sacrifice for the existence of Glass Onion. 
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haha I’m glad it worked out for you 
I could go on and on about CS projects but from a movie perspective I’d just like to put this here as one of my own examples of this trend: Legion. I’m not usually big into many of the of superhero movies and TV shows being produced of late as a general rule but this was amazing. I told everyone to watch it, but it was so unusual and unpopular that no DVD/BluRay sets were even released past season one outside of the US! They didn’t even bother putting out some bargain bin level CDs. How badly does your show have to be going for that to happen???
The only reason why it got a complete couple of seasons to complete the story arc was apparently one of the higher ups at the production company wanted to know how it would end and greenlit it anyway. (Thank you to who ever it was that did that!) Anyways, yeah. Sadly unusual stuff often has an uphill battle doing well no matter how well done it is 
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