Let me do a test playthrough and see what I come up with–I’ll be back
That is indeed not a hostile option. “Hostile” dialogue options only appear in the full dialogue trees (the ones that have 6 options, hostile is always #4). Not all dialogue options that increase rebellious are hostile, but all hostile options increase rebellious
It was wasn’t it that bitch
Anyway–I have tweaked the code a bit, so it should be slightly easier to get Samir’s invitation! My main goal was that if the MC was hostile to every character all the time that Samir would not look kindly to that, so hopefully this is a good medium
Officially fixed
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Yep, I mean if he’s going to keep that up he and my mc are going to be bantering like an old married couple even if he isn’t gay. Are rivalry romances possible at all in this game by any chance?
“Your last option is to explore the rest of the palace. You don’t know where anything is, and this could be a good opportunity to correct that. If you don’t get lost.”
It says this is an option, when failing the sneak out of the room the previous night but the game doesn’t actually offer it as a selectable one.
I haven’t decided yet–rivalry scores will definitely come up again later, but I’m not sure if enemies to lovers will happen. If it does, C and V are the most likely candidates
Thank you for catching that–there was going to be a 5th branch, but I decided to cut it in favor of making it a compulsory scene in the next chapter
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V and A are the ones I had in mind, particularly V for my gay mc’s.
Lastly why doesn’t Carina like the mc’s own fashionable outfit anymore like she used to?
My mc wants his own style so this is a bit frustrating. Particularly since Kaya still has her old line about Carina probably liking it if the mc goes for fashionable.
It’s also a nice touch that with a bit of persuasion we can at least outfox Sammy in the political game this time around. 
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I decided to change that bit in order to add the bargaining option, and I wanted all the MCs to get that. Carina still does prefer the fashionable outfit, but think of it this way–the photo shoot is the MC’s social debut, and Carina has a very specific vision for what it should be
Do you mean going back to the Prime Minister by yourself?
Yes, going back by yourself and convincing her to keep quiet. Sure it potentially allows her to use us as an inside source in the palace but it allows us to use her too and this way she can’t be upset about us lying to her face once Carina and the press reveal us for who we’re supposed to be. But the best part of it is that it completely blindsides Sammy and leaves him adorably flustered.
Problem is my mc does not particularly like that seemingly very conservative and traditional black and white suit, which seems a bit too close for comfort to our black and white, boring tuxedo “penguin” suit. 
When wearing really nice clothes is thus far the only really tangible perk his new situation seems to offer right now, particularly if something like this is among the “fashionable” options.
Already said that, combined with some leather gloves outdoors and some tasteful jewelry, including ear jewelry (which my mc is fond of in opposition to Seyvian tradition it seems) would practically be his new “standard” outfit. Particularly since it would be comfy too as it is basically a really nice variation on casual pant, shoes, a very expensive silky t-shirt, and a jacket.
So what’s Kaya’s deal? Did she have a crush on our eldest brother? If so was it ever reciprocated?
She seems to get awfully defensive when Yefim is brought up, much more so than when you choose to talk about Yegor or birth mother in the new, optional scene.
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Answering that question one way or another is a spoiler so 
Also, the suit (or dress if your MC is female) is not supposed to be conservative at all. It just happens to be black
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I’m so into Jiiiiiiiiiin. I really love what you did so far.
I do not think I will like the prince / ss image Carina want to present and I hope we will be able to rebel against her. As in glamorous/people shots really ?
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Thank you so much for reading my work and stopping by to comment on it!
As for rebelling against Carina, you do in fact have that choice. The MC is never under any obligation to cooperate with any of the characters–but beware: choices have consequences!
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This is why I curse the day I found out about the W.I.P page of this forum.
Every time i read a demo and i get too captived by the story, bam… thx for playing this demo and i feel a thousand stab in the heart.
(I hope i didn’t write too many error)
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Thank you so much for taking the time to read it and visit the forum! If you’re itching to read more content, check out the tumblr
Playing through it again, it isn’t obvious in the Parliament scene, where almost everybody has the expensive and untrustworthy implant but our mc’s biggest achilles heel remains that we are unable to speak the language and functionally illiterate as well as knowing less than Jon Snow.
This is most evident in Jin’s scene, but also plays a role in Kaya’s. Honestly in Kaya’s my mc would have been tempted to try to communicate with her with the implant turned off.
In the short term the most immediate concern is that we just cannot do public speeches and big rallies it seems as we do not speak the language and those without an implant or translator cannot even understand us. This would also be a huge weakness on live TV interviews having to be dubbed over or subtitled.
I hope we can make some steady progress soon on at least speaking the language.
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Thank you for bringing up this potential plot hole–if/when the time comes that it’s relevant to address, I have some ideas in mind. Having said that, I’ve decided that translation implant (and language more broadly) isn’t going to play a large role in my writing.
That’s not to say that it will be absent. As with J’s scene in ch2, sometimes it will become relevant and play a small role, but there will be very little if any focus on education. There will definitely not be any more scenes like H’s in ch1 where he begins to teach the MC how to read.
If anything, there may be some mention (or choice) of what the MC is doing off screen, but I won’t promise even that. Mostly I will be leaving the MC’s interaction and engagement with the implant and language to head canon.
One of the reasons for this is because it isn’t going to be a plot point. Although your MC may not trust it (and that’s reasonable), the implant does nothing more than translate language. I have no interest in writing a subplot for that because I just don’t think it would be satisfying either to read or write. The conclusion is not only foregone, it’s negative. Who wants to spend an entire game (or half a game or whatever) figuring out that the government is telling the truth and there’s nothing nefarious about the piece of technology in your head? It’s also much more difficult to prove that something doesn’t happen than that something does, which means that a truly skeptical (/conspiratorially thinking) MC would never accept the evidence.
Tl;dr head canon to your heart’s content, write fan fic if you feel so moved, but these themes will not appear in game
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But education would realistically be hugely important to my mc as in he needs a lot of it and it cannot come fast enough. And he’d definitely prefer education to Yusra implanting a vocal implant of some sort. 
I also really did like Hasan’s little scene as that more than the other two scenes convinced my mc and myself that the kidnappers might not be so bad after all, as far as kidnappers go, and to be reasonably cooperative, instead of being a rebel at every single turn.
So I really would like more scenes like that as it shows the new and scary people around him might in fact at least give a damn about the mc.
Going a bit forward in your plans, having the impression that most, if not quite all, people around him care about him seems to be the biggest difference between Prince mc and Prince Viv, from what you’ve teased of the guy since Viv does not have that feeling and that probably hasn’t been beneficial to his character development.
Please do include this. Maybe you can take a look at what was done in Tin Star with the free time sections as well as what @Vendetta was trying to do with his “free time” sections in Vendetta. Though that last one might be a bit overkill, so maybe just look at TinStar.
Yep, my mc does not entirely trust it. But it can at least be turned off (although if it is also a locator chip that function seems like it couldn’t be turned off).
Still some off-screen tutoring and gradual progress would be nice, like if by the end of the game the mc would at least be reading something written in everyday language like a common newspaper with the implant turned off.
Well if it lets my mc, for example, speak derogatorily/unfavorably about his sperm donor in front of the entire parliament on live television without it censoring his speech then my mc would concede it probably isn’t nefarious.
The other way would be for him to somehow gain the technical and technological know how to understand the implant as Yusra seems to. Him really getting to know and trust Yusra might do the trick too eventually, but not right then and there on that spaceship.
At present after his scathing review of his sperm donor in the small council he’s indeed half-convinced the implant might not be nefarious, just inconvenient.
Like you said, while the mc can read almost everything and understand almost anybody on the passive side the active side of language is more thorny and while writing can be gotten around by having a writing program on the computer at the same flawless level of the implant whenever the mc actually speaks what’s coming out of his mouth is either English (or in my headcanon Spanish or a bit of German as I headcanon his adoptive grandparents fleeing Germany just before the war as kids with their own parents) all languages nobody on Zemia actually knows, unless they themselves have an implant.
That latter might be true for almost anybody who is at least the upper-middle-class equivalent in Zemia by now but would still complicate such things as live televised speeches or mass rallies.
The future Emperor not even being able to actually speak the language is hardly going to reassure the people or give them much confidence in us. 
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I’m glad that you enjoyed that scene, and I hope other scenes as well have allowed you to gauge how the characters feel about the MC, but there will be no more “education” scenes. It’s just not going to happen. I can’t say anything more on this point without alluding to a major plot point.
Whether I include off screen choices or not is entirely reliant upon what fits into the narrative. In the ship scenes, for example, there is some commentary on what the MC is doing between scenes which depends on the MC’s choices. I’m not sure if that will happen again/often because I’m not sure if there will be a lot of time between scenes going forward. It all depends.
To some extent, as a language person myself, I’m kind of just operating under the assumption that the MC will pick up whatever language(s) they want to know through immersion. And as a teacher of foreign languages, I don’t have any particular desire to fill my game with mundane (to me) descriptions of my daily work lol
This just isn’t going to happen. The best I can offer is the MC will be able to tell individual characters what they think of the Emperor. Reason being, if I allowed the MC the choice to say such things to a large audience, I would also have to write the consequences of saying those things, and I don’t want to because that’s not the game I’m trying to write. The consequence would be that the Emperor keeps you away from microphones from then on out. That’s a boring game.
The Emperor doesn’t speak most of the languages spoken within the Empire 
that’s just the way Empires work
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About the translator inplant, the nation where the MC is taken is quite technologically advanced, soo for not changing too much about the inplant plot hole you could write that the studio where the speech is registered just translate the word speaked by the MC, then maybe after the first speech someone tell that this can’t go on forever and the MC must learn the new language . Now my suggestion are quite basic and probably explained in detail, but still i hope you could find something usefull
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Thank you for your input. Let me clarify for everyone: learning the language isn’t going to be a choice. Every MC will learn the language–I’m just not going to document it in game
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Ahhh, well you are the boss. Still the story looks amazing
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That big, huh?
The Emperor not speaking the main/most important languages however, that’s not actually very common, unless the emperor was imposed by a conquering foreign army or something. 
Well, show, not tell in the little scenes. I’m fine with the mc getting his education off-screen from here on out. I mean my mc has a great physique too and I imagine he does solid workouts to maintain it off screen, unless there’s some reason to actually show one on-screen ( I could my mc see maybe getting competitive with Viv’ or Arvin about who run the fastest or lift the most, as Arvin just rubs my mc that way and brings out competitive instincts and Viv seems like he might too. Though that might more properly be the domain of fanfiction).
I do hope our scenes in-game do show some gradual process of the mc getting used to his new life and integrating into Zemia/Seyvia a bit more. I agree with you that actually showing the mc’s whole education would be boring, although a reverse of the Hasan scene with Sammy would be very nice. As in my mc trying to teach Sammy some English.
With Zemian/Seyvian tech not speaking the actual language is the biggest problem by far as sufficiently advanced tech can deal can with reading, listening and even writing but speaking is different and much more difficult as a good vocal implant would make us a cyborg in every true sense of the word as it would need to be able to interpret our brain’s signals we mean to vocalize and then control a huge number of muscles to distort our mouth and vocal cord into the desired output. It would feel very jarring too.
It did, but Hasan really did go out of his way so naturally on the ship he impacted my mc the most. Lia and Yusra were still being more generically nice, though Lia offering the spar and work out with him on a frequent basis was appreciated too and it was kind of Yusra to lend to mc her tablet to get at least a small impression of the culture and consumer technology first-hand.
Let’s just say my mc leans towards choosing Hasan as a permanent bodyguard at this point in part because he hopes Hasan will continue to tutor him behind the scenes (he hopes Sammy and the others will too of course).
Again it doesn’t need to be told on-screen but some choice of what our mc does with what spare time they have with perhaps a bit of impact on the stats and small changes to future scenes to show the fruits of our labours would be nice.
Near the end the mc casually picking up a tablet/newspaper with the news and just reading it until they perhaps come across one uncommon word or phrase and only then realize “I must not have turned on my implant back on this morning” would still be a possibly cool little thing that shows progress happening without devoting a lot of or even any screen-time to it.
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I’ll give you “most important,” but historically most elites have spoken languages different from the masses, so we’ve got room for suspension of disbelief on that front. “Important” is a matter of debate. The monarch not speaking the language of the bureaucracy might be strange indeed, but then again empires on Earth have never had the technology to translate language in real time on a mass scale. In any case–in the long term it’s a moot point because the MC will learn to speak Seyvian. There may (and I make no promises about this whatsoever) be a choice to learn other languages as well, but there will be no choice in learning Seyvian
This will probably happen. I hesitate to say definitely because it will probably be a choice. Some MCs may never feel comfortable on Zemia, so I want to leave that on the table
Not necessarily, Hasan did begin speaking to the MC with a portable translator after all, so I’ve established that that technology exists and can be made use of. That’s probably the route I’ll go for handling any public speech that the MC makes. I’ll save if/how the MC not speaking Seyvian is addressed publicly for the game
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