These comments brought up a good point. And while I do agree with some of it, I think everyone’s kind of forgetting one major issue here.
Our job when we are writing is to write a good story with in depth characters and heart-moving themes.
Our job when advertising our games is to interact with the world in a way that produces fans and puts eyes on the work.
It’s the seperation there that is important. You should write like the world isn’t watching, but you should market in a way that reaches the eyes of the people most likely to like your work. You have to maintain a seperation of these two. Fans are going to demand things. That’s just fact.
The fans of the Voltron animated series sent deaththreats to the writers because of their choice to make one of the characters gay. Fans of Star Wars have literally camped out and stalked writers for choosing to make specific characters female, or POC, or anything else. This is just a fact of life when creating. This doesn’t stop Disney or Cartoon Network from advertising to those fans and appealing to their rabid nature. This definitely doesn’t stop writers and animators from throwing out character profiles or fanservicey voice clips.
I don’t see any reason not to advertise a RO from your game as a specific trope, even if that trope ends up not being valid later. If those mobile game commercials are any clue, NO ONE CARES if the advertisement is 100% accurate. Especially not at the VERY BEGINNINGS of creating a game.
I would suggest looking into the marketing strategy for “Yandere Simulator”.
I do think that completely sequestering your game before you put it up for sale is a recipe for disaster nowadays though. Which is why I’ve been building up my ‘studio tumblr’ since day one, so as to try and get SOME eyes on it, early as can be. As they say, “any publicity is good publicity.”
You are a connoisseur of TTRPGs and we should be friends.
Thank you for bringing this up. I don’t know enough about how the system works, fairmath or not, to know if fairmath is working out well. I feel like I will have to do a lot of adjustment after I get the storypaths down, because some of the checks are gonna have to be adjusted. I think probably a combo of fairmath and regular arithmetic should work.
The thing is though, this is just a standard part of game creation. Every game ever has had to adjust it’s metrics for each game-affecting choice. It’s the source of the term “Nerfing” after all.
Please see my Relationship system which basically does exactly that! and then, using the four variables, I translate that into a relationship bar on the stats screen, along with a prose description of the characters level of trust in the PC.
((In reference to everything in this post, I wanna state for the record I do not think I’m better than anyone. although I realize that this post has a tone of condescension to it, I do not mean for it to? Ive just done a lot of research (thank the AuDHD) into these subjects and this is the conclusion I’ve come to.))