Poll: Game-overs and Realtime escape (Patreon)

The Damsel on the Edge integration has brought a great deal of change to the basic structure of the escape system. One of our biggest challenges going forward will be balancing the new real-time system with the game's current and future escapes, especially concerning guard checkups and game-overs.

Real-time escapes with unlimited amounts of checkups as they are now have brought up some discussion regarding fail-states and their place in Didnapper 2.

Some players voiced their concerns of removing the game-over from running out of time, as this removed the tensions of trying to escape before it was too late. They also lamented the inability to see any game-over or bad-end scenes afterward unless they gave up. Also, no fail-state could limit the potential for multi-stage escapes or escapes which, if failed, lead to other escapes.

Others enjoy the possibility of being able to struggle for a long time, eventually escaping their extremely strict restraints even if it takes prolonged effort to do so. These players cited their enjoyment of the idea of struggling for hours just to get a gag off, without being forced into a game-over.

Our current plan is hopefully to make it possible to choose between these two options at will, but I'd like to get a sense of which would be the default preference for most of you. I plan to accomplish this with a setting to allow the player to set whether they'd like to have a fixed maximum number of guard checkups which once exhausted would instead result in a game-over, or have an infinite number of checkups in which the guard will never stop coming and the player can continue to struggle and eventually escape so long as they have the will to do so.

(Another problem is the guard checkups themselves. If the checkup time is too short, the escape may still be effectively impossible, but if it's too long, it will feel like it would never come into play. In the future, we're planning to rework the mechanics of the checkups to involve some opportunities for strategy and player interaction, through means of disguising removed bindings from the guard, or having a lower chance for the guard to notice a binding is being worked on if the progress bar is still high enough.)

Please feel free to discuss possible solutions to these problems in the comments.

So, the question of the poll:

What is your opinion of game-overs in escapes?

(Sorry, typo in option 2: should say "player", not play, can't edit it, oops)