An Extra Glimpse— Collaborative Planning Project: Decisions, decisions...(with bonus Betty) (Patreon)

Well, you guys definitely knew what you wanted for the story, hehe! The Castle and Estate setting won by quite a bit :D

Seeing as this story setting requires multiple locations, I took a look over my sketchy, rough map of the Echo World (which isn’t fully set even after decades of working on it!), to see which area would be the best place to set it.

The Echo World is mostly based around traditional medieval/high fantasy, as that’s a setting I adore and grew up with (think typical DnD setting), but as I grew and evolved as a creator, I have added lots of areas that are also very different. That’s the beauty and fun of creating your own world—it’s yours, and you have that wonderful freedom to let your imagination go!

But this does lead into helping us decide a good reason why the story is happening and how location can help with that.

So our base idea is the player character is now heir to the throne.

Why has our player/main character suddenly been put into the position of becoming ruler?

Obviously there’s the traditional event that a ruling parent has died, and they are next in line.

Or to add a bit of drama, maybe the older sibling that was supposed to be heir has died and our character has suddenly been thrust onto the throne when they weren’t expecting it.

Going for a traditional storyline isn’t a bad thing. Everyone loves to know what’s coming in a story as it means they can really enjoy all the other stuff if they’re not trying to take in too many twists and turns!

But going a different and unexpected direction can be fun too. And looking over my map, I forgot about an area I came up with quite a few years ago that would be pretty perfect for this type of story—the lore really works for what we want to do.

M’hyia-D’he (My-ah-dee) is a land built on precious metals. Many moons ago, a meteor filled with unusual ores slammed into this land and buried beneath the earth, Now the land has grown very rich off those unique ores, which the people mine deep below ground (which is where the name of the kingdom came from as it means ‘Gilded Shadows’, literally that the shadows of the land are gilded in these precious metal ores).

Anyway, the bit that works for our story is that the way they chose their royal lines is quite different. For one century, the current monarch is chosen in the traditional way of it being the first born/adopted/changed heir. But every hundred years, to keep the bloodline ‘fresh’, someone random is chosen from the general populace to begin a new royal line.

And this premise is absolutely perfect for the main character of our game! It means they can come from any background, which opens roleplay opportunities, and can be whoever they want on character creation as they don’t have to be in a set role from the get-go like they would be if they were already a royal heir.

It also gives a reason why so many kingdoms would want to marry into this royal line as the kingdom is one of the richest in the Echo World.

…Okay, honestly, I’m beginning to love this game storyline so much I may have to think about actually making it into a game at some point, hehe! :D

So we have an idea for the start of our main character and where the story takes place. The specifics of the main character can come later as they are variable depending on the player and situation anyway.

Usually next, I like to dive into the bit I love and am always very keen to get to…the love interests.

Although I do tend to rush a bit to get to this point, it’s actually also useful as knowing characters before story can help actually build the story.

But there needs to be an important game decision made at this point which is to do with the romance/love interest aspect of the story.

Do we go for a route-based style of romance game, or do we go for one storyline and separate romance scenes for each love interest?

For those that may not know: In a route-based style of game, you would usually have a prologue to the game where your character is made and then you’re introduced to the love interests. Then at the end of the introduction, the player character is given a decision on which love interest’s story they’d like to pursue and the game would then branch into a unique storyline for that character.

This is like The Lady’s Choice, for anyone who may have played it, or most other otome games.

In a one-storyline kind of game, think more of Wayhaven. The player character is following a certain story and all the characters are there and then you get separate love interest scenes at certain points within that story.

PROS of route-based is that replay is fantastic as each love interest has their own separate storyline, so no having to play through the same scenes except the opening.

CONS is that usually the individual story is very linear as already writing multiple stories in one game is a lot of work, so branching the individual storylines would be a very, very intense amount of work. So usually it’s just the endings that vary.

PROS of a one-storyline kind of game is that you can branch the storyline more as it’s only one storyline that you can usually branch then bring back to a main story ‘trunk’, if we’re going for tree metaphors. So although when replaying you have to go through some same scenes, you do get variation as it can branch more.

CONS is that you do have to replay through scenes that need to take place for the story no matter the love interest and writing different versions of one scene for separate love interests can be a lot of work, especially if you have love interest for all branches that could occur for one event, and that can get a bit confusing at times!

I enjoy both styles as a player. As a writer, I now tend to prefer the one-storyline approach as I really like to add variation and branching into my games to make them reactive.

Though that doesn’t mean you couldn’t do that on a route-based game, too!

So, before we can get to the real fun of love interests, we need to decide what style of game/story we’d like to proceed with!

And I’ll be leaving that for you guys to decide! :D