Inner Circle post for 0.4.16 (Patreon)

Hi all, I hope you're having a happy xmas or, if it isn't a holiday where you are, an enjoyable Monday.

For the next release I'm starting on the wedding scene. Weddings are a huge event full of iconic moments, so it will certainly need to be expanded on over several releases. Of course I need to draw the line somewhere: it'd probably be possible to make an entire game around a wedding.

It's a really important scene though so I want it to have a lot of content. In fact, the main wedding scenes have the potential to end up as some of the biggest in the game due to the need for them to work for any characters and to have interactions with multiple NPCs: the groom, the bridesmaids, the best man and so on.

The initial release will focus on a traditional path through the marriage without e.g. naked weddings or public consummation. I want to keep the scope as tight as possible so each element of the wedding gets handled properly instead of getting rushed to meet a deadline.

My basic set of content is:

Update existing scenes with basic married content. In particular, I don't plan to add divorce at this time so any content that focuses on breakups or the risk of breakups will need to be reworked.

Add the Formal outfit type along with clothes for men and woman. This will be tricky for men especially because it doesn't obviously seem to fit the shirt+trousers structure that Newlife currently uses. I think I'll need to at least add jackets, which means updating male description and undressing content throughout the game.

Lead into the marriage. While this may eventually cover things like the hen party for now it'll just be a short lead into the ceremony.

The wedding ceremony itself, assuming a fairly traditional path through: other paths will get added later on, and choosing them (like the naked wedding) in the wedding-dress scene will block marriage in the first release.

I won't be adding the reception at this point. Updates to existing content plus the ceremony is already a fairly challenging set of additions. The reception should end up being a very large scene so it doesn't feel realistic to have a non-rushed version alongside the ceremony in a single release. For now the ceremony will transition to the wedding night.

A short wedding-night scene. This is another one that might benefit from major additions later but for 0.4.16 I want the focus to be on the ceremony so I'll be keeping this scene quite short.

With the focus on the wedding ceremony, there are some obvious questions. I'll be implementing a fairly traditional British vaguely-Christian-ish wedding ceremony although I won't be including overtly religious elements. If anyone has preferences for different culture's ceremonies then let me know – I won't be adding them at this point but it'll be useful to have an idea of what people want.

Right now for me the big question is how the wedding vows should be handled. There's a lot of potential for both romantic and sexual content in the vows.

One option is to build up a list of lines for each character and have them read them to each other. "I <pcname> promise blahblahblah".

Another option is for the officient to read out the vows "Do you, <name> promise to blahblah" and have the characters say "I do".

A third option to keep the iconic "i do" while still getting the characters to read their vows would be for the officiant to read out a basic statement ("do you, <name> promise to love <otherName> etc") leading to an "I do"/"panic and flee the altar" choice then following that by reading personalised vows to each other which might include specifically sexual ones.

I don't have a lot of IRL experience with weddings, but from my research online it seems that all of these are sometimes used in real weddings. Which of these three approaches do you think is best for Newlife?