Our Red String teaser (3) (Patreon)

GGGB had a ton of characters and it seems like ORS will have quite a bunch of them, too. I love populating the life of the protagonist with interesting people that provide a lot of options for players to explore.

But keeping with the more focused approach I'm aiming for, I want those characters to have weight, not just for the options they provide, but in the way they affect the story and how they relate emotionally to the main character. I want to make their life's more three-dimensional and interconnect them. 

I felt that GGGB had a few problems when I was writing it: first of all, many characters had no relationship between them. For example, Wilson and Enrico had nothing to do with Jack or Tyrone, or Ethan with Arthur, or Iris with Jessica... Their plots existed in parallel to some of the other cast. That was necessary for several reasons, mainly to be able to provide a lot of very different branches and options to players, but now I'd like to weave their connections more thoughtfully, creating more interesting and intense scenarios where each choice can affect the main story and the side characters all at once. 

The second problem was that some of the characters felt a bit "flat". What I mean is that they followed a bit too much the tropes of the archetype they represent. It's important to build your characters around archetypes: that way you make them stand out and instantly recognisable by the player, giving him clear guides to understand and pursue the paths and characters he finds appealing. But it's important to add a twist and some depth to these archetypes, or they end up becoming cardboard cliches (that happens all the time with anime and manga, for example). I made Jack, the "alpha male winner", a guy with brother issues that tries to overcompensate for a lost love, Jessica, the "bitchy slut", a girl who was in truth lost and desperate to get acceptance and love from her peers, and so... But at some point some characters just filled the same roles interchangeably, like Eric and Dave, representing very similar archetypes, Arthur and Ethan were kind of similar but with a different flavor, Tyrone and Bubba... 

This time I want to define the archetypes better, making them different enough so each character stands out from the rest and have their own distinct flavor to the player, and at the same time make them more intricate or interesting. Some will feel familiar to GGGB, while others will add a new kind of character and interaction. And I hope you find all of them fun, interesting and sexy!