A Few Quest & Content Questions (Patreon)
Content
Hi everyone ^_^
So, over the last week and a half I've been working hard on the new Jess quest. On the bright side I feel it has been going well (the main core content for it is complete, as is the 'Bad End' associated with it), and now I'm just working on the extra paths through it. I do still need to finish up the quest logs, the Jess sandbox interactions after the quest is complete, and a few alternative paths (I currently have 9 endings marked out for the quest), but none of that is essential yet.
The reason why I've put up a poll is that I've come into two big questions for myself over how to formulate quests like this in the future, and I want to hear your feedback before making these decisions. So, what are these questions?
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1/ How much violent and non-sexual adult issue related content should the game contain?
This question came up as I began writing a path where the player overpowers the antagonist of the Jess quest. So far I've always widely avoided violence in all be the most abstract 'you've been knocked out' or saying that a character 'throws a punch'. In this scene however I have it that the player breaks his nose, kicks him whilst he's down and stomps on his hand. This just seemed a bit ... more than we normally deal with here, which in turn made me uncomfortable over whether you'd all be comfortable about it.
Now I want to say that I'll never feature killing in the game either way, though occasionally there may be off-screen allusions to it. Further, there's never going to be a scene of the player being tortured or torturing someone, those are all still not what I want to write and wouldn't fit in with the tone of my writing.
What I'm more curious about is whether my players would prefer more realistic gritty explanations of violence in scenes like the one I've written, or whether they'd prefer a 'fade to black' approach. This decision will likely become even more important as I write quest chains which touch deeper on the lore of the Repurposing Center.
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2/ Should half-finished quests be released in builds?
This is the second question that came to me, as I got to the weekend with a play-able quest, but was concerned that my patrons wouldn't be happy with it due to some of the incomplete options.
You see, the Jess quest has a time-limit after it starts, if you take too long then you just lose. At the time, the only methods to finish it (that I'd finished writing) were to pay the antagonist off, or to just give up on it. Without giving too many spoilers, I had the impression that many players will want to get their own back on the bad guy from the situation, and so I delayed the build.
The quest was complete-able and playable, but it wasn't a full experience yet.
As such I'm curious whether people really care about quests having all their options from the point of being released, or whether they'd prefer it if I waited and provided the full thing all at once.
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Anyways, thanks for helping me out with all the feedback you're willing to offer. Rather than splitting this into multiple polls and overcomplicating things I've put it in one poll that you can vote for multiple options on.
Hope you're all doing well, and happy gaming ^_^