Side-Write: Perfect Problem (Patreon)

One more time, I had to ask myself what to do for this side-write given Project Voice isn't super heavy on the lore compared to a lot of my work. The setting is basically "somewhere around 2005 but furries." Last time I explored the design questions behind why I designed the player character the way I did, and before that I explored their possible past.

I'd been considering doing something similar for the other character in Project Voice, David, but I don't want to go too much into his past partly since most of the important stuff is explained in-game and partly because I don't want to get too spoilery with all this given nobody's had the chance to play it at all yet and very few people have even read the material. That brought me around to the idea of discussing my process and my concerns for designing David, as sort of a combined counterpart to both of the previous Side-Writes.

There are still a few small spoilers in this, but I tried to keep it ambiguous enough to preserve the experience when you actually play. Hope it gives some interesting insight!

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Well, obviously, David is never going to be "another Lith." That's not what I was aiming for with him. Honestly, I didn't have much laid out ahead of time for his character. There were a lot of things he needed to be and a lot of goals he needed to help the game reach, and I let a lot of that shape his character. In a way, I guess you could say that he was built as a character in a similar way to Lith, born out of necessity and shaped to fill a gap. He's certainly had a lot less time to "cook" though.

Going into it, I had two main, contradictory priorities guiding his design: making him the sort of sexy, charming person people would like to spend some time chasing after... and making him similar enough to me that I could comfortably voice his role. They say creativity is born from restrictions, and that certainly restricted things plenty enough for his rough outline to come together quickly, framing him in terms of the impression he would give the player character and expanding from that to figure out what kind of person would give that impression, what would lead someone to lead that kind of life. One of those cases where it almost feels like it was inevitable he'd turn out how he did.

As I got more comfortable with the characters and the story, though, I realized there was one problem. I'd made David a pretty pleasant guy that would hopefully be attractive to some people, but... he was a little too perfect. He didn't have any particular faults, character flaws, or dark elements to keep him rooted as a real person and someone we can be comfortable around and relate to. He had everything the player character wished they could have and be, and plenty besides. There might be call for a "perfect" character on some occasions, but this certainly wasn't one of them.

Well. As I came to figure out what the main "gameplay" of this game was actually going to be, it gradually became clear what the game needed to be "wrong" with him, as well. Looking back on it all, it's pretty obvious there are a lot of parallels with MVOL. To have a story with an emotional and sexual focus, it makes sense for the conflict and the emotional "troubles" involved to be sexual in nature. That's already how I was setting up the player character, and the more I developed the idea of what we'd be struggling with, the clearer it was that to really make the idea "work" and feel believable, he'd have to have some sexual hang-ups as well that would serve as the opposite and the "perfectly worst" match to the player character's. In the chaos of the world, two people both perfectly suited for each other and perfectly suited to drive each other crazy end up coming together and trying to figure their shit out. That's a decent premise for a short, cute little game, I think.

I do find myself wishing sometimes that I'd taken more time to really develop his character and flesh him out as a person. Surely he has other flaws and quirks of personality, some of which might even reasonably come up in the course of the story? I guess part of the issue there is just that I've been trying from the start to make this game as "small" as possible, to make it something I can actually complete in a reasonable time frame, without taking up too many resources from other projects. I even struggled to strip down the details and the prose to keep the story flowing quickly in as little text as possible, adhering to the short-form text sequences we'll see in this game. Much less book, more Visual Novel style. If I gave him too much room to grow and develop, it could bloat out the whole project with a lot of side content that doesn't really serve the goals so much as take away from them.

Still, I could add some more little touches, couldn't I? A lot of his character is more or less presented as a sort of ideal, almost overwhelming in his capacity to sympathize, understand, and forgive, while also overwhelming in his "one big flaw." It'd be nice to have a little in between where he's just kinda not so great but not so bad, and there should be ways to add little touches and hints of that without expanding the text too much. Maybe when I come back to the project, after this release is done, I can go through and make some touch-ups like that to improve the final experience. For this time around, my biggest concern was basically just getting it to "playable all the way through at least one way" and that's already turned it into far more work than it should have been. We'll see.

Well. To some extent, it makes sense for his character to come off that way, anyway. David is an idealist with a strong motivator to improve himself and push himself to be what he thinks he should be. He's isolated from his family and doesn't have many friends, but he has the resources to do what he chooses in most cases, so he has a lot more control over his life at this stage than most people do. Maybe moreso than anything I gave him directly, his "flaw" is simply that he's very... alone, wrapped up in doing the right thing and pushing people away that don't fit in that vision of himself. The story of Project Voice focuses a lot on the player character's struggle and how much things will change if they overcome this challenge, but the events of this story would probably have a pretty huge impact on what David's life will be like from here, as well. This might be just the thing to force him to deal with a lot of new challenges and grow into a more flawed, but maybe happier, person.

I feel a little better about him as he is now, actually, thinking that over. A lot of it is very understated in the story as it stands, but it's there. Maybe when I'm adding more content next time I can work in a bit more of that. It still feels like I could put in a lot more time and work developing him, putting him through the wringer to force him to grow into a more robust and "weathered" character, but he was real enough to carry himself through my story, which takes a lot in its own right. So maybe that's good enough, after all. We'll see how I feel about him after I've given David, and his story, some time to breathe.