I already discussed the subject of choices and branching in Complex Relations a while back, but a reader recently asked me if I could expand a bit on how this plays out with the game's multiple character perspectives. Some of the ideas I have in mind will depend to an extent on the amount of funding the game gets in its upcoming kickstarter, and there's some built-in flexibility planned around that, but I figure it can't hurt to go into a bit more detail.

People who've already played the demo know that most of the choices featured so far occur in Jesse's perspective. But, this doesn't mean that Jesse is meant to be the main character in a way that Vani and Alexa are not, or that choices will necessarily continue to mostly be from his perspective in the rest of the game. Both Alexa and Vani are definitely intended to have choices in the full game, most likely including choices which contribute to script branching.

It is significantly more challenging though to write choices in scenes where all the main characters are present, which can be viewed from the perspectives of multiple characters, when the events themselves are independent of which character is narrating them.

Vani's Awesome Special Friends Time Game: Extremely hard to write in multiple perspectives.

There are ways around this though. The simplest, which the demo makes use of, is to lock certain scenes which feature choices to a single character perspective. But I'm not always going to want to do this. For one thing, I want to stick to a rule of making all the H-scenes viewable from the perspectives of all the participants, and as I've mentioned previously, some of those are intended to feature choices. For another thing, whereas in some scenes, I may conceal certain character perspectives because I want to hide certain things those characters are thinking to avoid spoilers or pacing issues (or because those characters aren't doing anything interesting at the time,) in other scenes, I want to make sure the audience does have access to multiple perspectives. So in these situations, I need to use a different approach.

One option is to offer a choice from a single character perspective, and to simply assume a certain outcome of that choice from other character perspectives. So, in the Vani's Awesome Special Friends Time Game scene, I could make the scene viewable from Alexa's perspective, with Jesse always asking the others "what's your guilty pleasure?" But this isn't really ideal for player agency or for continuity issues. Somewhat better is to treat a certain choice as the default, or select a certain choice based on variables the player has already accumulated over the course of the game, but then make it so that if the player selects a different option when playing from the perspective of the choice-making character, that choice will be applied to the scene if the player backtracks and plays from a different character's perspective.

But what if what you really want is to give the player a choice that's available within a scene from every character's perspective?

From a writing standpoint, that's a lot more complicated, but there are still contexts where it can make sense. Suppose you have a couple of characters trying to feel out whether to bring up a touchy subject. Each is trying to read whether the other one is comfortable discussing it. Whether they decide to discuss it or not, either one's decision reflects their best understanding of their mutual feelings. In that sort of scenario, it's practical to write a scene where either character can make the decision for both, without breaking immersion.

Of course, the results of all these different types of choices can be stored for later, both for branching purposes and for consequences in later scenes. If you've played through the demo multiple times, you might have already noticed some cases of the latter.

That can also play out in multiple character perspectives rather than just one. I'm looking forward to seeing just how much leeway I'll have to play around with this for the full game.