With things moving ahead towards a kickstarter launch, I thought it'd be good to start up the devlog again, so this time, I'm going to be expanding on something a reader asked about on the discord.

In an earlier devlog, I wrote that seeing every version of every scene in Complex Relations is intended to be a completionist goal, rather than a natural consequence of playing through every route. And I also wrote that the full game is intended to feature choices during sex scenes, with consequences in and outside of those scenes. So, how is that actually supposed to play out in practice?

The overly simplified answer is that sex scenes in Complex Relations are pretty much like any other scenes. Sometimes they'll contain choices which get referenced in later scenes, and sometimes they'll vary based on choices you've already made. At least one choice in the demo is already planned to offer a payoff in a sex scene later in the game, and any choices made during sex scenes will usually be referenced outside of them as well.

A slightly less vague answer is that the choices in Complex Relations' sex scenes are intended to be exploratory. Players should be able to make reasonable inferences about whether certain choices will push the game towards certain routes or outcomes, but when the consequences of a choice are unclear, the player should feel free to pick any option, because all options offer worthwhile outcomes, and no options punish players for making the "wrong" choice in ways that they couldn't have predicted. But the choices should still pay off in ways that the audience doesn't expect. For that matter, the choices sometimes pay off in ways that I don't expect until I write later scenes based on the context they set up.

Where possible, the choices should also be available from multiple character perspectives. When the player chooses a character viewpoint, that's always intended to be a choice which influences the context and information they see, not a choice that influences the progression of the game. There are no game branches which require the player to pick a specific character perspective at any point.

Here's an example of how it might play out in practice. During a sex scene, from Vani's perspective, she might have the option to tease Jesse in some way, and if she does, he responds in a way which affects the course of the rest of the scene. From Jesse's perspective, she'll offer the same tease by default, but the player decides whether Jesse offers the same response to it. The player would still have access to either version of the scene from either character's perspective, and the characters' behavior remains as consistent as possible between the different perspective versions, but there might be some slight variations in who takes initiative depending on the characters' perspective.

If the different perspective versions don't quite add up, well... you can chalk that up to differences in how they remember it.