Side-Write: Design Choices

Well, we're doing something pretty different for this one. Usually I try to focus on the story side of things and give some extra insight into what's going on with the game I'm currently working on on that side, but maybe moreso than any other game I've worked on, Project Voice doesn't have a notable setting to explore... more pressingly, the setting really hasn't been established at all. And that's a problem.

I was struggling to figure out what to do for this side write, but honestly, I've been struggling a lot with this project in general. I've been preparing, practicing, and thinking things over a lot, but production hasn't really moved forward and I keep running into walls that... well. You'll see.

So I decided that for this one, I'd take a document I'd been starting to work on to try and focus my thoughts and plans some more, and forced myself to flesh it out tonight as thoroughly as I could to explore what my priorities are for this project, and what my options are for the actual design choices. I honestly thought it was mostly going to amount to "get a peek at what factors I think about" and not much else, but in the end it actually helped me a lot. It's a little terse, I half used it for just ordering my thoughts but tried to write it to at least be understandable. I'm past due for a new dev journal, and I think I finally have something to say, so I may be giving a bit more detail there. I hope you find this interesting.

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The main goals of this project are:
-Experiment with voice acting and narrations
-Learn how to make sound work well in Unity
-Explore better ways to do voice acting in adult content

Any other ideas or possibilities are secondary to achieving these goals. Goals that support these ideas:
-Deliver a simple story with emotional content and sex
-Leave a strong emotional impact
-Feel "real" and authentic, including screw-ups and silly moments

With these goals in mind, it seems likely that a simple, easy to understand setting would be best, with characters that are charming and memorable without being too complex.

The idea of the player character being blind or visually impaired helps "justify" or support the emphasis on sound over visuals, but isn't strictly necessary. Any story that naturally puts an emphasis on the voice may work. Other possibilities...
-A long-distance relationship, talking over the phone a lot. Would be a lot harder to have very interesting sexual content then, though. Put the player in the role of being on the phone and having a mutual masturbation session, talking about what they want to do to each other? Experimenting with one of those remote sex toys to interact with each other?
-Some other kind of situation that reduces or removes sight. At night with a power outage, or somewhere very dark. A cabin in the woods? Player character is blindfolded and played with. Special treat for their birthday? Bondage play?
-Voice is in the player character's ear with some kind of earpiece while they're going about their day. Voice gives the pc orders to do erotic things while in public, gradually pushing them to be more and more brazen. Voice is pc's master? Has some kind of leverage over pc? Might be less of a direct voice payoff if the voice isn't actually engaged in sex.
A lot of these would force a narrower demographic, like making the player character be submissive, which is problematic given it's already limited a lot having a specific male voice as the main focus.

Writing should be a lot shorter in general than usual. Speaking lines takes a lot more time than just reading them, and voice files take up a lot more space. A similar scale would make the game feel very long, and this is meant to be a lightweight demo of the possibilities. This is probably already going to be a ton of recording, and the emphasis is on quality over quantity, so in general, should be aiming to keep the total amount of voiced content manageable.

Gameplay should be pretty simple, but it could be interesting to play with having the voice respond in real time to actions in something more interactive. Main drawback being that would be diverting resources, player attention, and time on both sides to something that is neither emotionally anchoring the characters or paying off with a sex scene. Any gameplay should be tied tightly to one of those two things. Possibilities...?
-PC and voice literally play a video game together. Could definitely be too resource-intensive if going for a 1:1 gameplay replication.
-Brief MVOL-style section socializing in the way you choose? Making too much content be rearrangeable could make it sound too generic and careful or break immersion when scenes don't sound right going one after the other.
-Some kind of basic challenge happening in real time that the player can fail on purpose if they choose, with the voice commenting on your performance as it unfolds?
Shouldn't have too many "outcomes," to reduce the need for alternative paths. More involved gameplay would likely break the "blind friendly game" idea. Technically, substantial gameplay isn't needed for any of the goals, so it would have to compliment the design very strongly to be worth the space.

In the end, being blind or having a power outage feel like they have the best potential, for situations. Comparisons...
-The power outage would feel more relatable for most players. The closer you are to saying "this could be me!" the less distracting the character is and the easier it is to immerse yourself.
-The game would have a very different "feel" depending. A game that's "about a blind person" comes with a lot of extra baggage as far as accurately and fairly portraying a disabled segment of society most people know very little about. If the game's just about "one night when the power went out," it feel much more fitting for it to be a small, short game, and there's suddenly a lot less distracting from the real main goals.
-Power outage would probably imply already living together, so them having sex would feel a lot less "special" than if it's the first time as with the blind scene. Could still be a "first time," but that would require jumping through some hoops for the story to make sense.
-It would be harder, but it can always be a good thing to help spread awareness and accurate, positive portraits of blind life, to help improve their public image. Though all things considered, it's not like my work is so well-known that that would make a significant difference...

The more I think about it, the more I'm liking the blackout idea. Ideas are coming together a lot more easily right off the bat. I do feel bad about not trying to tackle something "important," but I think the weight of it was creatively paralyzing me. I think this should work a lot better.