Project Wild One - Outline

Project Basics: Read Here
Intended Gameplay: Gameplay will be level-based, with several levels available at a time to choose from and previous ones always open to revisit. The first time you complete a level you get a new skill unlock, which can be used to modify/upgrade your character to better specialize it for how you want to play. The goal is for all levels to have open-ended problems and challenges with several possible solutions, rewarding creativity over a brute force approach. Some levels will be trivial for certain playstyles and challenging for others, testing your ability to understand the characters you encounter and adapt.

The focus of development and design will be the system for interaction between characters. Big goals are to allow many different kinds of interaction to flow together, hopefully with multiple characters at the same time, and to develop an AI that drives interesting and fun situations naturally where characters can act logically but unexpectedly to make things feel more "alive" and exciting.

The different abilities available to you will create significantly different playstyle experiences, and hopefully will blend together to create a lot of unique potential "builds." For those interested in trying out all the gameplay options, I hope to include options for variable levels of "opting out" where, for example, you can choose to include certain types of sex as an option but keep the descriptions strictly gameplay-focused, "autoskipping" any prose focused on such actions.

Hopefully once the basic system is built for interactions, characters can be added fairly quick and easy, then fleshed out over time with more robust interactions while already having baseline functionality from the start. Depending on how well this works, I hope I may even be able to open this up to others adding their own content/characters without too much difficulty. This project will be less focused on prose specifically and more on pushing flexibility and gameplay.

Story Themes: The story here won't be as robust as in other projects, but we can expect recurring themes of struggling with our natural instincts and how they can come into conflict with our own self-interest and that of others. The pain of encountering strangers and having to choose whether to let yourself be vulnerable or to strike out before they can possibly hurt you will lead to some complicated situations. Betrayal, moral self-doubt and questions of comparative morality between vastly different lifestyles and mindsets should keep the player thinking while enjoying the action.

Sexual Themes: Most of these will be "optional" and can be set either at game start or in an in-game options menu to fine tune your experience. Blending sex with combat, including: seducing an assailant to earn your safety; feigning defeat to invite sexual interaction; claiming sex as a prize when winning combat; earning an ally for future fights through sex and more. Unusual forms of penetration. Various forms of vore both as pred and prey, with options for how consequences should be handled. Breeding. Monsters. Orgies.

Strengths: All this game's emphasis is on creating an intense kind of gameplay-driven immersion in sexual situations. Make choices and deal with consequences that make it feel like you're really "doing it" and not just reading about someone doing it. Where too many sex games are just "a regular game with sex stuff added," this puts all the sex right in the gameplay and hinges your success or failure around your sexual misadventures. I'm hoping this will help create an exceptionally engaging sexual experience.

Weaknesses: Obviously, this game has a much smaller emphasis on prose, story, and character development, which are generally the strongest points of my game design so far. Instead, this game relies on my abilities to program and design an actual game game, which are largely untested. This will not be the kind of experience people expect from me, and I don't know how well I'll be able to deliver on it, but I think it's an experiment that deserves to be conducted. Further, the fact the game contains vore may turn some people away, but I'm hoping to present it in a way that both makes it clear that content is completely optional, and makes it still feel like a complete game without it.

Scores:
Emotional Engagement: 2
Character Presence: 2
Gameplay Strength: 5
Erotic Potential: 5
Broad/Newcomer Appeal: 4

Major Design Questions
-How far can and should I go in making the system flexible and open to any possibility? The more options I add, the exponentially more difficult it will be to build. Reeling back the scale of the payloads (shorter, simpler descriptions of the action) should help keep things manageable, but going too far may make it feel too "game-y" and break immersion when things don't make sense too often. It will be important to find a balance that allows the vast majority of situations I'm hoping to enable, without losing the ability to make specific scenes feel "special."

-To what extent will I still be able to include actual "story" and custom content for characters you encounter? If there's that many possibilities, there will be a nigh-infinite number of ways for the player to go "off the rails" of anything I write no matter how many extra branches I write for a given encounter. Should I keep these encounters simple and the dialogue/special subplots minimalistic, or should I encourage/add options for the player to get "railroaded" into specific actions so they can actually get a proper narrative sequence?

-How can I keep the interface from being overwhelming for the player if there are going to be so many options available? I've got a lot of ideas for keeping it quick, simple, and elegant, but I keep coming up with more ideas for options the player should have on hand. This is especially difficult when the turns should be very rapid-fire, closer to a rogue style game than an RPG.

Levels of Implementation
Barebones: Beat levels that are mostly linear, maybe unmapped, sequences of random and fixed encounters. Limited capacity for interacting with multiple NPCs at once. Little or no "story" elements, just some custom snippets for each kind of NPC.
Assets Needed: Strong game engine, basic text engine, maybe some stock art.

Basic: Navigate very simplistic maps loaded with encounter tables and some points of interest. Node-based? Most NPCs should "work" to interact with others nearby as needed. Some story elements, both overarching and within each level.
Assets Needed: Extensive game engine, strong text engine, a mix of custom and stock art, dynamic GUI.

Full: Explore 2D sprite maps full of wandering NPCs to sneak around or lure where you want, enabling extensive possibilities for large-scale interactions between NPCs and with the PC. Modding options? Custom character/NPC importing? Multiplayer support? Heavy development of subtle narrative based around choices made through gameplay.
Assets Needed: Strong 2D mapping and character management system with navigational AI. Robust game engine and text engine. 30+ creature portraits and art importing system. Extensively streamlined GUI.

Why This is a Side Project: This project has been a distraction in the back of my head for the longest time because of the question: Is it possible? This is the prime example of an "experimental" project I've been dying to get started, without being sure how it will actually turn out in the end. I'm going to start by trying to make it as rudimentary as possible, but with room to expand down the road if it doesn't immediately become so impossibly complicated or problematic that I have to call it off. I may start with a very rough prototype, then if that works, make a completely new version of it down the road with what I learned from that.