New Game Mechanics coming out with Chapter 6

Hi everyone,

I hope you all had a nice holiday season.

It’s time for some news. With each release of “Nothing is Forever”, I like to polish the game mechanics a bit more. For chapter 6, you’ll notice two new game mechanics.

--Save any image/animation to your gallery--

This is just a small thing, but I hope it’ll help you personalize your experience with “Nothing is Forever”. While playing the game next time, you’ll notice a new icon in the quick menu:

By clicking there, you’ll be able to save the image currently on screen to a new section of the gallery:

If you see an image that you like, you can just click that button and a new image will be added to the gallery.

(if the image is already there, the game will take care of it and not add a duplicate)

Sometimes, there might be more than one image on the screen. If that happens, you’ll be prompt to choose which image you want to save (or save them both):

Any animation can also be saved to be seen on the gallery. Right now there aren’t many in the game yet, but I will soon build a rending rig thanks to your support. And then I’ll start adding animations to many of the lewd scenes already in the game. 

So, with this small addition, you’ll be able to save all your favorite animations/images/moments in a single place and easily revisit them if you so wish. You know, for science or something. Of course you already have the scene gallery. But those play the whole scene and you might be interested in just a quick visual animation.

--Story Scenarios--

The second game mechanic has the potential to be more interesting. 

The “problem” I’m trying to fix is the following: as the game develops and more content and paths are added to the game, it becomes increasingly difficult for a player to know which content he has already seen or played. Furthermore, if they want to see the content they miss, they have to start a new save, skip through all the content they’ve already seen, at the right moments make different choices, and only then they see the scenes they were looking for. There’s also the issue with they might not even be aware that they have missed some content they would like.

The traditional way to solve this is with a walkthrough. You check which content you want to see, start a new game with the walkthrough by your side, and follow the marked path. That’s annoying and, overall, a bad player experience.

Can we do better than that?

I’m not sure. I’ve been thinking about it and came to this idea:

Once you finish the latest version of the game, you’ll see that new option: Scenarios. 

By clicking there you’ll see a menu where you can select pre-defined stories by me. For example: “Learning how to be a sub with Deb”, “Dominating your psychology patient”, “The feminist that secretly likes to be dominated by men”, “Humiliation by a misandrist girl”, or some other equally cringe titles that could be from some of the fanfics that Jen likes to read.

The idea is that you can choose one of those “scenarios” and the game will send you to that path. But I made it so that you only see the relevant scenes for the scenario in question. You chose the Deb scenario? You see only the scenes that are relevant for that storyline (usually the scenes where Deb is present, but not always). All the other scenes are just ignored.

It’ll also play more like a kinetic novel since the game will choose the “correct choices” for you in order to end up seeing the relevant scenes for the chosen scenario. That doesn’t mean there are no choices: for example, in the “Dominating your psychology patient” scenario, you can still choose if you want to see the praise or humiliation scenes with Jen. But, if we make a new scenario called “Praising the psychology patient” (yeah, I need to work on the titles xD), then it would automatically choose the praising scenes. It all depends on the chosen paths.

But those are simple examples. This game mode becomes more interesting when we’re talking about more complicated paths. For example, I can envision a scenario called “Caged forever” that will have all the scenes regarding orgasm denial in the game. If you pick that scenario, you’ll see all the scenes with Deb, Lea, Emma, and any future ones, that are relevant for all the orgasm denial scenes in the game. And you know that you won’t miss anything.

The idea is that this game mode helps to easily and quickly replay the game, seeing only the relevant scenes for the scenario in question, without worrying about missing any relevant lewd scene.

It would also be easy to create different pre-defined "entry points". For example, let's say in your main save you chose to be non-exclusive with Lea, but are curious about the "Girlfriend Path". Instead of having to start a new game just to check that out, you could start the "Lea Girlfriend Scenario", and choose to start when you decide to become exclusive. So, you wouldn't play anything before that, and would only see the future scenes relevant for that path, without having to skip all the others you (presumably) already saw.

The disadvantage is that I’m not sure if skipping all “theoretically non-relevant” scenes will still produce a coherent narrative. This mode will only be available when you finish the current story at least once, so you'll already be familiar with the overall arcs, but still... it might make it kinda boring because it'll playout mostly like a kinetic novel.

Also, I need to manually code which scenes will be seen in which scenario, which takes time and effort, and will become more and more complex as new scenarios are added.

So, the idea right now is to release the next update with a few scenarios (2 to 4, not sure yet) as an experimental feature and see what you think of it. If it's useful, I'll continue adding more scenarios each update. If you find it rather useless, I might just delete it. 

What do you think? When playing Visual Novels, do you find it annoying to have to replay the whole thing if you want to see a different path? Or the good old "skip scenes while following a walkthrough" is a good enough system and I shouldn't try to re-invent the wheel?

I’ll be very curious to see this new game mode will be received when chapter 6 is out.

For now, I would like to wish you all a great 2023!

Cheers