Here’s a link to my game: https://juliabiswas.itch.io/erosion.
I’ve been going back and forth on stats for so long (basically switching between yes or no every version). One playtester liked my original plan to have certain decisions decide what kind of person the main character is and the strength of their relationships with certain people, and this would change their language later on. FYI I explained the idea to them and somewhat implemented it but not really, so they were speaking to the idea and not actually to my implementation of it. I tried implementing this, but it just didn’t feel meaningful (i.e. the language was different, but not that different, and it didn’t add much to the game).
For my next version, I was sticking with minimal choices anyway, and I asked my playtester how they’d feel about the stats idea, and they said there was no need for them. In my most recent playtest, my playtester did ask for more choices early on (the kind that I had in my stats idea), but this time, those choices decide things such as who the protagonist talked to at a party/whether they went home early, and this enabled the player to learn more about the protagonist and get more story instead of characterizing the protagonist, so to speak. The idea to have the protagonist talk to more people at the party and reveal more things about themselves was actually my playtester’s idea, and I really liked it. However, I was wondering if it feels less meaningful since the if/else block for the choice does not branch out but rather all choices lead to the same path afterwards, and this doesn’t change the outcome (but I do feel that it changes play experience and could influence how the player sees the protagonist and makes their choices later on).
