Hello everyone, Jake here from Paperviper. Today, I want to share some news regarding the sort of "RPG" aspects in WAGAKKIWA. As many already know, Visual Novels contain gameplay as well: the user getting to choose what to say/do in events, effecting outcomes, etc. Though this is in WAGAKKIWA, I wanted to push the elements of gameplay further. As the summary suggests, I've been heavily focused on the programming of the 'Jobs and Life' segment in WAGAKKIWA. This is basically the part of the game after main scenes, main events, etc. where you choose what Hideo does with the rest of his day: work out, build social skills, study, hangout with a friend, go to work, or just go to sleep. I wouldn't go (at this moment) to say it's enough to certainly make WAGAKKIWA a dating rpg rather than a Visual Novel, but I can definitely say setting up the algorithm and system behind it has been quite the annoyance to me.
^A preview at the 'At Home' screen.
Firstly, I ran into a bug with the part of the script that finds out which part of the actual story you have to go to after you've done an action at the 'At Home' screen. The bug was a little annoying loop that continuously made the player go back to the currently "Test" version of Main Scene Four. But, after an hour and a half of contemplating and pulling at my hair, I finally came up with a simple solution, but for the sake of the game it has to be attached to almost every 'At Home' aspect.
Secondly, I looked at my earlier pieces of the script from when I first started and realized I had a 'Money' or 'Yen' system setup. Though the money would only be useful for the 'Call a Friend' events, I still wanted it to be included, so I decided to add a 'Find Work' and 'Go To Work' section alongside the 'At Home' screen, so (if you qualify) you can make Hideo work part-time for money! Another thing I decided to add since I began to think the player may not want to do anything for the day, is add the 'Go to Bed' option. It was fairly simple: you get to skip the option of building up Hideo in order to proceed with the story.
Why am I telling you all of this? Simply because I'm only about 25% done with THIS section of the game. And yes; I have to finish it because it will be played out no matter which girl's path you venture down, so it's important it get's done first. There's a lot too it, so I think I'm pretty accurate with my estimates that the game will be finally done around the end of 2014.
The last thing I wanna talk about is the game's way of story telling as a whole. After I received a question on Reddit about this game, I decided to post about this here as well. Usual Visual Novels run on one main story that have alternate endings the player can reach, but it turns out WAGAKKIWA runs on a story outline, and the story that is told to the player is determined on the player's choices, along side the endings being determined. I thought that was interesting so I wanted to share it. I'm sure WAGAKKIWA isn't the first to do something like this, but I know to me it at least is interesting to post about. It also let's you know why this game is going to take a pretty good amount of my life in 2014 to make; so just to let you know! :D
That's it for now! Make sure to 'Track this game' to keep updated, and share the IndieDB page with your friends in order to help give it some hype that may or may not even be needed! Thanks for reading!
~Jake of Paperviper
