Let's Talk About Chapter 4 and the Ending Point System

Alrighty. It's time for another long-form, rambling devlog. This one's mainly going to be about the last half of chapter 4 and all that comes with it.

A quick note before we get into it though. I recently decided to give the player character in Tales an actual name instead of simply referring to them as "PC" or "player character". That name is... Jesse. This won't change anything in-game, it's just a better way for me to address the player character in the context of these devlogs. Okay. End note. Moving on.

Come On! Feel The Illinoise!

The last half of chapter 4 has us exploring the windy city of Chicago. Nice place, never been. Which means thank God for the internet and YouTube videos or else I'd be completely winging this chapter in regards to location accuracy.

Let's breakdown what Chicago is going to be like in Tales. There's going to be 3-4 places you can visit and check out, these 3-4 areas are: The Sears Tower, The Museum of Science and Industry, Millennium Park, and maybe Shedd Aquarium. I say maybe for Shedd Aquarium because I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to add meaningful content to that area. My current feeling is that by the time I finish the third area in Chicago I'll have exhausted and completed most of my story ideas and goals for this chapter. And so any areas that come after the third will likely be filled with filler content that doesn't really do much of anything for the characters or the story. And no one wants to play through filler content.

You know what people (probably) want to play through tho? Optional content! There will be plenty of that at hand for you to check out. Optional scenes, characters, bits of dialogue, all things you can find and choose to play/interact with.

Using the Sears Tower as an example, at the very start you'll have the option of doing an optional scene where you and Sasha go to get lunch beforehand. Choosing to do this optional scene will give you some insight into both Sasha's and Jesse's time in college. Going into some more detail about how they met, what college was like for them, among other things I can't state because of spoilers. If you don't want to do this optional scene you can just explore around a little bit and find your way up to the Sears Tower's Skydeck which continues the main story.

I'm not planning on putting major plot details in these optional bits of content, but... You are going to have to do certain optional scenes, both in this chapter and in future chapters, if you want to end up getting the true ending once this game is finally finished. I've talked about endings and the ending point system before but that was ages ago. So if you're interested, I'll give you a refresher. If you're not interested, just skip over the incoming wall of text, I guess.

You will be judged for your every action (Imagine this is in comic sans)

Endings and the ending point system, what are they about? Let's start with ending points. Ending points are sort of a karmic system, they're assigned on a scale of -30 to 30 with 30 obviously being the best 'karma' you can get and -30 being the worst. As of right now, these points are only occasionally used to determine rather you get certain dialogue options.

Once Tales from the Road is finished - and I assure you, it will eventually be finished (I'm not pulling a Yanderedev), these ending points will be used to help determine which ending you'll get. Hence the name. For example, if you really screw up, and end up with something silly like -20 ending points, you're probably not going to get a good ending. The way I have the ending point system set up makes it so if you're directly working against solving Jesse's problems, you'll get negative points. You end the game with -20 points, you probably didn't do too much to help out poor Jesse. and so your ending will reflect this.

On the flip side, if you end the game with 20 points you probably chose quite a few of the 'good' dialogue options, did some of the optional scenes, and just generally helped Jesse out. Which means you'll be nudged towards a good or more neutral ending.

Now, ending points won't be the sole thing determining what kind of ending you'll get. I'll also take into account some of the more major decisions you've made throughout the game. Your choices do matter.

Let me list off some examples: Did you make Valery walk out on your lunch date/hangout? At the very minimum you'll get a -10 to your ending points, probably more. Depends on what you said. Know that scene where you're picking passengers for the road trip? If you were dating both Valery and Holly and you didn't break up with one of them during that scene you get 16 subtracted from your ending points. This also locks you out from getting the true ending.

Those are some of the bigger decisions thus far. There will, of course, be a handful of major choices to make throughout the road trip journey that will also play into the endings.

Okay, think we're up to date with endings and the ending point system. Let's move back to the main topic for a second.

Back on Track

Back to chapter 4 talk. Yes, optional scenes. They'll be in the game. They will be optional. Meaning you don't need to do them to progress the story. You probably should play through them if you like the characters and want to learn more about them. And you definitely should play through them if you want the true ending once the game is finished.

And that's really it for chapter 4.

Quality Control

So on topics unrelated to chapter 4... Something I plan on doing is going through the game, mostly the earlier parts, and checking for weird formatting, grammar issues, writing inconsistencies, bugs, and so on. By earlier parts I'm mainly thinking chapters 1 and 2 as I kind of rushed to get them ported over to Twine back in January. Turns out that rushing to finish stuff tends to lead to errors and problems, go figure. In regards to chapter 3, there will probably be a few things to touch up but I don't foresee there being as many issues as in the first two chapters. And chapter 4 should be 100% since I just wrote it.

Specifying what I mean by weird formatting, I'm thinking passages that just don't seem to flow right, maybe buttons are misplaced or don't trigger right. Perhaps there's a lot of white space. Basically, stuff that's not game breaking but just kind of annoying to deal with.

Grammar issues, pretty self-explanatory. Definitely not a stranger to messing up simple English grammar despite reading and writing it my whole life. You could probably find a handful of examples just in this devlog.

Writing inconsistencies, mainly timeline stuff. A few months ago I did a run though of the timeline of Tales, made sure everything fit logically. Still, I might've missed a few things. Maybe I forgot to change a date somewhere, who knows. Other writing inconsistencies could include using the wrong names for cities or having characters state contradictory things. Gotta check for 'em all.

Look for this clean-up of sorts to arrive... sometime. Actually cleaning everything up won't take too long but I just have to find the motivation to do it. Playing through the same scenes I've already read 10 times over, not too fun, gonna be honest. It'll get done though. Sometime.

Bye

Alright, end of the line. Time to talk about when you can expect the next big update and thus the rest of chapter 4. I would say... mid-August. Probably. Like I said in my last long-form post it's really hard for me to pinpoint a date because of how busy I'm going to be with getting stuff ready to move. So all things considered, I do think mid-August is a pretty realistic time frame. It's not set in stone by any means but I think I can manage to get everything wrote and implemented by then.

Might put out another devlog before I get the update finished. Depends on if I have anything I want to talk about. If the update is coming later then mid-August I'll post about it on Twitter here.

Think that's it. Until next time.