I was about to start posting about Riley and then realized that for folks following along, there’s actually a mechanic I need to talk about first. Talking about Riley requires talking about bonus scenes and then I realized that no one knows what those are. So let’s dive into that!
So as a precursor, I’ll just say that writing-wise, the scope we’re ending with was not the scope we started with. We started out intending to make a much lighter game before realizing that we wanted to try telling deeper and more meaningful stories.
That’s when set down that every character would have ten chapters. Later we decided that each chapter would have a hefty intro AND outro. And later still we decided to include “descriptive” panels instead of just dialog.
All of that was required to make Scholomatch what we wanted it to be. On top of that, I decided to add another 60% of content to solve two issues:
- If you end up ‘dating’ most characters towards the end of their arcs, then you don’t get to experience the fun moments of actually dating them.
- Players will naturally play the characters they’re most drawn to first, but you have to complete all of them to unlock the finale. That means there’s an experience of completing your favorite character first and then not seeing them for a long time while you finish the rest.
So, bonus scenes. After all ten chapters of a character’s story are complete, you’ll still see them on the map. Every character has a little scene authored for each map location (of which there are twelve).
And by “little scene” I mean scenes of wildly varying length. Some are tiny, but some are quite larger, with their own replayable and sometimes branching structure. Charlie and Miko film an entire movie in one location. Ember’s dorm scene is…well, it’s a lot.
- It’s an opportunity to learn a lot about a character outside of what’s critical to their story. We want to keep the chapters relatively short, which means we need to focus on specific aspects of a character’s arc. Backgrounds, hopes, fears, hobbies, etc.
- It allows for more interaction between other students. We get to play a lot more with little romance arcs and other cute scenes of our adorable wizards hanging out together.
Some of my favorite moments happen in bonus scenes. And some have a structure I especially love where every other character can show up randomly. Typhon spars with everyone, Riley encourages everyone to teach a class, etc etc.
I think that’s all there really is to say about bonus scenes. Sadly, there are none in the demo for obvious reasons. But I’m happy to talk more about them if anyone has questions.