Today I’m going to talk a little about Riley, our extremely helpful RA-turned-interim-headmaster. Riley’s development was probably the most straight-forward since he’s The Plot, or at least carries it to a large degree.
Riley is the tutorial character, so we wanted him to be approachable and to convey the tone of the game since he’s the first character people will see before deciding whether or not keep playing.
Scholomatch is nonlinear. Players can play through the characters in any order, mixing chapters however they see fit. The only constant is that they’ll always have played through Riley’s first three chapters before anything else, because of the tutorial.
Writing the tutorial was a challenging balance between making it brief (so you can get to choosing people!) but also getting in any information that other characters would absolutely reference (like the headmaster being missing).
Since players will already have that familiarity, we assume that many of them will come back to Riley somewhat frequently, a pattern we reinforce just a little by giving him the easiest puzzle mechanic in the game (his puzzles simply require fewer points).
Ideally, players are gathering some of the overall plotline (mostly through Riley and Miko) as they explore the more personal arcs of the other characters.
Because he carries so much of the overall plot and because his first three chapters are the tutorial, Riley has to fit his personal growth into fewer chapters. That fits the character, since he’s so busy trying to keep the place running that he doesn’t have time to socialize (a theme of his story).
This also means that he probably makes the best use of his Bonus Scenes out of everyone. In his main arc he’s focused on saving the school, with the player character able to pull him away and break through his shyness a little. In his bonus scenes, there are a few other romances that can kick off.
Honestly, the positive (and sometimes horny) response to Riley fills me with relief. I was concerned that by having to carry the plot that he wouldn’t be super-enticing as a romantic partner, but so far the community has indicated that that is definitely not the case.
