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Remaking Something's In The Air is a much bigger project
🕑 Added 2022-05-15 16:00:07 +0000 UTC
With the release of Date Ariane Remastered, that means three of my games (including Ariane in Paradise and Hopepunk City) have updated cycles rendered graphics and can be played as a male or female player character. Rachel Meets Ariane, which I hope to update soon (more on that later) doesn't involve the player as a character.
The odd one out is Something's In The Air, and it is time for it to received the "remastered" treatment, with new updated graphics and the ability to play as a male character or a female character.
But I wrote a post a few years ago explaining why a female player character doesn't work in Something's In The Air, and getting around that is what this post is about.
Date Ariane was fairly easy, aside from numerous pictures that had to be added, there were only a couple of scenes that had to be changed for a female protagonist, like the strip club and the scenic vista. Something's In The Air is going to have a lot more. So here is the bottom line:
Something's In The Air is going to have to be radically rewritten!
Games where I have to both write and illustrate take time, typically a year and a half to two years, while the Date Ariane Remastered project only took 6 months because it was mostly just new illustration. This is why a SITA update is not going to get finished until sometime in 2023.
My current working title is Something's in the Air: Prequel to the Sequel. The somewhat intellectual joke of the title is the kind of humor I want to go with in this game. It is obviously too wordy to keep, I'll no doubt change it when I have a better grasp of what kind of game it will actually be.
The original mission of SITA was a 3D rendered western style harem game, and there have been many since SITA came out, so my new mission: a Harem / Time-loop satire. Maybe that should be the new name.
With that in mind, here are the main goals of the SITA rewrite:
- I want to make Something's In The Air a stand alone game and no longer a direct sequel. Most of the "direct sequel" stuff mattered to the first part of "Another Date With Ariane" chapter, which I am either planning to completely rewrite, or drop all together. It has always been the most problematic part, and it changes Ariane's personality too much. The Ariane second date story really doesn't get started until you get to the movie theater anyways.
- I want to make it workable so the protagonist could be either gender. There are a number of problematic parts to this, like the "Dave" plot. Panromantic Rachel will be fine, and the Wendy plot does not involve romance. Veronica, Bonnie, Stacy and Paula are a bit more tricky, their plots are either problematic or make no sense with a female protagonist.
- I want the "Remastered" SITA to be a satire of western style visual novel games, that SITA itself actually helped pioneer. I actually have several fun ideas with this goal in mind. I was originally going for an "homage" rather than satire, but I have recently been playing some of the more popular ones, and there really isn't anything worth homaging, so one crazy twisted satire coming up!
These three conceptual ideas, plus redoing all the graphics in the game, will hopefully make SITA a more beautiful and more interesting game than it currently is.
What about Rachel Meets Ariane?
It goes to follow that there should be a Rachel Meets Ariane Remastered next? After all the plot of that game is key to the plots of Ariane in Paradise and Hopepunk City that follow after. My idea is to incorporate RMA as a bonus/epilogue into SITA, turning the two games into one.
This will turn the five game cycle into a 4 game cycle, each with value as a stand alone game. I want anyone to pick any of the games and be able to play them with no knowledge of the other games. Something's In The Air and Rachel Meets Ariane are the two games that don't have that quality, but they can if they are merged into one.
Brainstorming Ideas I may or may not use:
Basically, I am going to have to rip out a lot of stuff from the old game and then find new material to replace it with. Picking what happened on a previous Date Ariane date, and all the variants that go with it will mostly be dropped. That means dropping: calling Ariane for a fancy formal date, meeting at the restaurant bar, and the whole spilling wine incident. The whole flashback sequence at the Drive-N-Dine will be dropped too.
Where needed, they will be added as dialog choices. For example, if you meet Rebecca at the movie theater, you could be given a choice "Nice to meet you Rebecca." or "Nice to see you again Rebecca", and the game will just assume that is a hint that you remember Rebecca from before, but I will find a way to write around having to choose what happened.
Dave's main contribution is he accidentally introduces the player to Rachel. I'm not sure if a male chauvinist like Dave could get along with a hot female lesbian player, and not constantly hit on her. I need to find a new plot where the player meets Rachel that doesn't involve a "Dave".
Also the whole "baseball" plot seems out of place for a female player, not to imply that women can't like baseball, I'm trying to avoid gender typecasting activities all together. The baseball game was just a way to skip time. I need to find more constructive ways to pass the daytime hours.
I'm considering replacing Bonnie, the bartender who has like 10 surprise endings, with 8 to 12 different characters. That means 8 to 12 new girls with 8 to 12 new backstories. This is supposed to be a "harem" game after all, why not have a harem?
One big plot change is getting rid of the whole "Something's In The Air" weather mystery from the gallery, and instead implement it into the game plot itself, so instead of solving a mystery using an external checklist, you have to convince another character that something is happening and investigate together. Plot should not exist outside the story, it should all be self contained.
That will get rid of one of the three things you have to keep track of outside the game, which feels a bit bloated. SITA should only have two: endings, and notebooks. Notebooks are staying, they are a fun original alternative to achievements. If I do replace Bonnie with 8 to 12 other girls, it means the notebooks will get bigger.
Satire!
Since SITA came out in 2013, the culture of the western "harem game" has gone in a different direction. SITA proved to everybody that Renpy was superior to HTML, but it wasn't very influential in how it brought Japanese eroge to western audiences. Instead of trying to reverse the clock, I want to adapt to the new rules -- by poking fun at them.
I asked for a list of "harem" tropes over at the Sex Positive Gaming discord and got some good responses:
College is actually obviously a high school
Clueless or Douchebag PC (player character)
Any activity with a penis other than the PC's being called NTR (Netorare)
Female members of the Harem never interacting or acknowledging other female members unless participating in a group sex scene
One random furry/futa character unless the game is specifically around furry or futa
Any potential strong female characters reduced to virtual doormats
Cast have one personality trait each
Hair colour/style is the only way to visually distinguish the waifus
Exposure to the PC causes irreparable loss of all personal goals besides a vague horny affection towards the PC
Perving on people in the shower and assaulting them in their sleep is 100% normal and okay
A fantasy/supernatural/sci-fi metaplot appears out of nowhere halfway through
Everyone who dislikes the PC is actually a tsundere
All problems can and will be solved with the PC's dick
That is actually quite a lot to write satire about, and some of it is so goofy it writes itself.
Immersive instead of linear
The original Something's In The Air actually has an odd story telling format that many players never caught on to, probably because I did not know how to explain it in game and I was too focused on the sequel parts and not enough on the game structure parts.
It introduced itself as a linear game, you pick one of 4 paths and ended up dating a different woman on each path, but not everyone caught on that each date was on the same day, and that some ended in rain storms and some did not. It is easy to think the rain free dates with Rachel happened on a different day. Basically SITA is a time loop game, but it doesn't present itself that way. It would be really easy for me to just simplify the game and make it more linear like every other harem game, but I want to double down!
My goal is to make SITA:PTTS even more of an immersive gaming experience, to make the "storm" just one of several mysteries to be revealed in this time loop setting. Also I want to take some lessons from Date Ariane Remastered allowing actions and activities to be done out of order. The goal is immersion over plot. This video explains what I mean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhConc2uU_E
Any suggestions are welcome. I'm still working on the concept I want to do, and there is a lot I still haven't figured out yet.
Comments
Ariane Barnes
It's going to be an ongoing process. My plan is to do similar to what I did with DAR, start with a reformatted SITA with avatars and standardized menus and text, then update pictures and stories as needed. Veronica is one of those areas that needs changing, but I haven't worked out how. The current game kills her off, but I have already established in AiP and HC that she survives, so I probably need to explain that.
hackoperator
A "remastered" SITA is great news. The odd story telling format you mentioned was kind of unique for me, too. But I like the way the characters show up in different paths and create some sort of story connection. More immersion storytelling sounds fantastic and I would appreciate that. But I hope, immersion storytelling does not mean there won't be any game versions released in the meantime until you've finished? :-) And there is one thing I would love to be changed in the next SITA version - the story of Veronica, especially the endings. I like the spectacular ending, but it would be more interesting if it would be possible to continue her story. So far the player has to accept some of her "rules" and tolerate her bad behavior. How far would the player go to achieve the "promised" ending? Even if there are other characters involved the player met before. Maybe there could be a chance to change her mind / behavior and put her on the right track again...?
Ariane Barnes
Thanks, all things to consider. My thinking on Bonnie right now is that she has 9 post sex endings, which is fun and original, but if I add more girls I have to come up with new post sex endings for each one and will likely involve repetition. My current idea is that the "sleep in" choice will have the player ending up in places that you usually go if you are with Ariane or Rachel, but by yourself: the rock concert, the house party, the Spanish bar, the comic convention, the movies, the amusement park, etc. and because you are there alone, you meet other women with different stories and have different endings. One Idea I am thinking about (part of the "harem satire") is design these encounters like a turn based fighting game, but instead of physical attacks, you use "Be charming", "Tell a joke", "Empathize", "Listen", etc. and there would be two health bars on the top of the screen for "Player's feelings" and "Woman's interest". Your "attacks" are met with "counter attacks" and "winning" leads to a sex scene followed by some strange ending.
Maximus
This does sound interesting, and like a lot of work. :-) In fact it sounds like so much work, I'm wondering whether it would make more sense to just do this as a new game, instead of going the remake route. But obviously, you're the artist, so you decide what you want to do. As for specifics, when I played the original, I thought it was very funny that Bonnie came with so many random surprise endings. Replacing here with a dozen different characters would lose some of the fun, in my opinion. Although, and this is mostly from memory, since it's been a long time that I played it, the first time I played, I decided to 'sleep in' at the first choice, leading me directly to Bonnie, and I thought it was really weird to get stuck in a story that offered basically no choices at all. Of course later on I found out there was a lot more choices to make, I just hadn't found them. One last thought: can the remake have more Wendy, please? :-)
Ariane Barnes
There's a line in DAR where I hint at that possibility. Ariane rescues your phone from the fun house and asks if you know anybody to call. The player responds "I'm new to town. The only phone numbers I have locally are an old friend, who I don't trust." I was referring to Dave, but it is stated in a non-gendered way, so that I could change it if necessary. As for the assets that get used every time, it is because most of them use Daz Studio and shop at the Daz3D store. I use Poser and shop at the Renderosity store, which is why few of my settings and looks match other games. But I am considering using Daz Studio for parts of this game precisely to create a character or two from overused models.
Anonymous
This is an exciting announcement and I look forward to seeing future updates. I guess one way to solve the Dave problem would be to change Dave's gender based on the gender of the player. If the player is female, Dave could be a ditzy sorority girl who drags the player to the bar to pregame before going clubbing or something. As for the baseball subplot, maybe instead the player is attending a conference for work and is supposed to be going to discussion sessions but can choose to play hooky for the day. The idea of parodying harem games would be amusing; one trope I would offer is the naive or innocent girl who acts half as old as she looks. Maybe this is a little too on the nose, but there are also a lot of assets or settings that seem to pop up in a lot of Ren'py games; for example, many Ren'py games must take place in the same city, because you so often see that same park with the path running from the tunnel and between the bench and the grassy knoll.
