Gestalt game update
>been working on Gestalt game for about 3 months
>Not even finished with the first week in-game
Thought you might like to hear the premise/gameplay summary of the game so here it is:
Genre: Mystery, dating simulator, psychological drama, spy thriller
On December 21st, 2000, a mysterious event occurred in which half of the world's population simply mysteriously vanished into thin air. The remaining half was rendered infertile for reasons still unknown. After a Third World War and an entire 20 years without the birth of a human being, humanity desperately searches for answers an an effort to prevent their own extinction...
Gestalt is a visual novel which requires relatively little player interaction, as most of the gameplay is composed of reading text which signifies either character dialogue or the inner thoughts of the protagonist who the player assumes- a nameless young woman who lives under the false identity "Katrin Beck."
The protagonist has just moved to Berlin, Germany to attend school at the highly prestigious Vermilion University as an undercover sleeper agent. Having grown up a savage woman of the wilderness in the post-apocalyptic wasteland that was once the United States of America, she has never experienced civilized society before and is utterly socially oblivious.
Given the identity of "Katrin Beck" for reasons unknown to her, the protagonist must pose as a sheltered aristocrat and hide among the highly educated and extremely wealthy student body of Vermilion without exposing herself as a feral child and a charlatan. She soon learns this is a scheme orchestrated by a mysterious and (both literally and figuratively) underground conspiracy group by the name of "Wands."
The leader of Wands tasks Katrin on gathering intel on persons of interest for their own dubious purposes. Katrin thus comes to be acquainted with a wide cast of characters and the player must decide for themselves who is or is not suspicious or worth investigating.
The player will be given an allotment of free time in which they must choose wisely who Katrin should spend her time with in order to collect enough information to be able to solve the mysteries surrounding Wands and what happened 20 years ago. Depending on who the player chooses to spend time with, plot events may differ and different endings may unlock.
During allotted free time, the player is able to select a person to spend time with, and then view a scene of Katrin and that person socializing.
The more you socialize with a particular person, the deeper your bond becomes and the more information/loyalty you will receive from them.
Some characters may hide huge and important secrets, some may be altogether not too terribly important to the big picture. Choosing wisely in regards to who Katrin spends her free time with will result in gaining information that is crucial to understanding plot events and preventing future tragedies from occurring. It is up to the player to sleuth out for themselves who is worthy of their time.
You can maximize your Harmonization with a character, meaning your bond cannot grow any stronger and you will cannot further alter the course of the story from spending free time with them anymore, but you can still choose to engage in some "skinship" with them- shorter social scenes which are overall not plot relevant, but just meant to be purely for fun and hanging out/spending intimate time with your favorite characters. These serve as both fun for the player as well as potential distractions from more "important" uses of your time. ;)
For example, you could theoretically choose to hang out with one character and one character only for the entire game, and you would never run out of content and fun things to do with them. ...But you would probably not get a very good ending and would be confused about major plot points in the game you never bothered to figure out because you were too busy idk giving your fav character sloppy or something.
Gestalt is designed so that the gameplay highly encourages you to take on multiple adulterous relationships in order to get the most information possible and achieve a "good ending."
... tl;dr: You don't get to make choices about what to say and do, just who Katrin should spend her time with. Play it smart and make the right connections, you might achieve the coveted "good end", mess around wasting time with the "wrong" people and you won't be able to unravel all of the many many mysteries that make up the story of Gestalt in time to prevent a "bad end"!
