First chapter of Nicholas Rescher's Conditionals available online
Because man’s being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.
Hello! I'm not sure if this blog is still active, but it's worth a shot. When doing something with multiple endings, how would you do a dating sim with multiple endings for each character, like a Good one and a Bad one?
Heya Isaacie! Better late than never I hope?
I did an initial treatment of the idea of multiple endings here. I’d go about it a little differently now, so I’ll give more detail about architecture for a game below.
The basic substance of your question is “how do I make the game interpret the difference between different states?”. If you’re using variables to keep track of things, all you need to do is have the game test if the player has met certain conditions in order to determine an outcome.
For a game with multiple romance-ables, it might work best to separate the romance paths into different files. Then, at the end of each romance file, have the conditionals for if something is a good or bad end. You can bring the player back into the MAIN file for things that are the same across all runs, and then have the game check to see which character they are romancing to go decide where to go.
This would work something like:Main story line ~> romance path chosen ~> go to character’s romance file ~> romance interaction #1 ~> back to main file ~> romance interaction #2 ~> ect.
In that case, it would be simplest to CALL the new file’s first label, then RETURN at the end of the romance scene after choices are made. This will put you back into the main script right where you last left off to do general same story line things. Then you can call the next label in from the romance file and return back, ect.
If the story never intersects again once a main love interest is chosen(think something like Katawa Shoujo) then you can just continue the story in those romance files. (You’ll probably want to set a variable like Romance_X = True in your files too if it affect the main plotline minimally, but you still want ppl to reference it in dialogue or something!)
At the end of the romance files you need some way to determine if they’ve done “good” or “bad” to see what ending they should get. You can do this by keeping track of how many “affection points” they got and deciding if they have below a certain value they get a “Bad End”.
Ect for each scenario. This only works if they can only romance one person at a time. They get locked into a romance path(whether or not the rest of the game has story beats in common between routes) and so only one person needs to be checked.
But what if you wanna let them romance multiple ppl at once and see which one they got the farthest with?
For something like that you’ll need to put the affections in a dictionary, determine which one is the largest and then do the good/bad ending logic above.The logic would look something like this:
init python: John_love = 0 Mike_love = 0 Jimmy_love = 0 Sasha_love = 0(game play where you add affection with variable_name += number amount)(then a python block right before the end of the game)python: affection_dict = {"John": John_love, "Mike": Mike_love, "Jim": Jimmy_love, "Sasha": Sasha_love} love_holder = [] winner = None
for x in affection_dict.values(): love_holder.append(x) love_max = max(love_holder) for x in affection_dict: if affection_dict[x] == love_max: winner = x
Then at the end of your main file you’d type something like this:
Ect for each romanceable. Then you once again determine if they got a good or bad ending with them or not based on affection, which is separate from who they had the most affection with.(they could theoretically have 0, 0, 5, 9 and need a minimum of 10 for any non-bad end, if can even check to see if the max of the list is bigger than 10 and if not just have them giga fail with an ultimate bad end or something. You’d just add a line after love_max = max(love_holder) to say:
if love_max < 10: jump ultra_fail
They won’t even get to the rest of the code to pick the winner because it doesn’t matter lol.)
All that being said, the basic principals are:-have conditions that are failable-figure out what level of failure justifies a bad ending based on how your game plays-test the state of the game based on those conditions-use the result of that state testing to produce an end state result
I know this was long, and a very delayed answer, but I hope this helps you and others! Remember: If your code won’t compile and you don’t know why; who ya gonna call? The Ren’Py Help Desk!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 2/3
Fandom: Daredevil (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Matt Murdock/Franklin "Foggy" Nelson
Characters: Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Matt Murdock
Additional Tags: Psychological Horror, Whump, Anxiety, Worry, Physical Disability, Emotional Hurt, Birds, POV Foggy Nelson, Angst with a Happy Ending, Angst, Established Relationship, Painting
Summary:
Ever since Matt came home from a night of Daredeviling with nerve damage in one of his wrists, Foggy's been trying to push thoughts from his mind of a more gruesome outcome the next time Matt goes out. He thinks he's been handling it pretty well, until a recurring nightmare convinces him that a painting possessed by some sort of evil is out to get him and Matt. Will Foggy be able to prevent the only ending he can foresee? Or will he let despair overtake him first?
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posted the first part (2/3 chapters) of my Mattfoggy Telephone Game Round 2 fic! (it’s only like 2 whole weeks late from the original deadline oops)
We've already looked at zero, first and second conditionals, so now it's time to look at third conditionals. Once again, we have a condition and a result, but this time the condition is given in the past perfect (sometimes called the pluperfect) while the result is given using the words would or could followed by the present perfect (remember: would and could can be contracted to 'd).
We use the third conditional when talking about events in the past that didn't happen. For example:
If he'd had enough money, he would have bought her a diamond ring. (He didn't have enough money, so he didn't buy her a diamond ring.)
If I'd known they didn’t from free-range chickens, I wouldn’t have eaten those eggs. (I didn’t know the eggs didn’t come from free-range chickens, so I ate them.)
You'd almost certainly have got the job if you'd actually applied for it! (You didn't apply for the job, so you didn't have any chance of getting it.)
If you want to be a more formal or poetic, you can take out the 'if' and start the sentence with 'had' (this is a bit old-fashioned and not really used in a casual context):
Had I had more time, I would've spent every second with you.
Had our commander not taken such swift action, we'd never have escaped with our lives!
In spoken English, third conditionals lead to a lot of double contractions, so you might hear things like I'd've, you'd've, couldn't've and wouldn't've (if you're in the southern US, you might even hear something like y'all'dn’t’ve!) These aren't normally used in written English though; it's best to just stick to one contraction.
A common mistake native English speakers make is saying or writing would of instead of would have. This is because the contraction 've sounds very similar to the preposition of.
That's all for this lesson! Feel free to message me with any questions you have or send me some third conditional sentences to mark.
