A potential alternative to Legerdemain
If you haven't seen this post, the TL;DR of it is that I received some feedback that I somehow wound up taking poorly after initially taking it well (yeah, my brain is useless), and it made me have a sit-down with myself and a think.
And I think I'm too close to Legerdemain to make it an IF, and that it might be better off as a novel—but! That doesn't mean I'll abandon interactive fiction entirely. When I'm not stressing out over dialogue options (or putting pressure on myself to finish a single chapter), I'm actually having a bit of fun, especially in regards to code (never thought I'd say that, but here are).
Given that people like the premise of Legerdemain, one thought I had was that the alternative to it will be similar, but not the same. You are a corpo still, you will have a fully customisable character and everything, but maybe you're Novan rather than an Earther.
You will have three options for origin:
Eden City Southport/Sønderholm Silencio
Each one will have a 'quick start' character (just so I can bypass the character creation when testing), and each origin might come with their own surname. Still debating that.
Each origin will also have some unique bits of dialogue and information that the others wouldn't be privy to, and will have some of their own questlines. (Can you tell I'm craving a modern Dragon Age: Origins?)
The voice will be similar to Velychko's, just because Legerdemain will be from Paradox and kernel_panic's perspectives as originally planned, and I do find it challenging in a fun way to write in a voice so totally different from my own.
You'll still be able to choose to go the anti-corpo route or stay on the corpo path. I still want to split those two paths into two further paths. Everyone will still be able to die, MC and ROs included, depending on your actions.
The fratri/sororicide thing is something I'm aware that some people were drawn to, but I don't think that'll be feasible, unfortunately. Maybe in one of the origins that'd be possible; it depends on what I end up deciding with the corp you're working for.
Arden, Ángela, Yujin and Stella would be recycled for this project as they were created for the IF version of Legerdemain, anyway, and I'm not nearly as attached to them as a result. Yumi could supplant Paradox as the female anti-corp-locked RO. This may or may not just be an excuse for me to write more of her.
The personality traits will be largely the same.
It's still a bit to hash out, but I'm a chronic pantser, so a lot of the story will have to be discovered by me actually writing it.
I know that this course of action will be disappointing to the people who wanted Legerdemain, not something similar, but this might end up being the route I'll have to take.
The two hopes I have for this would be 1) breaking me out of this funk I've been in and having fun again; 2) allowing me to take feedback without spiralling over it when there's quite literally nothing to spiral about because the critiques are legit and something I normally would look at and go "yup, I'll go fix that now, that was dumb".
These are just my initial thoughts. I'm going to be taking a few days to think about this.
