Frosto Remembers: The Warning

So you might recall a little text that appears when you boot up Love Sucks.  And then again when you start the game

"This game contains Bad Endings that feature mild depictions of Blood and Death."

I've never actually heard anyone rally discourse against this warning, but I can hear it in my head.  People talking about trigger warnings have been following media in the past two decades. Some believe you should tell people about traumatic elements to not make them relive trauma. Others say it spoils the work, or that we can't be afraid of everything.

Yeah, none of this factored into our decision on the warning.

I was once credited with utilizing lines and veils with players with the warning. I opened the article several years ago and still haven't read it, so it isn't that either (or could be. Tab's still open. I'll read it one day).

No, the warning was born from a fan who said something that hit me like a ball peen hammer.  A fan I will refer to as K.

When Love Sucks was in it's original "Date or Die" stage, committing to sex acts with the girls resulted in death all the time, and that was perma-start-the-fuck-over-death.  I found this at crossed purposes, as your sex game that promised sexy time with sexy ladies made those sexy ladies into sexy beartraps. Following what you came here to do resulted in a game over.

Theo dying and traveling in time was a way to compensate. You could still be lustful and get your apple crunched, but didn't require you to start over.  It allowed you to have fun the way you wanted to, and not be punished for making arbitrary decisions. 

As a game designer, in order to demonstrate a mechanic properly, you generally show the player doing it themselves. So, mechanically and narratively, Theo had to die once to the girls. Hence the scene at the library.

I will admit also that it was a side step from the norm.  It was dark in a mostly comedic game, but I like that. It dealt with deeper themes and also showed an unexpected side to the girls.  I don't want to shy away from darker topics in my works because there are dark things in life.

We worked up a preliminary build up to the library just to see if we were going in the right direction. This was everything up to right after the library scene.  Theo died, got back to Naomi, thanks for playing. We didn't tell anybody about the plot, we were keeping the time travel thing under wraps because we wanted to see the audience reaction to it.  Theo going back in time seems so normal now, but at the time it was our big reveal.

Enter K.  K was an early fan who did one of our first bits of fan art, and he was very excited for the game. We gave him the early build. He gave us some really good and positive remarks but then sort of trailed off.

He said the death scene kept him up at night, he didn't get a lot of sleep.  We portrayed the game as a comedy and we wrote a very serious scene where Theo slipped into his death, with two girls crying they didn't want to do it.  We basically made him watch Theo die.  

When he first said it, I didn't understand.  I mean,  sure. The girls killed him but he didn't stay dead. He got better. And he was going to have plenty of time to avoid death otherwise.  But as K explained it, there was no way for him to dodge the death or make a different decision.  He had to watch Theo die a pretty traumatic death.  As a player invested in the narrative he expected the main character to live.  

We all expect the main character to live. And Theo died.  

A wise man once said to me "The source of all frustration is: Expect A, get B". You want something and then when you don't get it, frustration.  As a writer, you build expectations with your work. As people read, they build in their head where they think things are going to go. You can surprise them or even shock them, but if you do it too hard, you lose them. 

And if you're planning on making a game popular, it's a pretty good idea  that if the audience Expects A to make sure they get A.  We were advertising a VN about dating monster girls, hinting that it was dangerous with all the eye waggling we could muster, but not deadly.  There are lots of pieces of media that portray "danger" but nobody (important) dies.  There are also other people who are particularly against bad endings and here we were tossing one an unskippable one.

And the realization of this kept me up for at least a night as well.  I imagined floods of bad reviews pouring in about how we didn't tell people, but if we told them we'd be accused of trigger warnings or giving away parts of the plot! We made a boo boo. 

Kayla was the one who outlined it simply to say there were bad endings with death and blood.  Easy. We had to. (We were really outlining the death and bad endings.  There was a vampire in the game, there was going to be blood.  If anything that was a red herring.)

The warning wasn't born out of the want to softly take care of our players or even to actually warn them.  It was stating what our game was at the offset, so if people didn't think it was for them they could avoid it. And for everyone who stayed, we oriented them into what to expect.

As far as I know we haven't kept anybody else up for negative reasons.  It's always "I stayed up all night to play N2".  I like that better.