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Spirit Cascade
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>dumb little pg-13 flash games
Oh wow you have other stuff? I did not know this. Would you mind providing a link?
As for The Limit of Flesh, well, why did you make it? What is the story you're trying to tell, the themes you're trying to explore? It seems to me like a kind of biological horror, forcing us to confront the ugly, disgusting, and animalistic aspects inherent in life and our own biology while hopefully finding some sense among the madness. I don't think that's a theme pursued very often, at least not with this much fervor, so it's novel at the very least.
(And, I'm asexual so I know I'm not a good judge of this, but I really don't see how anyone but the most niche fetishists could find anything in that quest truly arousing. I'm usually very dubious of claims of artistic nudity, but I am willing to believe that is the case here. Everything just seems so purposefully repulsive and wrong; even the protagonist is constantly disgusted by the sexual things going on. It might be a good idea to tone it down a little, maybe make it less rapey, but I think it does work to highlight the nauseating insanity of the themes.)
>I do really really struggle with the fact that taking every best suggestion usually means a main character just storms through effortlessly making no real errors or mistakes because things tend to go too predictably.
Maybe we're reading different quests, but I don't usually find this to be too big a problem. You can always ramp things up, make finding the "right" decision more difficult, make it so there isn't an objectively "right" decision in the first place, format the story around making interesting choices (like a visual novel) rather than just right/wrong ones...there are a lot of things you can do to counter the hyper-competence you'll inevitably find among experienced or smart players. But purposefully warping suggestions to go wrong feels like cheating to me. It gives off the impression that you view suggestions as a nuisance that you're grudgingly working around, and that just isn't a pleasant experience for anyone. There's also the fact that, from the player's perspective, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to how the protagonist interprets suggestions, as well as what will work and what won't. Their actions appear to produce totally random results, which will inevitably frustrate them and make them believe their actions are meaningless.
To be honest I don't really care about railroading - I'm not a player myself, and I have faith that you're a better writer than me and know what you're doing - but the suggestions really seem to be dragging you down, and in turn they drag the story down. If it's absolutely necessary that the protagonist makes a bad decision to continue the story, don't appropriate a suggestion to do it (as you did with Culya telling AXON exactly what she planned to do with the satellite), just make it part of a cutscene. You might still get people who say "why didn't we get a chance to do anything grr arg", but it's lesser of two evils.
At least you don't do the thing where you try to have your protagonist do or say as many suggestions as possible in an attempt to please everyone. It seems like a good idea in theory, but in practice it's incredibly jarring and shatters any pretensions of a consistent protagonist or coherent narrative structure. (See Bite Quest for an example of this.)
You're right about the blank slate protagonist issue, but well, that's sort of a necessary concession of the genre. (Lagotrope makes a decent attempt at a middle ground in some of his quests; I'm not sure how well he succeeds, but you can take a look at that.)
Have you read Weaver's quests? I feel like he's the best author I've seen at properly utilizing the medium, but even he slips up sometimes. NanQuest is a good example of making the puzzles really freaking hard to confound experienced players, and DiveQuest manages to work while still having a protagonist who's more than an extension of the players' will. Maybe you've seen it already, but he also has a tumblr post of general questing advice, here: http://tgweaver.tumblr.com/post/58014258870/the-most-important-advice-i-can-give-when-doing-a
Basically, to be honest, I think you are a very good video game writer, in that you make strong, atmospheric, and/or tactical stories with clearly defined branching points, but quests, at least from my uninformed perspective, seem to be a subtly different medium. The higher rate of constant low-level activity requires a different skillset and mindset, and perhaps a different kind of story as well.
But I am just one not-very-well-read guy who knows next to nothing about art, so take everything with a grain of salt.
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