LoveChoice

Written before

  LoveChoice is an AVG game developed by Yaheng in GameJam, which was later completed and gradually improved. “What is love?” He tried to answer with this game. This game with a warm art style and plot not only relies on options to advance the plot, but also uses rich interaction to make the plot more full. By using an unexpected and reasonable way of interaction, to remind players to pay attention to details that are easily overlooked in emotions.

About the author

  Many people who have played LoveChoice may not have thought that Yaheng used to be an automotive embedded software engineer and part-time Japanese translator, without any experience in the gaming industry. Why choose to start making games? The following is Yaheng’s self statement about this.
   Yaheng: “Perhaps it’s due to a midlife crisis (laughs). A few years ago, I started thinking about what my lifelong career should be, and I also read some theories from others. I think there are two criteria that I agree with : 1. When you are very wealthy, you are still willing to do it. 2. When you do this, you can not be afraid of Monday. But in fact, the answer I have come up with is not to do games, but to do creative work. I hope to make creative work my lifelong career. It can be literature, video, movies, music, and of course, it can also be games. The reason why I chose games first is because games are the most familiar and my biggest hobby in these fields. The second is game development is relatively close to my own skill set. The third is that the earning methods of the game are relatively simple, easy to understand, and mature
   It can only be said that many people who love games have thought of making their own games, but few have the courage to start and persist like Yaheng.

About the game

  This is an AVG game with the theme of “love”. Its development team Akaba Studio only has one full-time, three art part-time, and one music part-time. Through the account of game supervisor Yaheng, who is also the only full-time developer Yaheng, we can learn more about the development story of LoveChoice.
   Yaheng has a habit of writing down game ideas he usually comes up with and keeping a record of them. He calls this folder “idea pocket”. There are dozens of game ideas inside, but for various reasons, they have not yet been made into games. One idea that existed a long time ago was to create an AVG where the answer was not included in the options. Yaheng: “This is actually a game idea that is close to a meta game. But if it’s just like this, it’s like let players down and it’s not helpful for the gaming experience. So this immature idea continues to sleep in my idea pocket.”.
   On Valentine’s Day in 2018, Yaheng played the debut Florence . The perfect integration of interaction and storytelling surprised him greatly, but Yaheng felt that the game had no feedback on the player’s choices. Yaheng: “I still remember seriously balancing the personal belongings of the male and female protagonists, trying to stop their arguments, and trying to make them improve. But these efforts have not received the ‘affirmation’ and ‘feedback’ of the game. Of course, this may also be a design trade-off made for the gaming experience, but I still can’t help but think, if these efforts can be ‘accepted’ and given ‘feedback’ by the game system, would it be good?”
 &In July 2018, Yaheng and a group of friends participated in a game competition. The theme is a painting of a man and a woman embracing each other, where two different effects can be seen. Not long after seeing this painting, Yaheng felt like “all the clues were connected!” and later completed the demo version of LoveChoice. You can tell from the name that LoveChoice is a game related to love. Regarding love, Yaheng also has his own opinion: “I believe that everyone have their own understanding of love, and the important thing is that they have truly thought about it. The decisions and behaviors thay make for love should be considered as love. I hope that players can try to understand different perspectives through this work, and then think about their own suitable view of love, instead of simply accepting opinions in the game or other popular views on love in society and the internet.”
   When creating the story, Yaheng hopes to create a different effect from ordinary love AVGs, weakening the characters, emphasizing the story, and emphasizing the commonalities of the story, which is his main direction when creating the story of “Picking Love”. He hopes that players will not simply immerse themselves in the characters in the story, but use these stories to connect the plot of the story with their own life experiences, thereby achieving empathy. In order to weaken the characters themselves, in some stories, he did not even give each character a name. It is also hoped that players can focus on the story itself rather than the characters. This is exactly opposite to the design approach of many AVGs that shape a strong character and design stories around the character.

Written behind

  What I want to introduce has been mentioned in the previous text, so let’s end with Yaheng’s words.

Here, I just want to thank all the players who have experienced the game.
Thank you for taking the time to experience the game we have created.
Thank you all for liking this work.
Thank you to everyone who was moved, pondered, and shed tears because of this work.
With everyone’s support, I have temporarily survived!
I will continue to work hard (｀･ω･´)ゞ