Gabu!! ☁️ ΘΔ

preface: i know ideas are cheap and like yeah realistically nobody's going to "steal my game idea", which is why i feel like i should just post about it a little to get my ideas out there and maybe get some thoughts from people, but just bear with me if i'm being a little secretive about it :-)

also warning i'm gonna be rambling on a bit

i've been annoyed by the lack of good games that 1) let you be a funny animal critter, and 2) are about transforming into a funny animal critter but don't have TF as the game-over state. i love the pokemon mystery dungeon games for this because they're like the only games that has both of these aspects

relatedly, i've been annoyed at animal crossing for just refusing letting you be an animal person, and nobody seems to want to make an animal crossing ripoff that lets you be an animal person???

i want to help change this. i want to make furry games. i want to make TF games.

i have a pretty good idea for general gameplay premise in my head which i'm really excited about, but what i'm struggling with is the like... general flow of the storytelling in my head? TF is hard to write when you're writing a game and not a story, and also want to keep the scope of the game manageable lol

to make it easier i'll just take a concrete example, lets say human -> quadruped dragon. for a good TF story you'd need 3 components:

1. the "before" state. without this there is no contrast with the "after" state. if you don't flesh this out then the transformation has less impact. you NEED to see the human form to appreciate the dragon form.

   but are you gonna make a game where you play as a human for like an hour and then you turn into a dragon and have vastly different gameplay? human can open doors, quadruped dragon can't even fit through a door let alone open them. would that even be fun to play? and as a gamedev you're literally giving yourself double the work

   it's fine for a written story, but it's really easy for a "prologue" like that to drag on and just feel annoying. imagine playing pokemon but for the first hour you don't have a pokemon, and don't do any catching or battling. you don't even SEE a pokemon. or a mech game where for the first hour you're just John Callofduty shooting guns on the ground. that'd suck!! you want to jump right into the gameplay you'll actually be doing (and the player will WANT to be doing)

2. the "transformation". most of the fun in transformation art and writing is in here. a written story can drag this out over the course of most of the story. but for a game... you can't really DO a lot with this?

   this part is something that happens, it's something you passively consume (cutscene), not something you actively do (gameplay)

   i mean, you could make a game where over the course of the game you transform more and more and unlock new abilities, and only near the end of the game are you finally fully transformed. but to me, if i want to play a game where you get to be a dragon, i want a game where you get to be a dragon, not one where you're a dragon for the final boss

3. the "after" state. realistically if you're making a TF game where the TF isn't a game over state... this is where your gameplay is gonna happen... and it's a little bit of a shame.

   pokemon mystery dungeon starts here. it skips right through stages 1 and 2. you're being told that your character used to be a human.

   i guess it gets away with this because it's not trying to be a TF game. but i am...

part of the problem here is that like, theres obviously a difference between a more roleplaying choose-your-own-adventure game that's about your character that you create, and a linear game with a pre-defined character where it'd be much easier to write a TF story because it'd be more of a "playable movie"

i guess to give another concrete example: animal crossing games start you out at the start of your "new life". your fresh start. you don't get to see where your character used to live, you don't spend any time with their old friends, etc. there's a good reason they do this!

EDIT: or take stardew valley for example. the opening is like 3 minutes long, it shows you Grandpa On His Shitty Freaking Bed, it shows the player character's old awful life as a corporate wage slave and it shows their decision to leave it behind and become a farmer. but it gets to go through the story setup this fast, because, it's not a game about transforming from an office worker into a farmer. it's a game about being a farmer, who is a former office worker.

but for a hypothetical "tf animal crossing", i'd be stuck between two bad options

1. bore a player with pre-TF content before the "real game" begins, which animal crossing skips for a good reason
2. massively weaken the TF aspect of the story by skipping over the actual TF, leaving me with only post-TF writing to capture that aspect. it'd be a lot of telling and not a lot of showing

ughhhh this is hard!!!