About routes and content blocks

Forgive was an action-oriented experiment in a closed context, where my focus was to use attributes in content blocks. Essentially, whenever a scene starts, the attributes interact with a specific part, determining what will happen next. The problem with this was the content cut when a route is ignored. In my view, it didn't pay off, both narratively (and taking up a large unnecessary space mechanically) and because it required significant attribute interactions to vary the content block until it became interesting, which, honestly, I didn't find enjoyable.

Making Forgive made me realize some narrative limitations and helped me realize a few things, mainly about the English/Portuguese localization:

• I tried so many different formats that, in the end, I left something quite rudimentary. I didn't like it, but I felt that if I kept tinkering, I wouldn't finish. Forgive is a laboratory, and I managed to think of a better formatting through the experience.
• I'm not sure if I want to continue using attributes as if it were a tabletop RPG. The randomization is quite strange, and when I base my routes on it, on one hand, sometimes everything goes right, but on the other hand, everything goes very wrong. When I try to balance the probabilities of something happening, I still get a strange sequence. It seems to normalize if I keep interconnecting, and I can't explain technically, but I feel it's wrong. Even when I use randomization without any attribute influence for testing. For example, in three repetitions of 10 consecutive tests at 75%, needing to roll 76 or more to mark success, I only got 1 success. In the same test, but at 74%, I succeeded in all situations. Is it a matter of luck? It could be. Even when I went back to 75, again, I only had one success. It's weird. I rethought the attribute dynamics within the tool quite a bit.
• Consuming MP for actions and decreasing HP when taking damage might be more interesting on an accumulated scale of fixed values. This is because, mechanically, healing/regeneration scenes become more exciting this way, and when I rely on a random value (with the oddities I mentioned earlier), it doesn't help at all. In fact, I passed this mechanic to another project and am quite enjoying what happens.
• I've also been thinking about temporarily setting aside the possibility of creating your own character instead of a fixed cast because of... the language. I spend a lot of time adapting verb tenses, which in English is arguably practical, but in Portuguese, it isn't. I think that by improving my English, which is one of the reasons why I'm creating games, this problem will eventually disappear. But for now, it's a difference that takes up a lot of my time. In a larger-scale project, this will definitely be a problem, but it's also something distant, as I want to have 7 short experience projects.

Apart from that, it was a good experience, I learned a lot, and I hope to create something better next time because, overall, I don't feel like I made Forgive fun, and I released it this way because if I did what I was thinking, I would simply make another game with so many changes that I want to impose. In the future, I want to make a Forgive 2, treating this experience less as a training lab and more as something to have fun with, probably involving espionage, as I had a lot of fun writing that segment. Until next time!