VR Friends List

This is a companion discussion to Virtual Reality With Friends, literally: it’s where I’m talking about companions I am building into the title. As your choice of companion influences how each game proceeds, and how the other character treats yours in VR, it’s pretty important to know who you’re teaming up with.

Most of the characters are written as students of the nearby university, as you will see.

The Boys

• Aiden (bi M). Likes to play straight M, bi M, bi F, straight F. Aiden is handsome and friendly and gets along with everyone. He’s also bisexual and pretty flexible about what kinds of roles he will play.
• Ashton (straight M). When stuck in the real world, he’s a skinny, shy nerd who barely can stand talking to anyone, and as a Math major, he’s usually the TA nobody notices who does all the grading. In VR, however, Ashton plays the boldest, toughest, manliest straight M roles you can think of, and he always stays in character. VR is where he goes to be the man he wishes he could be in the real world.
• Bryson (straight M). He’s a friendly geek of the talk-your-ear-off variety, a Comp Sci major who fearlessly strikes up a conversation with anybody about anything. In VR, he doesn’t ever play men, because that’s boring. (He can do that in real life.) Instead, he plays bi F, lesbian F, or straight F.
• Elijah (straight M). He’s a mellow stoner and philosophy major who mostly hangs out at the VR parlor as an alternative to living in the real world. He’ll play straight M roles, but he’s always wondered what it would be like to play a lesbian F role. He’s never done it because he doesn’t think he’s be very good at it.
• Lucas (gay M). Lucas is quiet and unassuming, a Music major with a very conventional look, but he has a hidden wild child that comes out in VR. In virtual reality he can pull off mesh shirts and ripped abs and purple-tipped hair and half-shaved looks with earrings. He prefers to play a gay M, but he’ll be shocked how much fun it is being straight M or straight F if you can get him to try it.
• Mason (straight M). Mason is kind of a jock, or at least he used to be. He’s still pretty boisterous and rough-and-tumble, like a big friendly dog, and he claims what he wants is to play big tough straight M roles where he gets lots of time with the ladies. If you can trick him into playing a straight F, he’ll be surprised at how much fun that is, too...
• Sawyer (bi M). Actually, Sawyer has been questioning his own identity, wondering if he might not be trans. He may go so far as to admit it to you, depending how you speak to him. If he hasn’t decided to come out, he will play only straight M roles; if you get him to confess, he will also play bi F or straight F.
• Tristan (straight M). He’s an academic, a matter-of-fact sort of guy with an interest in literature and a wide ironic streak. He might belittle some of your story choices, calling them predictable or puerile, especially those that seem custom-made for people to have sex or for men to parade around as bouncing, big-breasted lesbians. Of course that doesn’t stop him from enjoying those roles; he’ll still play lesbian F and straight M roles.

The Girls

• Aurora (straight F). She’s kind of an odd duck, a believer in crystals and fates and reincarnation. She thinks she was a straight male in her past life, and had been sent back to live as a woman to learn some balance. She will play straight F or straight M, although she tries to warn you that she wasn’t very nice to women in her past life as a man.
• Other characters have been defined but not written or fleshed out.

Virtual Reality With Friends

I am experimenting around with Twine to see what kind of complexity the engine can generate. The second game that leapt to mind was a visit to a virtual reality salon with a companion of your choice. It’s not a complicated idea, but it might push Twine to do things it was not intended to do, so I’m curious to see how far I can get this project to go.

Starting Your Character
At the beginning, you choose your starting sex. Your choices are Only Male, Only Female, Start Male and Start Female. If you choose Only you are signaling that your character will always play roles in games that are compatible with that sex. If you choose Start, you are saying your character might play  a role of the opposite sex during a game.

You then choose orientation. This is straightforward.

Last, and only if you choose Start, you decide what orientation you will be if you play the opposite sex.

Choosing A Companion
There are five lobbies to choose from, around which are scattered various NPCs. They have their own likes and dislikes, and they too know what roles in games they are willing to play (although they won’t always admit openly which roles those are). You can check out several companions and see what they’re like, then choose one.

Choosing A Game
At the moment there are two sample game worlds:

• Land of the Five Red Kings, a Barbarian sword and sandal game
• Pirates of Solace Bay, a world of 17th-century pirates.

When you have chosen a world you can see a number of titles. These are games you can play within that world. Each title has two roles, Player 1 and Player 2, which are predefined. For instance, Player 1 might say “Crelborn the Barbarian, straight male” and Player 2 says “Princess Isayra, straight female.”

It also gives you plot details, particularly if something happens to one of those two characters (for instance, if Crelborn and Princess Isayra switch bodies).

Telling Your Companion About The Game
The last thing before leaping into the game world is telling your companion about the title you chose. You can tell the truth and admit the whole plot, or you can just tell your companion what the starting characters are. In the example above, you’d tell your friend he can play Crelborn the Barbarian... but you’d withhold the crucial detail that Crelborn doesn’t stay male for long. Depending on your companion’s likes and dislikes, you might be able to get him into a game, playing a role that he didn’t quite expect...

Enter The Game World
I haven’t got to this point yet, the part where the content is, but you’ll be able to play various titles with a number of different NPCs and see their varied reaction to the same game.

Proof of Concept Version
I started by building the skeleton to the game to see if Twine could handle the variables I needed. It is to be found here: Virtual Reality With Friends (POC).