I launched my demo of Aftersoul on Feb 15th - and am pleasantly surprised by the reception!
A big thank you to everyone who clicked through. This is just the start!

For those that haven't tried it out, you can do so over on: https://ruttingroads.itch.io/aftersoul
If you're interested in updates on the project, make sure to check out the discord: https://discord.gg/Harpb9XS

Here's what has already been found and fixed for the next version:
-Fixed Surrender Bug
-Fixed UI Input Bug
-Fixed/Changed Hotkey Usage in combat
-Optimized repeated dialogue
-Balanced intro fight difficulty
-Adjusted text in many areas to better guide players
-Added a Continue button in the menu for current sessions
-Created a 'Context Stinger' that pops up - notifying players of various unlocks, as well as when to save.
-Overhauled Level Up UI to hopefully negate bugs people were having.
-Updated Carp portrait art
-Updated Hunter's pathway art

Now that Heir is over, I thought I would do myself the pleasure of a post-mortem to cycle through my thoughts.

Interactive stories are a hard medium to tackle. I’ve seen several over my years wherein the users fixate on… uh… simping, and then steer the narrative directly towards the hot and heavy. These types of stories are often incredibly difficult to balance, as creating an engaging narrative is a challenge in-and-of-itself when dealing with a collective that can’t always agree.

So, I decided to build restrictions and compromises into the gameplay loop. The character the players embody was not given 100% agency over the narrative. Hero was technically the ‘main character’ of Heir, and the overall purpose of the narrative was to have the players and our Hero influence one another throughout their journey. The players got to name themselves, and were immediately given the capacity to influence Hero. In this way, Vessalus was a great way of wrangling player choice, whilst still maintaining the pacing of the overall narrative.

From there, the rest of the gameplay loop revolves around Hero’s overall goal.
Gather all the keys.
Grow strong enough to beat the current King.

The first goal was objective - a task that required players to navigate the board and interact with the various npcs to gain each item. The second task’s solution, however, was entirely subjective, and not one I wanted to be obvious from the get go. The main narrative force that would drive this home was Erros, who acted as an early antagonist to Hero. Their presence was a reminder that the keys alone would not be enough to prove victorious.

That first goal, the keys, is enough of an early motive to move the characters along. Players were given full agency over where they wished to move about the board, but there was still an ‘intended’ path - cyclical in nature. However, the second goal’s solution was never planned, and I knew it would be up to the players to define what victory and strength meant to them. Hero was perhaps the only narrative force I had to help embody, or mold player perspective of ‘strength’, and I’m very happy with how that was presented. Main Characters can fall into a lot of easy pitfalls, but having Hero be the emotional support - unerring and undeterred - was a really fun dynamic. He’s just really cool, you know?

Beyond the objectives, came staging the narrative. I am not entirely satisfied with the delivery of the world of Heir, and it was definitely held back in many ways. Single paneling and my budding art skills turned most of Heir into dense paragraphs of exposition, where I would throw complicated and often cryptic terms at players. Those that are engaged might enjoy the speculation and drops of lore, but it’s not exactly an appealing process to go through to the uninterested. I have no doubt that many just glimpse the pictures, interact with the poll, if any, and go on with their day - just as I am sure there’s a good percentage of people that might skip /some/ of the text, opting to only read the dialogue within the picture itself. That’s all totally okay, and not something I was miffed by, but I still feel like it’s important to note. The medium, at many times, felt like it was conflicting with the type of story I was telling. This, however, didn’t stop me from seeing the story through.

I will admit, the concepts at hand were a bit too over the top, especially when this is my first attempt at something like this. However! I am never one to skimp, and so I really wanted to tackle a world like this. This narrative was built on the backbone of the word “Conceptual”, and I knew from an early stage that this wasn’t just going to be a fantasy earth with humans, elves, and dragons. I wrote a little style guide to better define how the world works, it’s magic system (literal willpower), and the forces that control it. From there, I just wrote in characters that would have an interesting dynamic to the overall themes I was building upon.

Kallus - Antagonist in the first half. Protagonist in the second. Early on, I wanted Hero to be at odds with giving in to his draconic half, and I really wanted someone like Kallus there to showcase that being draconic wasn’t really ‘that bad’. Having fun is okay! And Kallus was to be hedonism incarnate. His early role in the story was intentional, and I wanted him to be a bit of an unreliable narrator in the first half. Verdaine was always directly connected to Kallus, and I wanted him to be a bit more untrustworthy in his aid at an early stage - being an expository source on Heirs and the draconic unraveling that became of him. That didn’t happen, as players didn’t vibe out with him in his home, but we still got to see that exposition at a later stage.

Fi - Finder was to be an extraterrestrial threat, and a kind of… parasitic… unexpected nuisance of an antagonist. For a good portion of Heir, he is our primary villain, acting in Hymn’s place to wrangle things. I wanted the dynamic of Mimic/Fi to be a big source of expository for Vessalus, by reflecting future events. Mimic assuming direct control of Fi was a big necessity in my mind, so a lot of time was devoted there. Mimic reflects a lot of Ves’ own repressed struggles, and I really wanted to show off those themes of identity and shared willpower with Mimic to lead into Ves’ incorporation as a character within the narrative. I really didn’t want him to be conventional, in appearance, and I happen to really like the look of the octopus elephant dude. He’s like an illithid, but stockier! Idk, he’s cool, and I like that he’s niche.

Ember - Ember was the fun one, and my attempt to expand the narrative a bit to the world beyond the cave. I definitely failed to make the bar feel real, mainly out of fear of showing other Heirs in the bar and opening an entire can of worms, but that’s all very unimportant to the overall purpose Ember served in the story. Again, I wanted to show that many entities could exist as the same individual, and I wanted to show how at peace they were with that. They definitely still needed external validation, something which the bar no doubt was created to serve, so most of their narrative started and ended with Hero telling them they’re a good boy. And that’s okay! He served his purpose quite well, narratively, and was really fun to bring to life.

Champion/Verdaine - Champion and Verdaine really got the short end of the stick, but I’m not too worried about that. Verdaine was always a supporting motive to Kallus, and their expository happened really late into the narrative. Champ, on the other hand, had a very high chance of showing up sooner in the story than later, and players kind of missed out on seeing a lot of Champ’s story. I know, I know, I kind of steered players away from making the choice to go to the Champion’s Pif, but it’s not like I didn’t have plans if they /happened/ to go there! Either way, we still get to see Champ post-Ember-validation, wherein we see an active Ember turning the broken in Champion into his submissive plaything. Sadly, we just… never saw Champ in his prime, but again, that’s okay! An interactive story shouldn’t be designed to show off everything, or else that’s not very interactive, huh?

Erros - My favorite character. No matter what I make, I always end up with some sort of enigmatic… dramatic… He/Him and They/Them… loser. I love Erros. I love that he’s sassy. And muttering. And just. Messily entangled with Hero’s life, in a really weird way. Erros is cool, and he fit his role in the story quite well. If they didn’t fight Erros early on and just ran away, then Hero never would have gotten separated from Ves, and it’s just. Cool. To see those side narratives play out when they had a chance not to. Also, the visions Ves got would always happen, though the order that the player chose them would greatly change the context of the information within each. Getting to see the Void Prince’s realm, however, was not an example of railroading.

Hymn - It’s interesting to have an antagonist who isn’t in the story for a predominant portion. A lot of his wrongdoings are implied, or passed off from Fi’s actions (of which he likely allowed). So he’s not really a character, until he is. And I happened to like that. I think there was enough grudge-fueled motivation from Hero early on to support Hymn as this… unknown threat, and the fight that cues after Fi is defeated was a wonderful transition into heightened stakes. Erros was also always intended to interrupt us from meeting an early demise, and his sudden absence was a sort of… cementing… of needing to shift focus onto the secondary objective of ‘growing stronger’. Could the final encounter have involved more combat? Probably. But I think it’s also pretty fitting for someone like Hero to talk his way out of a situation.

MAJOR THEMES
Now to talk about the themes!

Respect - Oftentimes in the ‘fandom’, I’ll read some dom/sub stories and kind of just… feel a bit uncomfortable, with the depictions of power dynamics (even if they’re most likely some fantastically fun for those that enjoy them). Hero, in many ways, was my attempt to show what an ideal dominant personality is to me. Fi’s whole bratty display in the second half of Heir was where this theme of Respect shines the most. To /want/ to do right by someone is just. Such a cool theme. And to see Fi realize that he can /have/ agency and /still/ surrender himself to Hero was really fun.

Identity - Ves and Hymn being the same person was in place from the very beginning. A lot of the character stories relate to how a character’s views might conflict, both from outward pressures or a lack of inward validation. Ves represented Hymn’s unsustainable insatiability (player lust and fixations), and his doubts (indecision and eventual majority ruling of player choice). It was neat to see Hero use our main character to gain the upper hand with Hymn, whilst also mirroring this as a ‘repairing’ of sorts. However, I don’t think that healing process has even remotely begun within the confines of Heir. Instead, we see how it could play out through other characters, such as Ember’s contentment with splitting, and Fi’s newfound authority.

Validation - The idea that you have to have a helm to be on the throne is not backed by anything, other than social stigma. Kallus and Verdaine represent complete inward validation through being okay with oneself, attempting to break the cycle that the notion that embracing your draconic heritage somehow ‘ruined’ them. The word corruption is just so loaded with context in the real world, that it makes for a perfect juxtaposition here. To ‘corrupt’ is to make something impure, but that word is also used far too much to describe basic indulgence, or rebellion from the status quo. We see complete validation through Ember, who is okay with themselves, yet still needing that ‘outside approval’ from Hero. Yet we would never describe Ember as corrupt, no? At the end of the day, Kallus and Verdaine are ‘corrupt’ because there is a preconception of what they should be. But because they can’t fit that description, they are othered. Ember represents a kind of… new generation, wherein they are so freed of the social conceptions around them, that the notion that they could be an Heir is surprising (spoilers, Ember could definitely be next on the throne).

Existence - These characters don’t exist like we do. Erasure is literally a threat to them. Fractures in their world threaten the fabric of their reality. Heirs are literally forged by the traits that reflect them from an early stage. It’s all on the nose, really. Yet within this space, there’s a lot of room to talk about how much ‘existing’ means to us. In this way, the rules aren’t /that/ much different than our own. Identity death carries a great deal of importance in this story, implying that many Heirs have been battered so much that they are completely different people than they were, however many years ago. And this theme of existence is very. Very. Vague. Perhaps my most vague. Yet it’s core to the narrative, I feel, and definitely a major theme. For many, we live our lives with a sense of purpose, and while I can’t pretend like Heir accurately answers the ‘meaning of existence’, I do think it portrays what it means on a level beyond life and death.

Okay, all of that talk about themes is a bit too full of itself for my liking, but still! That’s the point of a post mortem.

As for Twitter, it definitely feels like a dying platform. I do think it’s a bit sad that I can’t properly archive this thing on a website, but I’m just not… willing… to put in that level of work for what ultimately correlates to a bit of porn that takes itself too seriously. Still, if this resonates with just a single person, I consider it a fruitful endeavor.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or comments, feel free to drop them here, and I will happily respond.