Continuing romances from previous games

In the image above, you see the "Romances Graph", a thing I like to make for all my RPGs, since romance plays an important role in all my games :)

In practice describes all the romance options available when playing the game with both characters (genders).

Those of you who played the first Planet Stronghold game will be happy to know that I'm not writing it myself :D so you can expect a much better writing this time! Aleema is in charge (same writer of Loren Amazon Princess) and from what I've seen so far, it will be awesome. Maybe it's because I'm a fan of sci-fi but reading the intro scenes got me the chills!

There will be time to talk about the new, refreshing plot (which will show the main character not as the classic "invincible hero", but more his/her human aspect) but for now I want to talk about the great idea the writer had, to continue the previous game romances.

I must say in the beginning I was scared since was something I never tried to, and was unsure about how/if that could work. But now I'm sure it was a great idea!

For those worried about keeping 4-5 versions of the first game save files, no worries: I've decided that is pointless to do that. I mean, since the only information passed from the first game to the sequel is who you were loyal to (Empire or Rebels) and who you romanced (which character), I thought to just show that as choices to pick during the character creation, as seen below:

It's much simpler to do that ;) in the same screen you can choose the difficulty level, your class and other stuff yet to be coded. As always remember that the screenshots posted here are all work in progress and might differ a lot from the final version.

So, based on your initial choice, the game changes, showing different scenes for every romanceable character. For example below is a screenshot from the Joshua/Rebecca intro:

which you won't see if you picked another romance or for example Lisa. This leads to a lot of variety and increases the game replayability by A LOT! :)

At same time, it makes everything feel more epic. It's hard for me to describe with words, but instead of starting from zero, is like if you continue a story that apparently only ended a few years ago (of game time). Some romance intro are tender and romantic, other are tear-jerking, other are passionate, and so on. It's refreshing for once to start one of my games with an already established relationship, and makes you even more attached to your character and his/her partner.

Obviously you can pick the choice to have no previous romances, and also you'll be able to break your current relationship later in the story and pursue a new character. It will be interesting to read those scenes as well :)

Next time I hope to be talking about Heileen 3 and show you some of the rules for Planet Stronghold 2, since I'm still working on those. But I can say that differently from the first game it will use a perks system and lower scale skills.