IntroductionIn the “Lab of God” game section in Goddess Maker, one of the implemented elements to deter feelings of monotonous grind are the random events that occur between the day’s work shifts that typically place the player and partner characters in wacky scenarios that involve the player making a choice. Included in these random events are “External Dilemmas” that involve the outside world imposing itself on the lab’s ongoing affairs.
Thematic SummaryExternal Dilemmas are very much the inverse of Social Experiments, as instead of the lab pestering outside strangers for scientific data to better their credentials and prestige, the strangers come to bother the lab with issues.These issues are diverse, but often present themselves in the aesthetic of a “transitionary” humanity in the future post-liberal world that the “Lab of God” game section takes place in.As time passes in-game and the surrounding local community goes through their own social evolution, exhausting their late liberal legacy behavior of grifting and basing their lives around money to becoming a society of ascension, trickled down by the lab’s faustian developments, the world around the lab metamorphoses into a civilization quite unorthodox and absurd, as it is additionally encased in higher degrees of severity.
Growing Severity of DilemmasFollowing the ever-upgrade of absurd occurrences in the timeline of canon events in the “Lab of God” game section that the lab faces as it procrastinates on the ascension to godhood research and realization, this increase of severity also affects the kinds of External Dilemmas that the lab encounters, whether brand new due to arrival, or an evolved continuation of former circumstances that embraces the updated realities of the new setting.Like, for example, as the player character and partner character settle to change the nature of their purchased Super Lab, during the transition from month 4 to 5, to become much like a fortress of sorts to safeguard the lab’s research and act as a center of their expanding power, External Dilemmas of the localized nuisance variety are filtered out to those that pose a higher class of dilemma more equivalent to the ascended position of the lab itself, such as a transition from encountering rural grazing field animals to imposing powerful entities with superpowers arriving with a focused agenda to disrupt the manufacturing ability of the lab.Nevertheless, the upward rise of External Dilemma severity over the timeline of events is only one part of the potential of the mechanic, as the full realization concerns the lasting consequences that are built up within an External Dilemma event series.
Dilemma Continuity and ConsequenceA key difference between External Dilemmas and the general “domestic” Random Events apart from the involvement of a third party is that External Dilemmas don’t repeat, but echo with verses, meaning that as the player encounters External Dilemmas, the choices made in-event are remembered in the later encounter.This successive structure of continuity also allows for branching paths to diverge on top of the game section’s ingrained timeline mechanic, as well as accumulate lingering consequences to build up and spill out at a later junction.For example, in the External Dilemma “Desperation,” a ground-to-earth storyline where a pathetic guy asks for cash, the player character can opt to give money, creating a dependency issue, or refuse to provide charity, manifesting a hidden resentment for the lab that can reveal itself when a communal opportunity strikes to bandwagon a backlash against the lab when it becomes inflicted with a fallen reputation soaked with controversy and impaired with vulnerability, vice versa if the lab seeks an advocate to defend its “good” name.Granted that the lab’s interaction with the outside world has a butterfly effect of causality, or “side-consequence”, the choices taken during External Dilemmas should be wary of manifesting prolonged social reverberations.
Manifesting Side-ConsequencesExternal Dilemmas are typically contained in a self-enclosed event space where most of the lasting consequences are kept sequential to that event chain, but for others like Freda’s “The Offer” External Dilemma, a decisive choice made in that event adds a new impending factor to the ongoing daily grind gameplay, evolving a periodically encountered event with minor lingering consequences to become a major side-consequence that frequently presses against the game’s ornate narrative.For instance, the previously mentioned player manifested Freda’s Height Obsession Side-Consequence, dominoes into a whole “route” of sorts where dating her becomes accessible and her more significant involvement in the lab’s affairs affects the way the events, such as the ones in the aristocratic month 3-4 “The Corporation/Shakers” arc, are approached.There’s also the case of the player choosing to add additional difficulty to a playthrough through the External Dilemmas like with the example of the External Dilemma “Boobs 4 College” where the player character can challenge themselves by spending a large sum of money at the start which then snowballs into a larger debt to be paid later.And as a reward for scaling the difficulty upwards, in terms of the “Boobs 4 College” event, adds Alice as a recurring character with her own side-consequence and unique storyline, who would otherwise not appear in a significant fashion in the game section.Like the mental impediments and the aforementioned makeshift difficulty slider, giving in and inviting problems through the Side-Consequences adds to the struggle, but it is an opportunity to make use of it like a stepping stone, as keeping the player character and partner character strictly isolated within the lab would be a path free of Side-Consequences, but would also be the route where progress is the slowest and most hampered, as the world evolves at a pace faster than the lab, and so wields a constant power over the lab’s affairs.It should be mentioned for the sake of clarity that adding Side-Consequences to affect the timeline of the game isn’t as significant as a true route change like failing to pay the debt in month 2 and being transitioned into the “Society of Superheroes” game section, where it is akin to starting a new game. It’s more that Side-Consequences affect other Side-Consequences that are in competition with each other, a complicated system to explain, so think in the example of the lab working within Marissa’s clean political structure, as opposed to utilizing Freda’s height obsession as a bludgeon for the lab to take a more assertive political power position, but rest assured that “canon” events are undisturbed and the Side-Consequences trend toward intersection, even if dismissed after the fact.
External Dilemma Encounter Rate Mechanically, the External Dilemma encounter rate is restricted to if the preconditions are met in order to make full opportunity of the one-time non-repeated occurrence, such a restriction on the selection of available events reflecting the direction in which the lab’s science has progressed.And thus, after meeting the criteria, the External Dilemma is added to the random event queue, and while it appears randomly, there is a last opportunity mechanism to play the event in order to toggle on the lingering consequences, so that the player isn’t forced to resort to a new playthrough, granted that the external world changes in a non-reversing direction, unlike the domestic alternative whose framework of content accessibility is freely malleable and reversible with no time constraints, laying the foundation for the active competitive and changing relationship game between the player and partner characters to take place.Of course, with the issue of the limited days and the bloated amount of events, there is a lingering concern that requires remedy, through the player’s replayability of the game.
The Intention of Replayability Since the game sections of Goddess Maker are designed to be replayable in the long form to reach differing ascension conclusions, randomizations and branching events that are encountered leading up to the grand motivation are personalized to provide a varied, non-repetitive playthrough experience to the player. As implied, there’s no developer-intended playthrough where 100 percent of the content can be experienced in a sequential order, so missing content in a first playthrough is the normal progression path, as further sequential playthroughs are required to well-round out the game’s full experience. When the product is in its complete form, I intend it as an experience where the player starts at the lab, works their way towards an ascension route, reaches an outcome in the ascension route, and finally experiences a god being born and the prolonged consequences from it, all being a unique flowing experience with common groundwork, of course, but still being a “point lab” to “point god” experience with quite a number of differences per playthrough.
Living Community of CharactersAnother selling point of the External Dilemmas is the interaction between the lab and the community that resides around it.Given the large cast of characters whose presence is fluid among the various game sections, I hope to invoke the feeling of living in a growing, transitive community that is affected by the lab and can be observed as having changed, such as being physically transformed.As External Dilemmas are a method of changing the characters over time, as they make direct contact with the lab, it is a key focus when considering their independent character transformation.Technically, any character that’s not the player character, the player character’s pig (when sexual content is off), and the partner character is an External Dilemma character candidate.And when considering the significant characters and less significant strangers, it’s typically sorted by name.Like if a character is referred to as a “pathetic guy” or “salesman,” then they are classified as a stranger who doesn’t have a major side-consequence to the lab and so aren’t a major contributing force, but if given a name like “Freda” or “Marissa,” then they should be expected to have a larger role and a side-consequence that impacts the affairs of the lab.There are exceptions, of course, as the game is opened up to involve community content, but it is the developer’s naming configuration.
Extraordinary External DilemmasAlthough game design-wise a purposeful destabilization of the mechanic, there are “Extraordinary” External Dilemmas in the “Lab of God” game section that possess a continuity similar to the ordinary External Dilemmas; however, these quite severely affect the flow of the ongoing ordinary gameplay, similar to the typical portal-opened Extraordinary Events that incite large transformative change and then whose continuity is thus cut.And in terms of the meteorite exonyte storyline of building the portal summoner for the purpose of using it as an opportunity to ascend, it is these extraordinary External Dilemmas that possess this hypothesized opportunity, but it would still require the prep work of completing the prerequisite steps through months 3 to 8, and then making claim to the ascension months 9 to 10 when the world has been altered enough to actualize it.