When I started working on Bindr, I had no idea how elaborate it would become or how popular some characters would be. Soumya's progression in many ways owes a lot to Swagmaster Supreme who pretty much helped define her character. The whole thing was a very thin wrapper around a desire to explore this notion of a dating app where you go on dates with girls.
Thus, I focused all my attention on that single mechanism within an engine that really wasn't good at anything other than visual novels. The phone in pre-0.20.x was just a fake background wrapped around a fake app which consisted of a screen where you scroll through girls and basically auto-match. As the messaging mechanism was built on top of NVL (basically abusing Renpy), it meant that you could never revisit history just like you can't reasonably replay a scene.
The "NVL phone texting mode" was just a skin on the "regular clicking through the pages of the novel" bread and butter of RenPy, you literally even had to click outside the phone to progress. I mean, you could cheese the system so the phone background turns off and the NVL message bubbles stay up awkwardly in the air... As it was literally faked, superimposed on top of each other.
This irked me to no end. But it wasn't a dealbreaker. But as the thing grew, adding regions and more and more elaborate dates, and further development of the relationship with Soumya (and others), a few key problems arose:
These people can't stay on a dating app when they're basically almost in a relationship. It's ridiculous. But the phone was fake and Soumya didn't have a phone number to give even if it weren't fake / superficial.
Where does Soumya live? In pre-0.20.x, the locations were just singular images, even with the small perspective fakeness, I didn't really manage to get a proper location and map system going to give a sense of space.
Locations need to be able to programmatically evolve, perspectives need to be able to change, points of interests that can be interacted with should conditionally change based on said interactions. Hell, people move, people die, people do stuff. Static just doesn't work.
At one point, Soumya asks you to take a photo of her in Paris, you do so and you have no "haptic" feedback on what happened. It is only implied in dialogue that MC sent the photo to her. There was no Photos app to store it and the option to literally send and embed it in a message.
And these seem like small considerations, but really what it required, for this type of game is a realistic phone. Which can install new apps and come with the default ones, you need to be able to access contact information, exchange contact information, message people on the built in app, have interactions built in, be able to switch between apps as needed.
It can't be just a fake background around a girl selection screen. Actual conversation system had to be fully implemented, and this is a massive chore in a single-threaded engine where you can't have simultaneous things occurring. Creating the illusion that people are writing messages in realtime while you go off and do other things is non-trivial.
Contacts, Messages, Photos, Bindr, this, that. And they all had to interop. On top of that, I needed a system that can support adding new applications (cards) as needed. Because there is video games inside the game, real estate for buying that club (I haven't forgotten), region traversal so you need an app to buy airline tickets.
Basically, there was months of work to do there, just to create the foundation on which these things can play out reliably. So that MC can actually go over to Soumya's place. And that that place is actually rooted on the map, with a known position. And knowing which goddamn day it is in the week, what time of day approximately. All sorts of stuff.
This foundation now exists. The Soumya problem is solved, and it applies to everyone. It is insanely flexible.
I could, and already have experimented with creating secondary origin characters in the "Bindr" world. Lesbian girl MC based out of a whole different city, different aparetment, different girls, using a completely different phone (visually). Because it's all self-contained and logically separated. Or a gym rat in London. Or whatever.