Bionic Heart 2 - old beta test thread

[Aveline]

Ok, I've sent the save to the support e-mail

saved right after Lucas attacked Tanya.

btw, i'm a "her" not "his"
I thought Aveline is a girl name, oh well.. !

[P_Tigras]

The double genocide caught me by total surprise and it seemed rather weird that Lucas inexplicably went from being horrified at Sarah's bioweapon and wanting to develop a vaccine, to using the bioweapon to wipe out every human being on Mars aside from Helen, Tom & himself. It also seemed odd that Tanya talked Jason into releasing the bioweapon on Earth too despite the fact that I picked all the nice, humane decisions for her and Jason even accused her of being too nice just before their assault on Nanotech. I ended the game feeling rather disconnected from the ending since both Lucas and Tanya seemed very out of character when they each released the weapon.

A thing I plan to change is exactly this, let you choose what to do in the end rather than the game chooses for you. I started looking at the scenes and perhaps I could do it rather quickly without much rewriting. I wonder why I haven't thought about this sooner?

1) This sounded very good to me.
2) I would have replied to this earlier but unfortunately you locked the old thread before I could.
3) Now that I've played through 0.9.3 I'm disappointed that you didn't address this issue as I continue to feel very disconnected from the endings of the game.

I think if you can choose what to do at the end, it should be in a certain way limited by what you did before, otherwise it could be unbelievable. For example, in Jade Empire, you could choose the whole time to be selfish or caring, but still at the end you could change it with one decision. That was quite disappointing for me, nice guy all the time and at the end bad boy.

I'm a firm believer in actions having consequences, but when the way you're limited due to previous decisions comes across as capricious, arbitrary or just plain out of character, it's even worse than when you're given a choice irrespective of your previous choices. At least you feel in control of your destiny in the latter case.

---
For the record, I stuck to the same choices I made the last time around when I played version 0.8.3. Here are the results:

Version: 0.9.3
Scenes: 0, 2-12, 14-15, 17, 19-20, 22-24, 26-28, 30, 31, 34, 32, 37-39
Endings: Public Execution, Mystery Woman, Lost in Space

My game diverged when I hit scene 30 instead of skipping to scene 31 after scene 28 . Then instead of scene 35, I hit scenes 34 & 32, only to end with the same trio as before, 37-39. No Marsicide this time, instead there was a social fight that Tom won against Luke, causing Luke to kill himself. Gotta say, while the additional scenes gave me a better understanding of why Luke's feelings had changed, I still felt the transformation of the character I most closely identified with to be extreme, and I felt railroaded and dissatisfied by the ending. I will play around a bit with the endings, but I felt like control of Luke was taken away from me to turn him into some sort of crazy monster, and that once again, as in the previous version, Tanya's genocidal behavior in the end didn't match how I had played her earlier.

[P_Tigras]

Bug Report: If Tanya is killed in her boss fight with Julia, you get her death epilogue, and then jump to her electrocuting Julia as if she had never died.

Note: I enabled the combined endings at the beginning.

[jack1974]

Ok, I've sent the save to the support e-mail

saved right after Lucas attacked Tanya.

btw, i'm a "her" not "his"
I thought Aveline is a girl name, oh well.. !

Got it, thanks. I often type quickly

Now that I've played through 0.9.3 I'm disappointed that you didn't address this issue as I continue to feel very disconnected from the endings of the game.

so mistype his/her/him/etc.
Well IF I can make the game work, I'll be already VERY HAPPY... when I wrote that I thought I had to rewrite a good amount of the story but now seems that luckily I can released it as it was original planned... or maybe not

For the record, I stuck to the same choices I made the last time around when I played version 0.8.3. Here are the results:

Version: 0.9.3
Scenes: 0, 2-12, 14-15, 17, 19-20, 22-24, 26-28, 30, 31, 34, 32, 37-39
Endings: Public Execution, Mystery Woman, Lost in Space

Wait so you got THREE endings? that's way too much!
Well I see that this parallel thing is still quite bugged, so in the end I'm not sure if I'll release it. I'm giving myself a more week of attempt and then will decide. It's getting ridiculous that a VN, even with many choices and a complex plot like this, is taking so long to make. I'm sure I'm going to lose money on this already, and I want to "limit the damage".

Thanks about the last bug too, seems that I missed something when allowing the combined endings...

[P_Tigras]

Well with the exact same choices as above, aside from not copying Sarah's data this time around so Luke wasn't forced to kill her, I get only two endings, A New Life, and Lost in Space.

[jack1974]

Aveline, I checked your savegame file and I got Earth Sweet Earth ending!
But is also true that I did some changes here on my code. Anyway, is good, you managed to reach that ending that I thought was impossible

P_Tigras, there's a problem with the ending list, Pubilc Execution is Mars ending while Mystery Woman is an Earth ending. The way I coded, the Earth endings always show FIRST, so is impossible that you got first a Mars ending and then an Earth ending. Though I think might be because of that bug you reported (if Tanya is killed in last boss fight).
Otherwise I cannot explain how that's possible, the order in which the endings are played can't be changed by any bug

[jack1974]

Two endings is fine, since Lost in Space is more like an Epilogue.
Do you have a savegame where you got the 3 endings ?

[P_Tigras]

Aveline, I checked your savegame file and I got Earth Sweet Earth ending!
But is also true that I did some changes here on my code. Anyway, is good, you managed to reach that ending that I thought was impossible

P_Tigras, there's a problem with the ending list, Pubilc Execution is Mars ending while Mystery Woman is an Earth ending. The way I coded, the Earth endings always show FIRST, so is impossible that you got first a Mars ending and then an Earth ending. Though I think might be because of that bug you reported (if Tanya is killed in last boss fight).
Otherwise I cannot explain how that's possible, the order in which the endings are played can't be changed by any bug

Not even in a combined ending?

No, Tanya did not lose on my first play-through with 0.9.3 when I got the three endings. Later I went back and checked to see what would happen if she lost.

Chapter 38 ends with Luke holding a gun to his own head. He pulls the trigger for the public execution ending right after scene 39 ends, and after an investigation Tom and Ellen are executed on Mars too. End of game for all three of them. Then the Mystery Woman ending triggers and we find out about how things end for Tanya and Tina on Earth. Finally Lost in Space gives us Jason's fate. There is no contradiction here.

[jack1974]

Yes it makes sense from the plot/story, but doesn't make sense from the coding point of view. If was Mystery Woman first, then Public Execution, no problems.
But the endings are checked in this order:
1) if you got a combined ending, first check for SOME Mars ending that works with the combined ending (3,4,5,8) and then the combined endings
2) otherwise, checks first Earth-only, then Mars-only endings
so as you can see there's no possibility that appears first a Mars only ending, and then a Earth only ending! I think the problem was because I forgot a command, I noticed it because as you said if you fail Tanya fight shouldn't still go on, that was causing a lot more problems.
The trouble of such games is that ONE single bug can cause a "chain reaction" of problems, messing up many other things

[jack1974]

Anyway I uploaded 0.9.4 which:
- fixes the bug that would continue the story as if Tanya won the last boss fight when in reality she lost it (which had lots of further repercussions)
- fixes the bug that was making the end "Earth Sweet Earth" IMPOSSIBLE to reach. Aveline's savegame unlocked it, so now I'm sure you can get to it
- several other bugfixes thanks to Elmsdor testing. Basically I think all the endings can be reached now, both with the parallel plot turned on / off