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I have occasionally wondered whether the "surprise" that Renee occasionally mentions regarding the party is that Annie will be in attendance

This is great! Thank you for writing this.

Each plot centers around the central mystery of Starter Marriage, which is: Why did Annie leave?

This might be the most surprising thing you said here. I'm not sure this question has particularly been forefront for me, though I know the protag and Lorelei occasionally talk about it. Plus, until now, rejecting Annie has seemed pretty final.

This may be giving away more than I intend, but: The importance of why Annie left and whether the protagonist ever even speaks to Annie again are not, technically, the same question.

(How long are you planning to develop this game for? Even the amount of content I could foresee is a lot of dev time!)

I try not to think about that, lest I become completely demoralized! The person whose shoulders it *really* falls, though, is Plutonian Knight, who is not only producing all the line art for SM, but is also keeping SJI going. The man is a miracle of industry, let me tell you.

This is great! Thank you for writing this.

Each plot centers around the central mystery of Starter Marriage, which is: Why did Annie leave?

This might be the most surprising thing you said here. I'm not sure this question has particularly been forefront for me, though I know the protag and Lorelei occasionally talk about it. Plus, until now, rejecting Annie has seemed pretty final. I guess there's a lot more coming than I realized! (How long are you planning to develop this game for? Even the amount of content I could foresee is a lot of dev time!)

The voice the protagonist hears during the night between "The Girlfriend Experience" and "Relationship Goals" is not Dante.

Do you mean, "is not Renee"? It's a woman's voice, right? Unless there's a dark room sequence I've never seen...

Dante never controls the protagonist in the story so far.

Well, I got that one wrong. Very curious what exactly is going on after that particular dark room sequence then.

The decision as to whether or not to fly out to Annie is less important than it might initially seem.

That would track with what you said about her leaving being the central mystery.

There are important characters who have not even been mentioned yet.

I had a sneaking suspicion this was true; I only recently encountered dialogue from Lorelei that mentioned Allison might have been enslaved by someone from an office party. If there are lots of big characters we're yet to even meet, that sort of opens this game much wider than I'd been thinking about it. There's no way to figure out what's going on if I literally don't even know all the pieces yet! I guess I need to relax a bit more and just let the game unfold. (Spoiler: I will not relax a bit more lol.)

Oh, and as long as we are talking about statistics… I have a 'bot that repeatedly "plays" the story looking for different paths. It's extremely handy for finding bugs, since I get a set of a huge number of different possible states.

But it never gets them all. The best I can hope for is about 95% coverage, and that's with 250,000+ playthroughs. So, there are a lot of choices in this game.

Oh, right, a couple more things I wanted to mention:

Sometimes, it's obvious when a choice will affect one of the parameters.  If the protagonist evades telling Allison that it was Annie who texted at the start of the story, that has an affect on his trustworthiness.  Sometimes, it's very subtle.  Sometimes, it's impossible to tell, because you-the-player doesn't know what the truth is, but the protagonist does.  (Yes, that's extremely unfair and oh well.)

One thing that will be forever a mystery is the way those parameters control the plot. Some of it is that, like I mentioned, so many different factors go into it that it's not easy to say things like, "More trustworthy protagonists are more likely to make a successful pass at Lorelei." (I don't even know if that's true or not!)

The other reason is that, to be completely honest, this is a story not a philosophical dissertation, and I don't want anyone to be offended or to feel they have to argue with a particular decision I've made about how the personality characteristics of the protagonist affect the outcome. I don't even agree with every choice in that regard! But, you know, 11,819 lines of Python, 18,470 lines of templates, decisions had to be made.

I am going to break my silence about the internal workings of Starter Marriage, at least a little bit. I don't know how useful this will be in following the story, but I hope you'll at least find it interesting.

As someone (thank you!) noted, the choices that you make early in the game don't just affect what comes later, but what has come before. In effect, as you select choices, you are picking which story the protagonist has been in since well before the story actually began. By the end of "The Girlfriend Experience," the story has resolved itself into a handful of plots. Each plot centers around the central mystery of Starter Marriage, which is: Why did Annie leave? The plot also controls which person or people are the primary engine driving the story forward, and it's not always the protagonist.

While there are literally hundreds of parameters that are constantly changing as the story evolves, two particularly important ones are "trustworthiness" and "attentiveness." "Trustworthiness" is what it sounds like: how often does the protagonist lie or tell the truth? "Attentiveness" is, more or less, how much the protagonist displays concern about the other people in the game, especially his lovers. Of course, those aren't the only factors that control what happens in the game. Changes in the direction of the story are often based on the particular way a choice is worded, taken as a statement of what kind of person the protagonist is.

An untrustworthy protagonist doesn't just lie to other people. He lies to himself, and covers things up. This is true even though the point of view of the story is free indirect, rather than first or second person. So, yes, the protagonist will (potentially) lie to you.

The motivations of the other characters in the story also change depending on how the story evolves, and can be quite different from plot to plot.

As the story plays out (especially in the earlier parts), the choices determine what kind of person the protagonist is, and what happened in the time before the story we're looking at started. These are alternative realities: each plot is incompatible with the others.

And now I'm going to drop a few facts, just to make things even more interesting (or confuisng):

• Allison played no part in Annie's departure.
• The voice the protagonist hears during the night between "The Girlfriend Experience" and "Relationship Goals" is not Dante.
• Dante never controls the protagonist in the story so far.
• The decision as to whether or not to fly out to Annie is less important than it might initially seem.
• There are important characters who have not even been mentioned yet.

And: There is a huge clue to what plot you are in and what it means in Phase 4.1.

Thank you for all of your kind words and attention to Starter Marriage! It's been an enormous amount of work (and even more work to come), but the reception it has had makes that entirely worthwhile.

Not sure if this is a bug or not, but I am noticing situations where the set of options on different pages is non deterministic.

That shouldn't ever happen, and I can't see how it could in the particular case you mention. If you can paste in a few examples of the choices changing with just a reload on the same scene, that would be very helpful.

Not sure if this is a bug or not, but I am noticing situations where the set of options on different pages is non deterministic.  (Not just the ordering, but the actual set of options that are available)

I first noticed this on an anal run, when you and Allison are having sex after the dinner with Dante and Renee.

I created a save point right right after "there's something I want to do to you"

Different choices appear when I reload the page.

(Perhaps there are some state variables that get changed down stream and these are impacting the options available in the before times?)

I would never have assumed that being deceitful makes me more a controller

My understanding here: the logic is, if you were an evil mind controller, what kind of person would you be? An immoral, selfish person! So making decisions consistent with that will push you that direction. It isn't the only factor, so there are other choices you can make, but I'm pretty positive it has an effect.

I'm actually the exact opposite reaction... in that I love this artist but this comics story is personally a huge turn off for me generally. I click for the boobs and ignore the plot because incestual relations bother me significantly. The professor once being blonde but now being a dark raven hair bombshell for example I completely didn't even recall until it was mentioned as such. Rafinha made /makes Slime Thief (or at the very least it's an uncanny resemblance to that artists style)which is an old favorite of mine from the expansion/transformation fetish community and it's kinda fun to see the artist spread out a bit so to speak after all these years.