Nazi VN Idea

[Wolfhound1730]

My friend and I have been writing a historical VN for the past few weeks.  The story is focused around an ex-military guy discovering a secret Nazi time machine.  He decides to go back in time to stop the Nazis from using the machine to take over the world in the future.  The game would focus on him and his interactions in the town, as well as figuring out who invented the time machine, and destroying it before anyone can use it to cause harm.  The game would focus less on the time travel and more on Nazi Germany.  There would be a few girls, one being a Jewish nurse, who is being forced to heal Nazi soldiers, or else she will be killed.  And a Nazi Secretary, who will be shown why her ideology is fundamentally flawed, and that she should learn to love instead of hate.  We wanted to make a few endings with different outcomes for the characters.  In the True Route, he stays back in 1945 with the girl who you have more "Points" for.  I really don't want to say too much about the endings, because I intend to sell the game for $5 USD on Steam. 

I hope that our idea would be good enough to release our first game.  We intend on making the game around 3 hours long.  The routes will play effect only in the last half hour or so.  I'm aware this is light on details, if anyone wants to hear about more, I will discuss it more.  If you want to criticize the idea, please leave it in the thread.  We appreciate all the reviews we get, good or bad. 

If there are any good artists willing to support us, we'd really love to hear from you.  We are broke, but we want to run a Kickstarter Campaign, so we would pay you once that has been done.  If you are not comfortable with that, we understand.  The world is a tough place, and you have to make money to live.  But if you are interested, please send me your portfolio right away. 

Edited June 22, 2020 by Wolfhound1730

[Clephas]

Mmm... I'm going to be clear that the idea behind this has me a bit skeptical.  I'm going to state my reasons below.

1.  The Nazis didn't make exceptions for 'useful' Jewish people.  During the war, while individuals might shelter or help a Jewish individual escape from the pogrom, you didn't see them being spared from the camps or execution in the open.

2.  People who get involved in the kind of dogma you see here don't change their minds easily.  A three hour VN wouldn't provide a 'feels real' experience for a Nazi party member from that era changing their colors, no matter how you worked it.  Even more so with people in positions of authority, since the party of the era selected loyalists for positions of any sort of influence, and people who showed any sign of wavering didn't make it up through the ranks.  This is even more so with women, since women in positions of influence (rare to the extreme) were usually 'mothers of the Aryan Race'.  

3.  This is a reinforcement of 2, in that it needs to be stated that logical arguments do not change the minds of dogmatists. 

4.  Timing.  This is really, really bad timing.  With what is going on right now, Nazi-related fiction is radioactive.  It doesn't matter how you handle it, it will backfire against you.

Edit: 

To clarify, I'm not trying to be a jerk about this.  I'm merely warning you that this is likely to be the reaction from people who really think about your game's concept.  My advice is to eliminate the romantic elements completely or cut out one of the heroines.  

[Zalor]

Going to agree with Clephas here generally, but I'll add my two cents. 

When it comes to any work of fiction that focuses on a particular time period/setting, they tend to be best when they are really well researched. If you focus the story less on being a dating sim and more on the mystery of German/Nazi research, not only would it be potentially more interesting. But it could mitigate some political backlash.   

Specifically if you avoid any sort of moralizing of Nazi characters, and display careful and meticulous research into the horrors of their research (might want to look into this guy as well as his associates a bit), you could avoid most pitfalls in public opinion and still tell an interesting story. 

[Plk_Lesiak]

Honestly, because I agree completely with what Clephas and Zalor wrote, I would simply fictionalize it. Making a quasi-WW2 setting in a fictional country gives you a lot more of creative freedom to discuss issues you want to discuss and not be tied so heavily by historical accuracy and the possibility to insult real-life groups. This VN is a cool example on how it can be done – it has a lot of flaws and the setting is a bit weird, but the way it handles the loyalist route is actually quite excellent, I think catching surprisingly well some of the allure and mechanism of totalitarian power.

Still, doing research is super-important. Even if you drop setting your story in Nazi Germany as such, you want to get your description of the totalitarian machine and how society functioned under it as accurately as possible, if you want your story to mean something.

Edited June 22, 2020 by Plk_Lesiak

[Wolfhound1730]

I've been humbled by much of the criticism I've received.  Sometimes the best criticism isn't all that positive.  So, I've decided to change the story quite a bit.  First off, there will be no romantic subplots.  That would be extremely rude to people who lived through that period, to boil their suffering to a mere romantic subplot, so we will remove that completely.  The Jewish Girl, named Anna, will not be a doctor, but she will be hiding and you discover her on a patrol (MC joins the Nazis to track down the machine, by the way).  And the Nazi girl, named Emily, will turn in Anna, and you have to save her from death.  The machine is called "Die Glocke", by the way.  It was a theorized Nazi time machine.  MC will have to uncover the machine before they can take over the world.  I want to make this as historically accurate as possible, at least in some respects, so we need to make sure we're not doing that is inaccurate.  And we want to be respectful to the real people who suffered in this time period.  I might want to create a fake history inspired by Nazi Germany, but I need to think about that for a while.   

Once again, thank you all. 

Edited June 22, 2020 by Wolfhound1730

[Wolfhound1730]

We've decided to cancel this project.  We feel the subject matter is too dark for us to properly capture.  We have come up with a new idea that we can explore, that won't offend anyone or butcher any history

Edited June 23, 2020 by Wolfhound1730