When you talk about game development, one of the topics that is bound to come up is that of rewards. What do players get for doing whatever it is you have them do, level to level? Why should they care to keep doing it?

Especially in the age of mobile games, where doing something over and over and over again becomes a key component of the gaming experience (despite many of these being thinly-disguised psychological traps), gauging what your audience will deem adequate kickback for their minutes spent on your title is an important part of designing. While all of this is pretty straightforward for an MMO, puzzle game, or FPS, it gets trickier for an RPG or visual novel. And Harmonic Odyssey is a bit of both!

Traditionally, this is handled by making the story itself the reward. You walk around some world, grinding monsters and chatting with NPCs, and if you do enough of this, one of the people you meet or items you find will reveal more of the plot, and  most likely open up the way to the next level, a bossfight, or an impressive cutscene. These are cornerstones of what makes an RPG fun to play, and people have been happy to play games that offer immersive storylines in exchange for action-packed combat mechanics for years. Why do you think we can get away with running mob fights on archaic turn-based systems?

When I set out to make Harmonic, I had been intrigued by the Black Mirror episode/film/game, "Bandersnatch" and its choose-your-own-adventure plot. I played through the "movie" about five different times throughout the week following its initial release, pored over flowcharts of its story and pushed more people to try it so I could have more people to talk to about it. Much like the protagonist of the film, I was obsessed. Unlike Fionn Whitehead's character Stefan, however, I wasn't hooked onto the story as much as I was one very specific piece of it (or several pieces of it, if you like). I wanted to see all the possible endings.

I was working on programming the dialogue on a rather dry puzzle when my husband chimed in, "I think you should be able to die, there."

It was ridiculous to me at first. What kind of maniac would put the potential for a game over in the middle of an otherwise bland "pick the lock" scenario? 

And then I thought about Bandersnatch, and all the other turn-to-page-whatever books that came before it. How surprising it was to make a decision, seemingly of little consequence, and end up on the wrong end of an orc's axe.

"But I just chose apples instead of oranges!"

Many a game has had its origin in a choose-your-own-adventure novel, either directly or indirectly. We might argue it was the basis of the entire visual/kinetic novel genre of gaming entirely, even. Through games, we can offer branching storylines, multiple endings, and all things unlockable by the mere act of choosing the right path, just like we used to by reading a book. The fun of choose-your-own-adventure that we almost take for granted today, however, seems to be the danger quotient. Visual novels and RPGs have veered more towards the previously mentioned arena of task and reward, which is a much safer space than their printed predecessors, which functioned on choice and consequence.

Looking at this system, one would assume that positive consequence is the desired outcome of any given choice, since that's what people generally want to get out of choices they make in the real world. Factor in the fantasy aspect, however, and you find the opposite is equally true. How many times did you find yourself flipping through a novel with multiple endings, just to see what other ends awaited you, had you chosen a different path?

In Harmonic Odyssey, player characters and non-player characters alike will die. Their deaths will be permanent and sometimes, horrific. This sense of finality was a conscious decision by the dev team, as so many books which came before the game and indeed, some major points of inspiration for Harmonic lent themselves to extremely violent, often equally ridiculous ends. It's all in the name of good fun, though.

Frequent saving is encouraged.