designing a dating sim in which you're already married!
Posted: Sat Sep 26, 2015 3:32 pm
Hehe as the title says... I will probably work on Never Forget Me early next year, but I wanted to discuss this "problem" I'm having.
Normally in a stat-raising dating sim, you raise your skills to meet each love interest requirements. To get Boy X, you need stat Y (or Z) at a certain value.
In Never Forget Me, you start the game ALREADY married (in the beginning you can choose) with one of the four love interests: Aaron, Hugh, Eddy or Lawrence.
There are 10 scenes each, with choices. Based on choices, you'll unlock 2 bad endings, 2 good endings and 1 neutral one. And that's already taken care of.
The problem is for the extra epilogues. I thought to have some extra epilogues based on some stats. If you have enough Creative while on Hugh path, you'll unlock an extra ending for example.
So I have a stat raising in which in practice you must raise only 1 stat because there's no point in raising the others. I'm thinking how to do it:
1) give up the stats raising and just have a game like a "pure" visual novel (that would be the easiest solution). I think I could always have a "visual novel mode" even if I decide to add other gameplay.
2) tie each stat with at least another: so to raise Creativity, you would need to raise also Culture to like half value, and so on. The "other" stat would have no use except on the gameplay
3) try to come up with a minigame to raise that single stat, but maybe with some sort of puzzle. But I have no clue how to do this, and most importantly how to make it fun
4) something else!
I don't think having a map in this case would work, though I haven't made my mind yet. If anyone has any suggestion or even some other existing games to show me some different mechanics, it would be cool
Normally in a stat-raising dating sim, you raise your skills to meet each love interest requirements. To get Boy X, you need stat Y (or Z) at a certain value.
In Never Forget Me, you start the game ALREADY married (in the beginning you can choose) with one of the four love interests: Aaron, Hugh, Eddy or Lawrence.
There are 10 scenes each, with choices. Based on choices, you'll unlock 2 bad endings, 2 good endings and 1 neutral one. And that's already taken care of.
The problem is for the extra epilogues. I thought to have some extra epilogues based on some stats. If you have enough Creative while on Hugh path, you'll unlock an extra ending for example.
So I have a stat raising in which in practice you must raise only 1 stat because there's no point in raising the others. I'm thinking how to do it:
1) give up the stats raising and just have a game like a "pure" visual novel (that would be the easiest solution). I think I could always have a "visual novel mode" even if I decide to add other gameplay.
2) tie each stat with at least another: so to raise Creativity, you would need to raise also Culture to like half value, and so on. The "other" stat would have no use except on the gameplay
3) try to come up with a minigame to raise that single stat, but maybe with some sort of puzzle. But I have no clue how to do this, and most importantly how to make it fun
4) something else!
I don't think having a map in this case would work, though I haven't made my mind yet. If anyone has any suggestion or even some other existing games to show me some different mechanics, it would be cool