[TRENCHES] Thursday, June 6, 2013 - Inadvertent
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Inadvertent
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/inadvertent
It’s called Rohypnol
AnonymousAmong my circle of friends, I’m known for openly enjoying Japanese visual novels and dating sims. I largely keep it on the DL, but from time to time it comes up.
Enter a friend who co-owns an indie development studio. The whole company consists of two programmers, an audio guy, and an artist. They mostly make flash games, and the one friend calls me in, asking me to do some focus testing on a dating sim they made that was nearing the end of cycle. I figured that it would be a good way to kill a weekend, said yes, and signed an NDA.
At this point I should mention that the stated goal of the project was “to create a dating sim/RPG that brings Western sensibilities to a Japanese genre”. All the girls in the game were 18+, there was no “harem ending,” and tentacle monsters were strictly forbidden. That sort of thing.
The game had an interesting mechanic where the player’s relationship with the various female characters were measured on two axes: How much they liked you and how much they were attracted to you. To get an ending with any single girl you had to have a high score in both these categories, but having a high attraction would still let you “score” mid-game.
There also existed a potion which would raise attraction with one girl but not how much they liked you. Between four people working on this game and who knows how many other volunteer playtesters like myself, nobody had managed to pick up that you can buy said potion that essentially lets you date rape female characters in the game, and you can use it even if they don’t like you.
After arguing about the ethics of the potion for half the weekend with the developers, I washed by hands of the situation. To my knowledge, the game hasn’t seen the light of day.
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-arley just had his mind blown.
As someone trying to create a Dating-Sim Mechanic myself, (admittingly, it's on the periphery and not a core part of the game) , there are *lots* of pitfalls to fall into. The issue is that you have to assign a number that represents a characters emotions toward the player. This number has discrete values that have to mean something to the engine for it to be useful. For example you can have an axis that goes from -127 to 128 to represent how much a character "likes" you.
The problem is that computers suck at continuums. In the end they need a straight up number to define an emotion, which is silly. That's why many dating sims use multiple variables to indicate behaviors. (Such in the example of the post, a muti-axis graph in the story.)
What happens, however is that you can wind you with two variables at opposite ends of the spectrum that don't make sense. The computer then takes these and runs with whatever you define to happen between those two numbers. This can wreck havoc on your narrative. Dating sims/visual novels require a very high degree of story telling and world building in the first for them to even work, not even including the game mechanics at all! You must have a rock-solid understanding of a character from end-to-end and at rock-solid narrative, or it's going to fall apart.
So when reading the story about how. they were bringing "Western sensibilities to a Japanese genre", I have no idea what on earth that even means. What the heck is a "Western sensibility"? Are they saying Japanese don't have sex? The thing reaks of game modders who want to make a "mature" mod to a game by adding "fuck" to every other dialog box. Most mainstream dating sims/visual novels are quite celibate and the subject of sex doesn't come up at all. It's not that it's "appropriate" or anything. Mostly because putting sex in any game massively screws up your narrative because of all the social expectations you expect from it after that point. I have/had(?) a "sex scene" in my own game. I know where it is and the circumstances leading up to it, and I don't know if I'm going to be putting it in because it adds absolutely nothing to the story that two characters hugging and holding hands can't accomplish. Even just sleeping in the same bed together is a better option than sex because it defines a characters trust for each other much more coherently than putting your wee-wee an someone vajayjay.
And that's the trap people fall into. Dating sims isn't about dating, they are interactive romance novels. They are not even called "Dating Sims" in Japan. They are called "恋愛ゲーム" (Ren-Ai Games) or "Falling in Love Games" They are supposed to invoke "romance" and the goal isn't the fuck a character in order to "win"
If that's what they men by adding "Western sensibilities to a Japanese genre", then they missed the point entirely, and in fact is a little telling of our own culture.
Also, I have no clue how you got your impression they just wanted to add an option to fuck everything. As far as I can tell from the story, there weren't a huge amount of opportunities to "score," and they wanted to avoid a lot of the shadier aspects that, if nothing else, dating sims have a reputation for. That doesn't really leave me with the impression they thought "Japanese don't have sex," either.
Finally, two characters having sex can be useful as something besides porn and can advance the lot, and it's not always going to be the exact same as having two characters hold hands or whatever in terms of the impression it gives.
kingworkscreative.com
kingworkscreative.blogspot.com
I'm not even sure how a location awareness game like this would be profitable. I mean, it would scale really well- the more players you have, the more interaction with people claiming and re-claiming locations from other factions. If you got to critical mass, it could make you a ton of money and be really fun to play.
But how do you get to critical mass? If the game's just released and you're the only person in your area that has the game, it's not really that exciting. If you live in a smaller town, there probably won't ever be other people playing it.
I guess if you have a good enough game and shell out a bunch for initial advertising you could get the playerbase to make the game a success, but it seems like it's a major boom-or-bust situation with nothing in between. So very risky.
e- also re: the story, the date rape thing would be a huge problem for a dating simulator that is trying not to be a Japanese date-rape sim. Kudos to the story poster- you found a really core issue and stuck to your guns trying to make others see it.
The story says what he meant. No tentacle porn orgies with high school children. Obviously "Falling in Love Games" wasn't his experience with the Japanese genre.
TRUCKSSSSSSSSS
http://www.lifeismagic.com/
"Stop being such a prude! It's not date rape it's just (insert nerdy explanation that totally does not clear the date rape implications)"
have a few coworkers that play, they are max level and keep the area around the office safe for there team.
is it...fun? The line about in-game currency or whatever raises my hackles
Yeah, I have this issue with my DS games that have proximity features or whatever.
Very few of my friends either have DSes or live nearby. The few people who I know have DSes don't have the same taste in games.
I spend 95% of my time at work, or at home.
The features just go completely unused.
Maybe have it so your claimed location spreads out to touch your neighbours', regardless of physical distance? So, in a city where a lot of people were playing your might claim just one building, and your neighbours would own the buildings either side. Whereas out in the country your claim could cover half a county, and still butt up against the same number of neighbours (themselves each owning whole counties) either side. And the topography in game doesn't have to match up to the real world topography one to one; it could stretch out the singel building claims in the game world, and shrink the half county claims. Or something.
Ever hear of this game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode_Battler ? It was huge in Japan and predates Pokemon by 5 years. While the game itself was a little quirky, the huge catch was that the conglomerate that made the system specifically designed it so that bar codes from its products (some brand of soup, I think) would always generate the strongest stats.
So yeah, unfortunately, the way to make something like this profitable is with viral marketing, "If you capture a Starbucks today by ordering a large latte you get double points!"
3clipse: The key to any successful marriage is a good mid-game transition.
I started playing it from Friday when I saw Pika's link. The in-game currency, as with all Free To Play games, is optional; it just gives you more stuff quicker, but you can play through the game without it just fine. The part about PvP battles I don't know since I haven't tried it, but it most surely is not balanced since you can just pay to get a powerful weapon and smash any free player, so I just stay to the NPC dungeons.
Although, there are only 3 classes available, and the 4th is unlocked with 110 gems (kinda easy to get with just leveling or luck with battles. As I said, I've just been playing for 3-4 days and I already got about 30).
As for the game it self, I see it like Final Fantasy (the gameplay itself is turn based with you controlling the actions of 3 characters in your party) and you beat dungeons that show up in the map of your city. It's fun if you have friends that live close by and you can compete for dominance of local dungeons, or gain influence on nearby shops.