Yandere game

[YandereYuka]

Hi,I'm thinking about making a yandere/horror VN. It goes allong the lines of Higurashi in that everything's fine until its, well, NOT.
The game follows a protagonist, which can be named by the user. The MC has lived in a small town for several years and lives a fairly carefree life. He lives with his sister and mom, and down the street is his best friend (also a girl) who he walks to school with. Unbeknownst to him, both his sister and best friend are competing for his affection. Then childhood friend of his moves (under very suspicious circumstances) back to town and everything hits the fan.
The game is set to have several endings, each of them resulting in the death of at least one character. There are good endings- but they are very, very difficult to get.
The Characters
You: Main character
Little sister character: I haven't made a sprite for her yet and am still toying with weather or not I should use a character who constantly says "Onii-chan~". So, I'll let you know how things turn out.

[qirien]

Sounds interesting!

Are you looking for anything specific from the community here...?

[Sakai]

God I hope it wont have ending like School Days (anime) :'|

[gekiganwing]

Unbeknownst to him, both his sister and best friend are competing for his affection. Then childhood friend of his moves (under very suspicious circumstances) back to town and everything hits the fan.

In other words, it sounds like the girls were sane at one time, and have been overcome with jealousy. If that's not your intention, be sure to say so.

The game is set to have several endings, each of them resulting in the death of at least one character. There are good endings- but they are very, very difficult to get.

What's your overall goal? If you want to write horror and drama right under a cute slice-of-life surface, that's one option. If you like yandere characters because you like the idea of "Someone who is crazy for you is someone who is crazy for you." I think your ultimate goal should be to tell a story.

Two interesting and possibly helpful resources... "Kageryushin’s Infamous Sermon Upon Yanderekology" is a discussion on the cavestory.org forums from 2009. NOT worksafe due to gore, swearing, and sexual references. TVTropes' "Playing With: Yandere" might help you think creatively. The site is a notorious time sink.

[dretchlord]

When you talk about Yandere, do you want to include any horror elements? Yandere games are aspiring because of the elements they have. I would recommend a sadistic twist at some point in the game where one of the girls try to kill the girl you are currently getting. It shows the element of Yandere which is deranged and psychotic lover. You could also put comedy to the game such as the little sister wakes up bother and tries to do something funny to him, he escapes and along the way to school he meets Yuka who is secretly finding a way to steal him away form the other two girls, she like tells him to follow her and her shy attitude becomes somewhat cute as she tries to confess and kiss him, he then escapes and at school he meets Madoka who is making jokes with him and asks him questions like "Do you prefer blond or blue hair?".etc You could see the element of Yandere by showing how the characters would go through great lengths to get the protagonist. You could even add both comedy and horror which adds spice to your game.

[kaleidofish]

Will we have the option to fight back or do we have to derpily accept them stabbing/axing/shooting/cleaving us in the name of LOVE?

[YandereYuka]

Will we have the option to fight back or do we have to derpily accept them stabbing/axing/shooting/cleaving us in the name of LOVE?

Hahaha no, there will be endings where you fight back or team up with another girl. There's a few endings where you can manage to avoid most of the bloodshed altogether (which are 'good' endings) but the main character isn't designed to have the 'Oh, you want to kill everyone i love? Thats fine. I love you' reaction. I'll post a list of endings(and hopefully a demo that'll give you a taste of what the game will be like) next weekend.

[YandereYuka]

Sounds interesting!

Are you looking for anything specific from the community here...?

Well, right now I'm just looking to see if theres any feedback that I should take into account before I write a demo game and decide on all the endings, as well as some feedback on the characters and what kind of aspects people are interested in seeing from the vn.

[YandereYuka]

When you talk about Yandere, do you want to include any horror elements? Yandere games are aspiring because of the elements they have. I would recommend a sadistic twist at some point in the game where one of the girls try to kill the girl you are currently getting. It shows the element of Yandere which is deranged and psychotic lover. You could also put comedy to the game such as the little sister wakes up bother and tries to do something funny to him, he escapes and along the way to school he meets Yuka who is secretly finding a way to steal him away form the other two girls, she like tells him to follow her and her shy attitude becomes somewhat cute as she tries to confess and kiss him, he then escapes and at school he meets Madoka who is making jokes with him and asks him questions like "Do you prefer blond or blue hair?".etc You could see the element of Yandere by showing how the characters would go through great lengths to get the protagonist. You could even add both comedy and horror which adds spice to your game.

Thank you so much for your feedback, i really appreciate it
Anywho, yes, I'd like to incorporate horror elements, but they'll be subtle and gradually accumulate until the ending of the game when they reach a climax. Allot of these events will make the main character question whether somebody actually meant to hurt him or if he's making things up. For example, in one scene he finds a sharp chip of glass in a piece of pie his sister made for him, then he has to figure out who would've wanted to harm him and/or if it was all just an accident since his sister is an awful cook.
There's allot of comedy in the day-to-day scenes. Madoka constantly teases the main character by calling herself his 'lover', which confuses the other girls allot. Yuka tends to play pranks (e.g. putting s chalkboard eraser on top of the classroom door so the first one in the class behind her gets covered in chalk dust) on the other characters to get the main characters attention. However, she's pretty shy and according to everybody 'just wants to make people happy', so usually she gets cut a break.

[rabcor]

Are you still working on this? i'd love to play it if you finish it.

One thing i do think though is that mixing horror and comedy genres is probably hard to do right since they're pretty much polar opposites. Stories usually need to have a flow i.e. you usually can not get away with jumping from "light" to "dark" themes over a short amount of time, but i've seen a lot of things that start out light and then eventually turn dark as the story progresses (some anime has done that, if i remember correctly Tasogare Otome X Amnesia did that) but it can be done, i've seen a successful mix of comedy and dark themes sometimes, but not the whole yandere kind of dark, again if i remember correctly Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood was borderlining on dark and light themes most of the time and with comedy in the mix too, it also gradually got darker and darker as the story progressed but it never really let go of the comedic values until the last couple of episodes.

Also if it's your first time writing a story, you may want to consider using flowchart software to help you manage the different branches of the story, I use "articy: draft" for it, but unless you're making something as feature heavy as an RPG it's overkill (i'm making an RPG myself) but just for it's color scheme i'd recommend it anyways since it can boost your productivity a little to work with it's colors. But there are other (cheaper and free) programs to do it.

Another thing to think about again if you're new to storywriting (just like me) is that i find a motivating factor when i write my stories that i want the reader/player to be able to learn something from it, to gain just a little shard of my life's experiences without suffering as i have for them. Now that's all good and fine since my game is dark themed, but in general i think we need more games that encourage the player to be more happy and content about his own life. But basically i'm saying, i couldn't write a story that had no deeper meaning than just being simple entertainment even if i was getting paid for it, much less for free/of my own accord! Every single character has a purpose and a back story that defines them, a backstory that makes sense from a psychological standpoint too (is what i always aim for)

[Rosstin]

Serenity and I were considering making a game like this before we started working on Queen At Arms. We eventually decided that writing a Yandere Horror/Comedy would be extremely difficult, and not enough people would want to play it. It's a really tough genre! We wrote a rough draft of the storyline for one of the characters, and it was really f---ed up. I couldn't really empathize with the characters and I wasn't sure how the player was going to, either.