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Yes, what I'm talking about is the dating mechanic (or could be considered as dating minigame), especially like those in RPG games. And I'm not asking about mechanic in Dating Sim games.

We are have played (or now there are games like these out there) that features dating as part of the game, integral and important to the game like Sakura Wars series or Thousand Arms or not so important to the game (optional/doesn't need to date to finish the game) like Dragon Age or Mass Effect.

But I'm pretty sure there is more complex dating system other than just choosing answers to the girls' questions or giving gifts, like minigames or something else... but what? Most dating minigames I know only involves choosing the right answers at the right moments and giving gifts (sometimes the right gifts to the right girls... or boys). Or some simple minigames...

So in this thread, let us all brainstorming on what is the good (or best) dating minigame system or please describe any dating minigame system that you know from a good game. I hope this could be helpful to everyone just as it's for me ^_^

I like non-universal completion requirements. And by that, I don't mean "Boy1 wants ABC and Boy2 wants XYZ" type of changes to the same system. What I really liked with Dragon Age 2 is that the relationships did not advance at the same pace, and the characters did not react the same to choices.
These are very different lines of progression, and is a great way to show how the characters influenced their dating system. It's not a one-size-fits-all type of scenario. I can barely play TokiMeki Memorial anymore because it's just the same thing over and over to me, with different flavors. The secret obtainables are far more exciting now, because they break the mould.

I think any dating side quest-ish thingy that actually requires a mini-game is a bit silly. I like the psych locks for Phoenix Wright because it's just visual interpretation of what you can already verbally achieve, but winning a game of checkers really shouldn't be the method of increasing romance points with characters (at least ALL of them, equally and in the same way, unless they're all very very turned on by game boards), and trivializes the romance to me. Like trying to "figure out" the woman, and bam, you've unlocked their secret code and now they're yours. It's fun, but it just makes the love interest a trophy. It also reeks H-game, where winning strips off another layer of clothing. Not really a deep, realistic relationship, which I generally prefer.

So, I'd like dating sub systems to be mostly making choices and saying the right thing, like in real life. Any other hoop jumping is kinda ... unrealistic to me. TO ME. This is my opinion. I'm writing romance VNs. I'm obviously biased.

In my game the player has a lot of other options and role-playing opportunities outside of romance options, so I actually have the potential romance partners pay attention to what the player is doing, what they are saying, and how they are acting, even when not around them. Those romantic partners then have certain personalities and traits, likes and dislikes, so depending on how the player has been acting, will be either more or less inclined to like them. I actually have the possible partners where they can oscillate between the two extremes of "lover" or "enemy".

At the same time, all those romance partners are living their lives (the game spans a number of years). Their goals will change, be given up on, or be achieved, and how soon you become lovers or enemies with them effects the outcomes and storylines. It is entirely possible to have a romance partner that is in love with you lose respect for you because of actions you take - they then treat you differently from then on than if you had never dated. Likewise, it is possible to slowly move into the good or romantic graces of an "enemy" and that relationship is different than if you had dated them before you made them an enemy.

It is all pretty complex, (and hard to write - SO MANY branches and variables) but realistic. There are still instances where you would want to pick the right answer or action, but those things are cumulative and interwoven. You have to slowly build trust and a relationship, or you can slowly but surely create a rival or enemy through your actions or attitude, or the fact that you can have goals that conflict with a romantic partner's.

The way it is set up now, one of the most interesting results so far is that it is possible to have a high "lover" score with a certain partner, but at the same time be their rival and enemy. It has so far made for some of the best drama and storytelling, since (through your own actions) you can become "doomed lovers". It's all very morally gray, and once in that situation, there is no happy way out - you only have two options at that point if you've taken it that far - either you love them so much you let yourself and all the goals you care about be ruined, or you harden your heart and crush the dreams and goals of your lover/enemy. Both options have very different outcomes. Or you can abstain from confrontation all together, but that means abstaining from contact, meaning your relationship is over anyway . . . and it might set up a bigger confrontation years in the future when you have both achieved many of your conflicting goals, but can't take that final step without crushing the other.

The only thing I am debating is whether or not to have a menu with meters showing where you sit with different potential partners. Would you want to see where you stood with different characters at a glance, or let it play out more organically, not knowing where you stand except through their actions? I'm leaning toward the latter, since it fits in more with the realistic dating system, but I have 7 potential romance partners, and the story spans years, with the player doing a lot of other stuff besides dating. I worry it might be too much for players to keep up with.

I think is hard to come up with something new. Not hard in terms "hard to think" but hard to implement. A real-life dating situation has LOTS of variables, and if you wanted to make something similar in a game, it would be an insane amount of work for every character. Just think about all the decisions you make daily about your relationship, and try to transpose that in a game. Would require over 100k words of dialogue for every character
If you mean in term of gameplay, I don't really think a minigame would work well, I prefer normal dialogues through various situation/scenes.

I agree that most of the more complex stuff that would make dating sims more interesting would be extremely difficult to do.

But I think you could still work with the basic mechanisms of Q and A and gift giving if it wasn't so predictable. Most of the time the character basically tells you what they want and you go fetch it. I think it is more interesting to really have to work at learning about a character and make logical guesses about them, just like you would with someone in real life. If you are buying someone a gift, you analyse their hobbies, their dislikes and their wants, and try and come up with something interesting. It is the same with questions and answers. Personally, I don't always feel they should be obvious. And sometimes the wrong answer can be a good one. It is like when someone gives you something you don't want, but they have put effort in, so that is all that matters.

I guess more than anything I want to see more in depth character development and more realistic reactions. I don't think dating sims should be easy. You should have to work for a partner and take risks in trying to court them. some should be harder than others, so should be a hate/love relationship. I think plenty can be done to create more complex and interesting story lines with the basics without over complicating the mechanics.

Aleema wrote:I can barely play TokiMeki Memorial anymore because it's just the same thing over and over to me, with different flavors.

What I've always hated about Tokimeki Memorial was the stupid "bomb" mechanism that happens when the girls decide you don't treat them right. Essentially, what happens is the following:

1) In order to be at least somewhat interesting to a specific girl, you need to build your stats so that this girl notices you are "dateworthy".
2) However, as you become "dateworthy" to a girl of your choice, other girls also notice you exist and start to express interest in you.
3) However, if you act as any normal person would in real life - tell all girls except one you're not interested and ignore their further advances - the ones you don't want start sending you "bombs" - essentially, they damage your reputation.
4) If your reputation is damaged that way, the girl you actually WANT to date will start hating you as well.

In essence, if you want to win one specific girl, you have to somehow juggle fake relations with ALL the girls and make them believe you're sorta interested with them in order to keep them from making your dream-date hate you.

What sort of god-awful depiction of teenager relations is this? I mean, it makes for interesting gameplay, but some girls (Shiori! AAAAGH!) are nigh-impossible to get for the fact that you're not cheating on them enough!

Ugh, that happens in Girl's Side, too. The stupidest feature, hands down. It would be cute if you just got a jealousy scene where they act upset that you're ignoring them, but I have to stop what I'm doing to go on a fake date with them or I'll lose the game? Laaame. And usually it's not once or twice in a game. It's just always near the end, and sometimes with multiple bombs at once.

LateWhiteRabbit wrote:The only thing I am debating is whether or not to have a menu with meters showing where you sit with different potential partners. Would you want to see where you stood with different characters at a glance, or let it play out more organically, not knowing where you stand except through their actions? I'm leaning toward the latter, since it fits in more with the realistic dating system, but I have 7 potential romance partners, and the story spans years, with the player doing a lot of other stuff besides dating. I worry it might be too much for players to keep up with.

Could you plot a middle course and allow the player to routinely get verbal "hints" about their relationships? I think Magical Diary does something like this: there's an event halfway through the game where you have the opportunity to find out if any of the obtainable characters are thinking about you, although the game doesn't give you a meter quantifying how good your relationship with them is. Or perhaps there could be another character whom the player could go to and ask about their relationships.

OK, so far most people have been talking about simulation mechanics, which is fine because I think that's more interesting than mini-games... but the question of those mini-game mechanics still stands.

Personally I think there are a few routes you can go with this:

Goal-oriented, like if you're on a date with someone, there's a mini-game, and depending on how you do you'll gain more of that person's affection (like winning a carnival prize for them). Like Aleema said, this is something we'd see in an H-game.

..and then there's what I'd call "point blank" style, where you basically have a static scene with a character and have to make a few conversation choices that can make the affection meter go up or down. You can tell pretty much right away whether your relationship got better or worse. Classic examples are the Shin Megami Tensei games (devil communication), Persona 3+4 (typical romance sim style), and Yakuza (typical romance sim style, but you have to spend in-game money to increase your chances).

Personally I think Persona 2's devil communication style is the most interesting. Choosing certain options will not necessarily yield the same results, and if a conversation goes bad, you can try to steer it back in your favor. The demons have 4 different emotions (happy, interested, scared, angry), which will change depending on your reactions. For people complaining that conversation trees take a lot of work or are too hard to script, just consider this game and how many combinations of characters and demons there are. Surely you can do something similar for a mere 5-10 characters.

Oh, and then there's Getter Love... the Nintendo 64 board-game + romance sim (one of the few games I actually completed every path for, lol). Also, to a lesser extent, the Nekketsu Nikki board game from Justice Gakuen (JP version of Rival Schools: Project Justice), which simply gives you a typical love-sim scene every time you land on a space with another character. Both of these prove that board games can make for great dating sims, though they are certainly outside of my own capabilities.


...now on the topic of romance sim mechanics, I've noticed how there's usually one character that's fairly difficult to hook up with. You might spend the entire game going after them, and end up getting maybe half the scenes for your effort. Despite being more difficult, these characters usually feel less developed, so I would caution away from using these characters unless you give them equal face time in the end (not just a little scene like, WHOO, you got the crazy mystery girl/guy!, the two of you disappear on motorcycles!)

Oh, and the Kenka Banchou games actually used a few different romance-sim mechanics. In Kenka Banchou 4, all you had to do was meet each girl at the right place. After a certain point you had to choose one and leave the others behind, but it was otherwise fairly simple. In Kenka Banchou 5 you not only had to meet girls in the right place, but choose the correct conversation choices - get a single one wrong and she disappears forever without any warning.

I really don't like that latter system, especially considering the ambiguity of certain choices. For example, earlier in the game your character talks about how horrible it is to hit girls, like it's the lowest thing you can do. Later when he's dating a spoiled girl, you get the option to slap her, and obviously any player would choose not to. But when you choose not to, she says, "You're just a coward, I knew you wouldn't do it!" and leaves forever. Then he looks down and is like, "I suppose I am a coward...". Pretty dubious if you ask me.

HotLimit wrote: Personally I think Persona 2's devil communication style is the most interesting. Choosing certain options will not necessarily yield the same results, and if a conversation goes bad, you can try to steer it back in your favor. The demons have 4 different emotions (happy, interested, scared, angry), which will change depending on your reactions. For people complaining that conversation trees take a lot of work or are too hard to script, just consider this game and how many combinations of characters and demons there are. Surely you can do something similar for a mere 5-10 characters.

I'm playing Persona3 right now, never played the 2 but what you say is quite interesting, I like the possibility still to turn a conversation in your favor even if you pick the wrong answer. But still it's a LOT of work, especially for indies (one-man or small teams).

jack_norton wrote:

HotLimit wrote: Personally I think Persona 2's devil communication style is the most interesting. Choosing certain options will not necessarily yield the same results, and if a conversation goes bad, you can try to steer it back in your favor. The demons have 4 different emotions (happy, interested, scared, angry), which will change depending on your reactions. For people complaining that conversation trees take a lot of work or are too hard to script, just consider this game and how many combinations of characters and demons there are. Surely you can do something similar for a mere 5-10 characters.

I'm playing Persona3 right now, never played the 2 but what you say is quite interesting, I like the possibility still to turn a conversation in your favor even if you pick the wrong answer. But still it's a LOT of work, especially for indies (one-man or small teams).

Not really? Like, make a variable like "conversation mood". Then at the beginning of a conversation, set it to 5 (Interested) as default (or more or less depending on the character you're talking to or where you are in the story, etc). If you say something right, add points. If you say something wrong, remove points. So between 1-4 is scared, 5-7 is interested, 8-10 is happy. If it gets to 0 or below, the person gets angry and leaves immediately and you lose affection points. If the conversation mood is between 8-10 at the end of the conversation, you get like +10 affection points. If the conversation ends and the points are between 5-7, maybe get a moderate +5 affection points. You may lose a few or just not gain any points if they're scared by the end.

So you get multiple chances to say the right thing, basically, then once the conversation is over, affection points are added/removed and the conversation mood variable resets.

That's how I would do it?

I'm sleepy and have no idea for an original dating mechanic, so I'll just review a game that I found interesting. It's Embric of Wulfhammer, an rpg yuri dating sim. You can find the game here, it's free ^^: http://wulfhammer.org/

so here' is a couple of facts about the game:
1. It's made with rpgmaker
2. The dating mechanic is very simple, just keep talking to the character you're interested in (and sometimes, pick the right choice)

So judging from those facts, it's supposed to be a boring game ... however, it managed to make me play non-stop until I get almost all of the endings including the true ending XD ! Based on my observation, here is a couple of things that make this game is so interesting.
1. The entire cast has unique and interesting personality
2. The dialogs are engaging and cleverly written
3. The side images manage to deliver the characters' emotion
4. Good storyline

Ok, that's all, I'm going to sleep now XD

Aleema wrote:Ugh, that happens in Girl's Side, too. The stupidest feature, hands down. It would be cute if you just got a jealousy scene where they act upset that you're ignoring them, but I have to stop what I'm doing to go on a fake date with them or I'll lose the game? Laaame. And usually it's not once or twice in a game. It's just always near the end, and sometimes with multiple bombs at once.

woaah, so it forces us to become a playa?? what this world is coming too D: ?

Camille wrote:[..]

So you get multiple chances to say the right thing, basically, then once the conversation is over, affection points are added/removed and the conversation mood variable resets.

That's how I would do it?

Yes, that's how I would do it too - the problem is that you need to write it, all the sentences, and code in renpy. The dialogue should appear "natural", so writing in pieces like that is not really easy to do. (I'm a bit sleepy now probably tomorrow will be able to express myself better XD)

jack_norton wrote:Yes, that's how I would do it too - the problem is that you need to write it, all the sentences, and code in renpy. The dialogue should appear "natural", so writing in pieces like that is not really easy to do. (I'm a bit sleepy now probably tomorrow will be able to express myself better XD)

As VN writers, we're always writing conversations, anyway. So it's just a matter of adding a few more options here and there to make them longer and changing the way the points are distributed. Maybe it's not as big of a deal to me because I'm used to this by now, haha. MJ has tons and tons of different dialogues depending on the MC's personality. Every other line is something like IF SARCASM > 10, THEN... I'm only through writing about 15% of chapter 3 out of 8 and we have 70 menus. A few of those are because of the letters, but that is still well over 50.

It's really not that hard logistically, just perhaps takes a bit more patience and creativity with writing different dialogues. ...actually, the more I think about it, the more I like this system (it was a lot more simple in Persona 2, though, since you had a set number of actions and reactions that were recycled from demon to demon) and just might have to use it. XD

As far as mini-games go. I found an american dating sim once, where you had to do the tracing game when you're on a date (like the gardening mama tracing game) when you touched her arm or kissed her, and if you failed it would upset her and your date would fail. You could also have different mini-game for each romantic option and how well you do at it or how often you play it impresses them. Like rocker boy likes it when you play the guitar mini-game. Or simple "event" mini-games. Something extra you can do, like DDRing to prove you also love and know the tune to her favorite song. My favorite dating system had to have been Azure Dreams(PS1), because first, you had to talk to them and make them like you, but there were also other things you had to in the RPG element before they liked you. Like build geek girl a library with money you earned from adventuring, rescue warrior girl from the tower, find sick girl medicine from the difficult part of the tower, etc. I much prefer a system with obvious, slightly difficult hurdles than continuously failing at an overly difficult/complex talking and gift approach. :/