Seeking tips and tutorials for dating sim

[IchihashiMaiden]

My friends and I are discussing the idea of making a dating sim, and as far as I know, Ren'Py is the program best suited for the job? I've been trying to dig up some guides and tutorials, but they're all either old and likely outdated, or just run me in circles.
I think my two biggest issues right now are branching paths/multiple endings, and the whole..... romance system?
I definitely feel like I'm forgetting something extremely important. I'm fairly new to coding, so the simpler the better, but what I mentioned above are definitely the bare minimum, I think.

I'm also open to recommendations of other dating sims I can look at as examples. I'm acquainted with Dream Daddy, Boyfriend To Death, Mystic Messenger, Dangerous Fellows, and Arcana, as well as some of flash games like Chronos Days. So any dating sims I could learn from are fine, though I guess if I can see what others can do with Ren'Py, that'd be most helpful.

If you have any advice, guides, tutorials, etc that would be helpful, we'd appreciate all the help we can get. If you do link to a tutorial, though, please make sure it's up to date, and not from 2017 or something.

Thanks in advance!

[papillon]

Well, first off, what kind of thing do you want to write, gamewise?

Leaping too quickly to an example can cripple your design sometimes because you don't know what is and isn't important or how to fix anything that isn't working (and as you know, guides quickly become outdated, unless you get the version of RenPy they were written for. Which you can do if you decide you want to!). Too often people get themselves stuck and think it's impossible to do something just because the one tutorial they're looking at doesn't work that way.

Or sometimes people will give you an "example" of something insanely complicated that you didn't need in the first place, and will make the whole thing sound way scarier than it is!

The basic how-to-use-RenPy tutorial that ships with the program should show you how to make menus with choices, which can be used to create branching paths.

I'm going to assume for a second that you've never done any of this so ignore it if I'm aiming too low:

Have you experimented with making something super-super-simple, just a few minutes long, to see how choices work and how you can use them to lead to multiple endings? Trying it and adjusting it until it works is going to give you a much, much stronger foundation to build from.

Start with maybe just a game that loads to a blank screen and asks you to pick between ice cream flavors or something. First try, just put in one menu and have the outcome for each option lead to you eating that flavor of ice cream and the game quitting, just to show that you made a menu. Once that works, then try making the menu choices set a flag to remember the user's choice and rejoin the main story, then have endings to the main story based on checking that stored choice. And then, hey presto, you've got the basic idea for how branching paths and multiple endings will work!

As for a romance system a lot of that is going to come down to how YOU want it to work, so you need to figure out what you want first. Many Japanese games actually have an incredibly simple choice system - you hang out with all the romance candidates, then eventually it asks you who you like best, and voila! you go onto that character's route. That may be the only choice you get to make in the whole game. This is allowed, if that's the kind of story you want to tell! It doesn't have to be super-complicated. (Obviously I love complication but not everyone does).

How do you want romance to work? Do you want to just pick someone and get their story? Do you want to pick someone and then have to make a lot of choices to determine whether you get their Good ENding or their Bad Ending? Do you want a lot of choices interacting with a lot of different characters in good/bad ways, and then you end up dating whoever you have the most Compatibility Points with? What sort of gameplay interests you?

[IchihashiMaiden]

The only thing I've done so far is a linear novel. Your suggestions with the ice cream and stuff makes a lot of sense, though, I guess I always looked at the forest instead of going from tree to tree.

The project we're talking about now is set in a behavioral rehab dorm school of sorts. I'm thinking maybe it'd work like western dating sims, where you interact with all of the suitors, and you have to actively pursue the character you want to have a good (or bad) ending with. Maybe after a while, it'll give you the option to specifically only work with that suitor, if that sounds like a good idea? But not right away, and not at the very end, so you can get attached and build up a small relationship, and then you can choose to go all in on one guy.

[eezergoode]

Well, if you are going for a purely story based VN with branching narrative, there are a few easy ways to go, but IMHO, the best way to go would be a points based system. Basically, every choice you make carries a point value, weighted towards one character or another, or for/against a single character. At some point in the game, you either ask the player which character they wish to pursue into a deeper relationship, OR you just branch the story based on the points accrued to this point.

If you want to go more complex, of course the mechanics will also be more complex, but most things you could still run with simple point-based tracking.

[IchihashiMaiden]

Well, if you are going for a purely story based VN with branching narrative, there are a few easy ways to go, but IMHO, the best way to go would be a points based system. Basically, every choice you make carries a point value, weighted towards one character or another, or for/against a single character. At some point in the game, you either ask the player which character they wish to pursue into a deeper relationship, OR you just branch the story based on the points accrued to this point.

If you want to go more complex, of course the mechanics will also be more complex, but most things you could still run with simple point-based tracking.

So instead of you choosing the suitor... the suitor chooses you, based on the points? I like that idea! I think that could feel much more rewarding, thank you for the suggestion!