My demo thread: http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... 45&t=20186
(current mockup)
Story:
You were a young, freshman woman at a prestigious university who saw the following poster:
(*If you don't know what speed dating is, I have a brief explanation at the bottom of this post)
You decided to go. You didn't have high expectations, but hey, it was worth trying, right? You met five intelligent guys who were... "memorable." This is the story of how it went...
Concept:
The story is told as five interactive vignette-like encounters. Unlike most games about dating, the focus is not on which guy you will get, but how differently your interactions can go, not based on what you say, rather, how you say it. Whether you choose to be nice, sarcastic, reticent, frank, aggressive, or unpredictable, there are characters who respond well and others that don't. The characters are all extremely bright, somewhat eccentric freshmen whose maturity lags behind their self-awareness. There is a lot of light parody of social interactions.
There will be about 30 dialogue choices plus a few bonus choices. Each match with a guy will have its own short epilogue independent of the others (a match just means you plan to get to know each other better). It is possible to get every guy in one play-through, because you can act like a totally different person around all of them if you want. However, my goal is to make nearly every choice result in a unique, interesting bit of dialogue, regardless of whether it makes them like you or hate you. I want to reward the player for going back and trying all of the different options.
Characters
(some pictures are more in progress than others)
The protagonist (default name: Virginia)
A sharp young woman. What is her personality like? You decide! (But right now it looks like she's in a sarcastic mood...)
Chet
A spontaneous sort who loves snowboarding,
Jam
An architecture major who admits exhaustion from long nights in the studio. Claims to otherwise be a party animal. No, really.
Red
Clearly intelligent, but you get the feeling he’s sizing you up as he would a political opponent.
Will
A computer geek. Or… perhaps “dork” would be the more appropriate term?
Hunter
A handsome young man who seems to know what to say to make a girl feel special.
Screenshots
(the character bodies are still a wip)
Progress:
I have completed a demo!
All Platforms
Writing: 40% -- Prologue and Chet's story complete. The total wordcount projection about is 36-37K -- way more than I originally planned. I have about 15k written, so my writing percentage has actually gone down as I've written more! Oh well.
Art: 60% -- I have expressions for Chet and the protagonist. Their clothing is incomplete. The others are still very much in progress.
UI & Coding: 60% -- Interface is good except for a few tweaks. Chet is coded (see demo). Jam, Red, Will and Hunter still need to be coded (because they partly still have to be written).
Music: 5% -- It's in the planning stages
I've never made a dating sim or VN, and in fact only started playing them last month, and having done NanoWriMo in the past thought it would be cool if there was something like that for VNs, did a Google search, and... well, here I am. I had an idea for a much more epic project, but I wanted to do something I might actually finish. So I made up this premise as a smaller way to pilot some of my characters and ideas. It’s also a good writing exercise for conveying characters in a very short period of time (every word will be chosen for a reason).
(*About speed dating: Speed dating is an event for singles where they spend a specified amount of time (eg. 8 min) talking with a potential match – no contact information exchange – then a bell rings or something and they rotate to the next one. They confidentially note whether they are interested in each person and give it to the organizers at the end. After it’s over, the organizer will look for matches – mutually interested people – and send them contact information. That’s the basic gist, anyway. I've never actually been on one myself, but choosing this format seemed like too good of a scope-limiting tactic to pass up.)
