Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

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Re: Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

Postby Branes » Wed, 10Jun09 21:49

One of the issues I have with a lot of point and click games, is the linearity. You must make the right move or you lose..or go in the wrong direction. This proposal doesn't provide for a completely random option, but does make it a little more unpredictable.

Whenever an important dialog choice or action is chosen, you have to make a "chance" selection. You have 3 options or doors as in "Let's make a deal." One option gives a good result..you move on to the next step. The other is a bad result, you fail and have to go back to a predetermined part of the story. The 3d option is the bonus. You skip a step in the process, so, for example, if you're trying to feel her breasts, you get to rub her between the legs instead.

This would allow you to play the game with different attitudes also. Because the different results can be different attitudes for the girl. Instead of standoffish, "don't touch me" you might find that she's hot to trot, but only for this move. You might actually get away with saying "You're hot, I want to have sex with you, now." But for overt statements like that..you only have 1 good result, the other two are bad, limiting your success. It doesn't eliminate linearity completely but it does put a "luck" factor in. I don't know if you can program "random" results in html, I doubt it, but by varying the outcomes you make it appear to look random. at least on the first run through.

I know nothing of using Poser or Daz3D so I can't design this game, but one of you can use the idea if you like.

I did actually make a sequence in 3dSV2 using this system, as a demo but never actually completed the game.

To demonstrate my idea check this verbal flowchart.

A guy meets a girl sitting alone on a park bench. She is beautiful and wearing a top which shows off her ample breasts and deep cleavage.

Guy: Hi. Beautiful day, huh?
Now he selects 1 of 3 options.

1. Good option. Hi, yes, it is. Would you like to sit down and talk with me?
2. Bad option. Hi!? Is that the best line you can come up with? Go away, you're lame.
3. Bonus. Hi, yourself. You're cute. Come over and sit next to me.

Sitting closer to the girl is the step AFTER sitting down, so in
the bonus you skip the sitting down step.
Now that's one dialog choice. Another might be.

Wow, you're really hot!

And then you come up with responses for that. And so on.
lastly you could have him say something chauvinistic like:

Hey, baby! Nice rack! then in the chance you have 2 bad options and one good one..no bonus.

So basically one Dialog choice could have many different outcomes depending on how many dialog choices you put in.

And at a certain point you have the dialog choice determine which branch of the story you wind up in. In my game, I had nine different endings mapped out on the flowchart, not counting the fatal choice where you had to go back to the beginning, and there was only 1 of those..kind of like getting the Queen of Spades in Hearts.
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Re: Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

Postby tlaero » Thu, 10Jun10 08:49

Hello Branes,

Your idea sounds interesting. To make sure I'm understanding it correctly, after the player clicked "Hi. Beatufiul day, huh?" three blank doors would appear, and the player would click on one of them to see what her response is, right?

Are you worried that it makes the game kind of arbitrary? No matter how well I make my choices, I need to keep redoing things to find the "right" door to choose.

I'd rather the player have multiple choices and have the woman's reaction depend on them.

Something I was trying to do with Amy Redux was make all of the choices be "valid" but have each have a differing impact. For instance, I kept track of how happy, aroused, and angry Amy was. Some of the choices had no effect but to advance the story, others made her happier, or more aroused, or more angry. Then, I based the important points in the game on combinations of those values (ie, for her to have sex with you, her arousal had to be over a threshold, and her arousal + happiness - anger had to be over another threshold). That way, a player had multiple valid paths through the story and could roleplay the way he wanted.

I didn't do it as well as I wanted to, but hopefully did it well enough that others can use the example and build upon it.

The real difficulty with branching dialog trees, though, is the amount of time it takes to write them. Every extra option the player can choose requires another reasonable response from the woman, and all responses need to branch back together at some point. It's not necesarily HARD to do that, but it sure is a lot of work.

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Re: Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

Postby TheBrain » Fri, 10Jun11 20:07

I don't think he means those doors actually to appear tlaero, rather just have the game choose one at random.
I think the main problem would be that if you have no 'safe' choices (i.e. every option has a chance to fail) then the longer the game is the bigger the chance you'll eventually fail (for example, a series of 5 choices with 10% chance to fail ends up with a 41% chance to fail overall).

But even if you can't do the graphics, make a text only prototype (and if you can't do the programming, just make a flowchart). It would make your idea a lot more clear.
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Re: Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

Postby cheese101 » Fri, 10Jun11 22:25

yeah,there would have to be answers that guarantee a good result...either good or bonus

also skipping parts may not be good,if you get a bonus at the wrong time,you could miss some great pictures,or some information as to what to do next...
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Re: Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

Postby tlaero » Sun, 10Jun13 09:19

If it's actually purely random, then I'm strongly apposed to the idea. I hate the part in VDG Rachel where you can only advance if the random number generator happens to go your way (slot machine). I personally changed the code to make option 2 always win. I also hated the "spin the bottle to decide where we'll go next" option in Ariane. After trying multiple times to get the bottle to land on the place I wanted to go, I went in and modified that code too.

Needing to start over on the whims of a random number generator doesn't make the game better. It just frustrates the players.

Now, if there's an area you'll naturally go through a lot and, occasionally, a random event happens, that's fine. But success and failure should be determined by the players actions.

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Re: Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

Postby TheBrain » Mon, 10Jun14 02:46

I could give a different spin on this idea, mixing it with some thoughts I've had a while back.
I think the basic idea behind this is that essentially you're not dating the same girl every time, i.e. her reactions to the same action can differ. The problem with pure random reactions of course is that the girl acts completely random, there is no consistency in let's call it her 'personality', which means the player can't learn anything about it.
To fix this I would determine certain traits for the girl that affect actions. You would still have the same (mostly linear) series of actions/events, but rather than have the actions have random effects their effect changes based on the traits. You can then randomly generate the traits and have something similar to Branes idea, but (when designed properly) with some consistency throughout the date. If you add indications of the traits along the way the player could even learn the personality through more than just trial and error.
Example, say we have a 'shy' trait (basically a true or false variable). If the girl is shy she could greet you with a "Uhm.. hi", whereas if she isn't shy she could go with "Hi cutey!" (as you might notice, I'm not great at coming up with interesting dialogue :P). The player probably won't get it the first time around, but after a couple of times seeing the different greeting he should be able to infer the 'shy' trait (possibly along with other hints).
In the rest of the date the 'shy' trait may block the success of bold actions (going for a kiss too soon, etc. etc.).

I'd think that even with a few of those traits you could create a reasonably random personality within a date that's still mostly linear.
Of course I'm just a theorist, I probably couldn't come up with the dialogue for one date, let alone one accounting for multiple personalities (which is quite a bit more work). But it's just more ideas, maybe someone will find it useful ;).
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Re: Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

Postby tlaero » Mon, 10Jun14 11:28

I like that idea, TheBrain. How she responds and what she responds favorably to would be determined by her personality. And there are a lot of different possible ways to choose the personality. It could be random. It could be a choice the player makes. You could ask a series of questions at the start and infer the appropriate character type from the users answers.

You could pretty easily have a function that says, "Look up her personality, and give influence if this action matches that personality."

But the game writer would still need to write multiple dialog paths. And it seems like the action paths wouldn't be the same between the multiple personality types. The shy girl would never do things that the adventurous one would, and the adventurous one would get bored by things the shy one loves.

I wonder if you're better off doing multiple dates with different characters (of differing traits) instead of trying to do cover different traits with one date. That's basically what Chaotic did, and it worked out pretty well.

Lots of choices. It's definitely worth thinking about.

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Re: Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

Postby Squeeky » Mon, 10Jun14 11:42

Following on with your thoughts tlaero, I'm a little concerned at the potential file size with multiple date/persona choices. Without needing to elaborate too much ArianeB really gives us a lot of the qualities to which TheBrain refers, but within one persona rather than multiple, and consider the imagery size as the first overhead. And then there is the multipaging networks to make it all happen.

There is clearly no easy answer, the author must make some massive decisions.
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Re: Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

Postby TheBrain » Mon, 10Jun14 18:29

Making multiple dates is definitely the easier option. On the other hand you do end up with something that's solvable by pure trial and error. My idea really is about adding some challenge to all the "drink X times and do Y nice things"-dates.

Squeeky, I'm not sure what you think is similar to my idea in ArianeB, as it contains nothing of the sort I described. Consider it this way, with random traits a walkthrough for it would have to be conditional (if she greets you with "uhm.. hi", choose A, else choose B, etc.), while a walkthrough for arianeB is straightforward (choose A, choose C, etc.).
Furthermore, as long as it's clear to the player that her personality changes every time, you could have just one set of graphics (of course in the ideal case you'd have multiple to signify you meet a different girl each time). Plus you could get away with a much smaller world than what you see in arianeB: it is by no means a requirement for the idea to have multiple sets of clothing, hair styles or even to have more than just a few endings. And in the end many of the paths in these date games are totally irrelevant to eachother anyway (yes, you might need one path for a 'fun'-point that you need in another path, but you could just as well get that 'fun'-point from another path and end up in the same place).

Either way I wouldn't call file size a real issue anyway, internet connections are fast enough to cope. Plus I'd happily wait an hour to download a good game rather than play a game like meet'n'fuck instantly.
(Of course the real issue here is that creating something big usually takes more time for the creator)
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Re: Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

Postby Squeeky » Tue, 10Jun15 06:34

Ah. Conditional. It does happen throughout Ariane, consider the hot tub, you can have a drink or play "Truth or Dare". No, there are other conditionals too, like viewing the night sky.

Those incidents appear to me to be of the same programming structure that you describe.

I accept that "wardrobe" could be well reduced to download overheads, and at that point some of us have connections where affordability of broadband could take well up to 2 hours, and what if I want to download something else in the meantime, 50Mb?

I accept your argument to download quality is paramount over downloading instant crap.

I suppose to a point, we really don't get to know Ariane but in your thoughts certain events could trigger her persona. Like during the evening photos looking over the city, a false comment might end that scenario re modesty (whatever) but instead of the date terminating you get some other options (rather than getting the prize).

Do I read that correctly? Maybe, forced to bypass that prize allows other options allow it somewhere later?

Is this how I understand your viewpoint?
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Re: Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

Postby TheBrain » Wed, 10Jun16 00:14

Not quite, it's not about the functioning of the game per se. You could still use it along with instant-failure options, though it might be better suited towards maybe something with a happiness meter.
The principle is quite simple, what is common now is that in a given situation you have a couple actions, say A and B, with one result each, for example:
A -> increase fun and go to scene 2
B -> go to scene 3
In my idea this would be enhanced with the personality traits, something like:
A -> if (shy) { increase fun } and go to scene 2
B -> if (shy) { end game } else go to scene 3

You could rewrite this for a given personality and end up with what is used now, say if we know the personality is 'shy', then the action results become:
A -> increase fun and go to scene 2
B -> end game

Of course with this I've ignored other implications, for example response text needs to be able to change based on traits to make them apparent to the player (like the 'hi'-example in my last post).

But this is for the most part independent of the rest of the design. You could easily replace 'increase fun' with any other construct. The traits would just be there to provide variation.

The conditionals in ariane are quite different from this, for starters they only occur in one place: you view the night sky, have to identify a random location and then you move on without it ever having an effect again.
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Re: Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

Postby tlaero » Wed, 10Jun16 11:46

I like where you're going with that, TheBrain. You're right that part of the game would become figuring out the girl's personality and what's appropriate for it. That would be cool.

Squeeky, I don't think file size would have much of an impact here. The real size in these games is the images. I don't think the various personalities would dramatically change the number of images. Mostly you'd get smiling and frowning versions of her in the various locations, which you'd have regardless.

All this is possible with the current setup, that Phreaky is using. It would just take a lot of extra html files. It would certainly be possible to do fewer HTML and more Javascrïpt, but we've been trying to keep the JS to a minimum for the non-programmers.

If any of the artist/storytellers wanted to go this route, though, we could write some javascrïpt functions that basically have multiple lines of dialog based on personality type. I envision it going something like this.

You (the game writer) first decides how many personality types to cover. Let's say you do 3 (shy, normal, adventurous). Then, for each line of dialog, you write three lines (one for each personality type). You have a variable you set that chooses the personality type at the start (random, user choice, etc) and then throughout the game the JS would choose the dialog that goes with the personality type. Reactions would be a bit more complicated, but similarly doable.

The trouble is, the pages and code would be much less readable to a non-coder. There's something fairly nice about the current page structure where the code is mostly hidden and the HTML is basically just the dialog and action text.

At some point, though, the complexity outweighs the value of doing this in HTML and you start looking at other options, like Flash or Silverlight.

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Re: Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

Postby Squeeky » Wed, 10Jun16 12:09

Tlaero, I think you are suggesting that there i one "person" that the artist/creator develops rather than eg, 3. Onto this "person" you overlay the qualities of the chosen personality.

If that is the case then I acknowledge that the number of images would not increase hugely in consideration if you were creating 3 unique models. I guess this is what TheBrain has been trying to convey to me.
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Re: Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

Postby TheBrain » Thu, 10Jun17 01:57

Perhaps if you consider it to be one person because the imagery is the same it is more correct to refer to it as different moods, rather than personality.

Either way, if you were gonna do one set of images per personality the whole idea would kinda fall down, because the images would be a dead giveaway of the personality. And then you're just back with a couple of dates with different girls that all occur in the same setting, but with no added challenge.
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Re: Suggestion for different Virtual Date game

Postby Norse Graphics » Sun, 10Sep05 07:51

Hi TheBrain, what you're thinking of is something I have thought a little about, but not in much detail. The Shy/Normal/Adventurous mental traits seems a fair deal, because you can recycle some of the pictures in the game, and add interesting gameplay. It is a very good idea, and filesize issues shouldn't hold you (or anyone) back.
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