Japanese Dating Sims

When I originally created my Dating Sim, I thought I was being original.  I knew about games like The Sims that had dating scenarios in them, and I knew about interactive stories, adventure games, and the “choose your own adventure” books, but I figured that my combining all these elements together was an original concept.

It wasn’t too long after releasing the first version that I discovered I was wrong.  A whole genre of “Dating Sims” had risen and declined in the decade before my game.  My ignorance can be forgiven since all of this happened in Japan, and nowhere else.

Before I go on about the Japanese Dating Sims, I should point out that the Japanese never called them “Dating Sims”.  They have Bishoujo games (beautiful girls),  and Ren’ai (romance) games,  both categories do not necessarily mean “dating” as literally as I took it.

The term caught on, because the Ren’ai games released in the early 90′s like Tokimeki Memorial, True Love 95, and a bunch more relationship games seem sto have “getting a date” as a major objective. These are just some of the ones known here in the US.  In Japan there have been hundreds of these titles.

A well known sub genre of the Dating Sim is “Eroge” (Erotic game, aka hentai game , or H-game), and Dating Sims themselves are part of a broader genre known as Visual Novels, which I’ll discuss in a future post.

I do not know what is considered to be the first “dating sim”, the early H-game  Dokyusei (1992) seems as good a candidate as any.  Games with sex and nudity existed before, but it was just straight porn or “strip poker” type games.  Dokyusei actually had plot and a gaming objective before the sex and nudity came into play. Like many early titles, eventually non-H versions would appear on consoles, and even Anime based on the game would be made.

I do know that Tokimeki Memorial is the first real breakout title, released in 1994.  It was an all ages program from the beginning, and its gaming style influence many titles to come. It and numerous sequels, have been released onto many consoles and even on cell phones.  Another breakout was True Love (1995) another “eroge” title.  An MS-DOS version in English was released in the US with nudity intact in 1999.

Before you go track these down,  most all the characters in these games are “manga” style drawn characters.  This convention has largely remained throughout the visual novel genre, which is probably why the genre has never caught on outside Japan.

The general settings of these games are also very Japanese.  The most common setting is Japanese prep school, and all the girls are in school uniforms.  The games start out letting you pick what kind of character you are RPG style where you distribute points between, looks, charm and intelligence.  As you move through the school, you meet many girls, and the object is to find girls that your style allows you to “score” with which you must do by the end of a set time period, usually a semester or school year.

It is not always a school setting, but there is always some arbitrary time limit involved.  The games usually also involve many different possible endings making the games re-playable.  Even though the settings often differed, the formula did not.

After about a decade, the formula got tired, and the popularity declined except for small cult followings.  Recently a resurgence has been happening as video game makers have been interested in games for pre-teen and teen girls they have dusted off the old formula, removed the eroge stuff, and reversed the genders making games where girls have to get boys.  These are called “Otome” or GxB Dating Sims.  Gay themed dating games exist as well, but only from indie sources.

Links:
College Romance – A simple flash romance virtual novel, PG-13 contains adult situations but not nudity.
Sim Girl – A flash game that pretty much includes all the stereotypical Japanese dating scenarios, including the H ending.
True Love 95 – The ms-dos game in english, in all of its 256 color glory, downloadable for free. Contains a reg file to allow it to run in windows. In vista or 7 see this note.
Dating Sims at NewGrounds – A big collection of flash H-dating sims, most are probably crap.
Wonderland Days – A PG rated Otome dating sim for girls.

Similarities and Differences with Ariane’s Dating Simulator

While mine is made up of rendered 3D while most of these are hand/computer drawn, the idea that live photos would be way too creepy is a shared idea.  Like mine, most all of these Date Sims adhere to the first person perspective (I thought I was being very original here, but I was just like everybody else).  All dating sims, including mine, occasionally pause the plot for some mini game or puzzle you have to solve to go on.  Mostly still images mixed with occasional animation, is also a shared trait.  The biggest alike quality is of course the multiple possible ending scenarios.

The key differences: Most dating sims allow you to pursue multiple girls, while mine is limited to one.  The advantages of the first is you can construct multiple personality types, mine is stuck with one type.  Other dating sims go on for pages before you have to make a branching decision, while mine has multiple branching decisions every other page.  The advantage of the first method is that you can actually tell a story, mine has to be designed with small story elements that can be told out of order thus sacrificing any semblance of plot.  Another key difference, all other dating sims are made up of “sprite” images overlapped on still backgrounds, while mine are all fully rendered stills.  Their method is a lot less work, believe me.

The biggest original concept on my part (and I wouldn’t recommend it to others) is to code the whole thing in html/javascript.  There are free programs out there that automate the whole process for people  interested in making your own.

The Dating Sim Formula in Other Game Genres

As games have gotten more complex over the years, the Dating Sim seems to have gotten demoted from genre to story element.  One cannot play these Japanese Dating Sims without being reminded of Leisure Suit Larry games for example, though that series was more arcade skill oriented and linear stories.  While The Sims added Hot Date in 2001, it was The Sims 2 expansion pack Night Life that included simulated dates where you had a certain amount of time to impress your date or lose a bunch of friendship points.

But the most complete inclusion of the Dating Sim element into a larger game I have seen is Dragon Age: Origins, where an optional sub plot of the game involves getting friendly, or better yet romantically involved, with your party NPCs. Like the above Dating Sims, this usually involves chatting them up, and responding in ways that gets them to approve, as well as buying them gifts and doing special personal favors for them.  No doubt these formulas show up in other RPG games, but DA:O is the most obvious example.

Another Date Sim Update 6.45, and an annoying Firefox bug

So after releasing 6.4 and squishing some bugs, one of the commenters posted this:

Another bug, if you go to the strip club with Rebecca then have sex with Ariane in the hot tub you can’t stay the night because Rebecca is in the bedroom. I had always felt bad about ditching her at the strip club anyway, but I think I would have noticed if we had brought her home with us.

The easy fix is one new line of code, but I realized he has a point about the post strip club party, and thought of a fun new scenario to add.  I then found myself in a common problem with this project which I call the “theme vs format” conflict.

A running theme in Dating Ariane simulator is that Ariane is a modern feminist who is not delicate or submissive.  She does only what she wants to do.  If it gives her pleasure, she will do it.  If it gives others pleasure, she may do it if she is assured a mutual exchange. …or really drunk.

The format of the game is (mostly) still images in a first person perspective.  It is supposed to play like a comic book, where you decide what happens next.  The advantage is that I do not have to usually show the player doing stuff, only Ariane’s reaction to the player doing stuff.

The conflict between the two is that it is difficult to portray a worthy mutual exchange of activities when we only see one point of view.  Like for example, how do I portray the player doing a striptease show without showing the actual player?  A series of reactions “stills” is kind of boring.  Then I came up with an idea that if the player is in motion, then his first person point of view will be in motion as well, so why not move the still image? Its a silly enough idea, it just might work, and I know it is possible because I have seen similar moving image effects on other HTML/javascript websites.  Its just a matter of figuring out how to do it.

While researching the problem, I ran into the old “every browser is different” problem, before eventually finding some code that smoothly moved an image linearly on all modern browsers.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is I did not want to move images linearly, I wanted wavy motion and circular motion.  The linear motion code is all done with loops, one loop to move the picture to the left, then another to move the picture to the right.  Since circular motion is a constantly changing direction, that complicates things greatly.

Then it hit me, what math functions go round and round and up and down?  Trig functions! (yes, there are opportunities to use Trigonometry after college)  I can rewrite the code to move in trig functions with ever increasing angles.  Start with angle a=0, x = sin a, y = cos a, then increase the value of a and recalculate.  (x,y) will form a perfect circle.  You do not even need to check for an end of the loop,  the value will just go round and round until you change the page.  Scaling the direction will create ovals instead of circles, and adding an absolute value y = |cos a| will make a U shape pattern.

Anyways, I wrote a new scenario using these tricks, and because it is only a small update, I am releasing version 6.45.

Get the full download here, or get a smaller 6.4 to 6.45 upgrade download here.

Another annoying Firefox bug

So I created a cool new scenario, what else can I do to finish out?  I have been thinking that the Comic Sans font I have been using, while fitting for the comic book theme, was getting old.  The best way around it is to convert the whole thing to external CSS, so with one line of code I can change the text font of the whole site to whatever I want.  This could be a fun new feature to play with.

Except I am running into another “every browser is different” problem.  For some reason Firefox does not register ongoing “onMouseover” events in one frame while handling an external CSS file in another frame.

Let me show you what I mean. Go to the online version of the date simulator here, then click on “Introduce yourself” and “Give her a hug”.  What you should see in the space below the picture is the words “You let go” written in navy blue in an Arial font.  If you are using Internet Explorer, that is exactly what you will see.  If you are in Safari, Opera or Chrome, you will see the text as soon as you move your mouse a tiny bit, which is wrong, but I can live with that.  In Firefox, you will only see the text if you move your mouse out of the picture (triggering an onMousout event) then move it back on the picture.  The only difference between this page and all the other pages is that this page uses a link to an external CSS file.  If I put in CSS code internally into the page, Firefox works fine, but that means changing 500 web pages to change a font, which defeats the whole purpose of doing CSS in the first place.

I’m not going to try and release a CSS version until I figure this one out.

Dating Sim Game 6.4 now out

Yeah I know, I keep coming back to this game. I need to stop.  I have an idea for a new scenario that can only be done online, so I need to stop releasing new downloadable versions.  Plus I have other projects I want to start.  I keep telling myself this, and yet I keep falling back into tweaking my old project.

So a couple of months ago, I found yet more bugs to fix.  While fixing bugs, I thought about a possible rule change involving magically appearing towels (mentioned in the comments).  So I created a new simple rule that if you go in the backyard without a towel or a swimsuit (which implies a towel is present) that no towel will appear until you return to the bathroom. This required two new pictures and some new code. Simple!

But, then I thought of a couple more rules to changes that were more complex. SPOILER! One idea I had is that the recently added Rebecca sleepover scenario has an abrupt ending if you wait in the hall instead of following either of them.  I decided to make it possible, under certain circumstances, to continue the date with Ariane, with Rebecca sleeping in the bedroom. Of course you can’t go anywhere and leave Rebecca alone, nor can you enter the bedroom since Rebecca is there, nor can you do anything noisy like shower or dance.  This means that I had to make some changes to all the allowed activities when Rebecca is sleeping in the bedroom. Another rule change was a cosmetic change that anytime there is removal of clothing (unless hidden behind a door), show the removal of clothing. The only place this rule is violated is in the photo shoot scene, so I ended up rewriting that scene yet again.

I have thoroughly tested all the new stuff, and (hopefully) written it in a way that it wont create more new bugs in the old stuff.  Feel free to post new bugs in the comments.

Enjoy!

Real ID: The Facebooking of WoW

Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of World of Warcraft, and the upcoming Starcraft 2, has made what I consider a bonehead move:  they plan to start posting on the forums the real names of the posters.  The stated reason is to cut down on “trolling”, but apparently it is also to promote the Blizzard Real ID service.

This may be the dumbest thing any gaming company has ever proposed.  They want to model their Real ID on Facebook which (supposedly) uses real names.  Real names anywhere on the internet is to me a serious security risk, especially when it comes to child safety.  Posting on open forums under your real name is like surfing the web without a virus scan, it is just asking for trouble.

Think about it.  Do you want family members, future employer’s, potential friends or mates googling you an finding how much time you spend gaming online? or your NSFW posts? or your tweets about getting drunk again, or how much you hate your boss, or some candid naked pics? Do you want hackers able to guess your banking security questions based on things you posted online?  Online anonymity is not about being able to spam and troll forums, its about separating your online life from your real life — a very wise and sensible thing for everyone to do.

The Official forum thread on this is over 30,000 posts in just 2 days. 98% of the posts are negative.

UPDATE: Thanks to massive opposition, Blizzard has reversed themselves.  Real names will no longer be added to the forums.  Personally, I think the whole Real ID idea is a bad one, but at least they are no longer forcing anyone to use it.