- Apr 30, 2023
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Opening to Love
Hi everyone welcome to the game development thread/development journal of my game Opening to Love which you can check out
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and the F95 page is hereThis game is not new and is in active development but I wanted to make this thread to discuss the game and as a place to put down my ideas about the game and the journey of it's development as my first visual novel.
About the game:
Below is my game's overview:
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Essentially the game is a romantic adventure/mystery game where the player takes on the role of a virgin 34 year old office worker who has never dated. In comparison to other adult games I would say that it is fairly vanilla and that is by design because....
The reason I made the game with this premise
I have played adult games for some time but I was always attracted to games that weren't extreme, games where I felt that the characters had genuine feelings of romance, where they would fall in love (or into lust....) and then they would express those feelings through passion and sex. But when I looked up adult visual novels on places like itch.io etc. I felt I couldn't find those sort of games...
Particularly I really wanted to play a game where the romance was set in "real life" and was between people of about "office worker" age i.e. I was thinking around 30 years old. The problem was that I found a lot of romance games are set for really young people e.g. high school/college setting and if they weren't then the setting would be fantasy/sci-fi/isekai etc. I wondered where is the game where it's just a normal working aged guy trying to date working age women. On top of that I really love mystery/detective fiction where we slowly unravel the mystery. So that's what I set out to make; a game where it's about romance and finding love as older person but there is a mystery to build tension and drama and to keep you engaged.
Why the MC is an older virgin
The thing I have noticed talked about a lot in regards to my game is the fact that I made the MC a 34 year old virgin. I think I did it for two main reason:
- Even though I am writing about older characters I still like the idea of new love and I wanted to capture that thrill (and trials/tribulations) of finding first love. Also I found the idea of finding first love as someone a bit more worldly in experience with a more mature attitude to be a really interesting thing to explore. Also I feel that having the MC being a character that has never dated until older age BUT who also wants to give it a go gives a lot of space to build character growth. A first he might be nervous and unsure but this can build to a character who is more confident and assertive.
- I think I wanted to normalize it.... I feel that there is a lot of pressure in modern soceity for a man to "prove they are a man" by having sex. If a man is a virgin people will treat them as if there is something wrong with them and then the begin to judge themselves e.g they/I must be a creep/incel etc. I wanted to challange this idea. Sex is sex, it is not everything. While yes sex is good and awesome, I feel society puts pressure on men to make their whole identity about pursing/having sex, often encouraging them to be assholes to women/partners in the pursuit of sex. I wanted this game to, in a small way, support the idea that it really doesn't matter if you have sex or not as long as you enjoy what you are doing and treat other with respect. Have lots of sex? great! Have monogamous sex? Fantastic! Don't wanna have sex? Awesome! To me it's all about choice, respect, and happiness.
The love interests
I have tried to make the love interest a diverse cast and below is a short intro description of each:
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I wanted the love interests to be diverse to encourage narrative choice. The personalites range from brazen to refined and they are aged from about senior college student (23) to an older mature woman (45) with most of the charactes in their 30's. I have a lot of ideas about them so I am planning to make a dev diary entry going more into depth about each of them. But for a quick general overview statement I basically wanted each of the to do the following
- to confront the MC narritively,
- play a part in the mystery,
- be diverse in personality, looks, etc. to attract a diverse range of players
For a long time I had wanted to make games, not really as a career but just as a hobby I could share. I have decent computer/programming skills and I thought visual novel type games might be something I could do. The problem was I really liked 2d games so I knew that is what I wanted to make but I cannot draw and I haven't felt that pull to want to learn drawing/art so making a game of my own was always a pipe-dream. And then AI came along... Unlike drawing I am motivated with computer work and the challange of making the AI produce what I wanted to was something I really enjoyed. Once I figured out sprites and 16:9 images I realized I could put this all together to make a game. To be honest without AI I don't think I could have started to make games.
That all being said I understand there is a lot of ethical issues/debate around AI and I understand that it will put off a lot of people and that's fair. It is what it is. For those who don't mind I hope they enjoy it and can appreciate the visuals and for those who do I am happy for them to ignore the game.
My main goal with the AI is to try and put in my best effort and avoid being entirely slop, so hopefully that comes through in the game.
Future plans for the game
At time of writing the game is at version 0.3 and I am working on 0.4. As I said before this is only a hobby project for me so I am just working on the game whenever I can without and real structed time frame. The last update ended on a large cliffhanger and represents the low point for my MC. So for now I'm excited to focus a bit more on the mystery narrative and for the players to see how the MC can work through it and continue on his romantic journey.
Future plans for this journal
Writing about my writing, writing about my characters, writing about my failures and successes... Just a lot of writing really
Anyway that everyone for reading. Any thoughts, feedback or question are welcome!
Enjoy some images/animations from the game below!
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