VN Question about how Relationships get built up in VNs

[AstralJam]

When you make a sandbox, this is quite simple. you can interact with a girl or not if you want to. then you can choose dialogue that's either nice or bad for example. then you can upgrade the relationship to the nice (love route) or bad(degradation route).

what about in a VN? I'm making one right now. I like to add many dialogue options that the players can choose. Usually one is nice, one is neutral and one is mean.

But how should this affect the story? It's not like you can "grind' those options.

Would it be better to just have one route for a girl? Basically get together with her, or not?

Maybe make just one big degradation or love relationship choice after a bunch of illusion dialogue choices that will settle it?

What do you think?

 

[Zoe Archangel]

what about in a VN? I'm making one right now. I like to add many dialogue options that the players can choose. Usually one is nice, one is neutral and one is mean.

But how should this affect the story? It's not like you can "grind' those options.

Technically you can. A lot of games will use a hidden score system where you accumulate "good" points or "corruption" points or whatever, but I think it usually turns out poorly. You don't want a situation where your player accidentally gets set on the route that they don't want.

Maybe make just one big degradation or love relationship choice after a bunch of illusion dialogue choices that will settle it?

This is the best option in my opinion. It gives the player the most agency and allows them to change their mind. Maybe they started off thinking they would go one direction, but after spending time with the character they decide to go for the other route.

I would avoid having clear-cut nice/neutral/mean dialogue options, though. That only serves to force people into picking a single option based on their preconceptions, even if it hasn't been officially locked in through the final choice yet. The dialogue options leading up to the major decision should be all be neutral and exploratory, so there is no dissonance between, for example, picking mean options and then deciding to go down a "love route." Don't think of them as illusory choices, but rather as ways to help the player decide which route they want to go on. Even if a choice doesn't offer a unique route, it can still matter by giving different information.

 

[AstralJam]

Technically you can. A lot of games will use a hidden score system where you accumulate "good" points or "corruption" points or whatever, but I think it usually turns out poorly. You don't want a situation where your player accidentally gets set on the route that they don't want.



This is the best option in my opinion. It gives the player the most agency and allows them to change their mind. Maybe they started off thinking they would go one direction, but after spending time with the character they decide to go for the other route.

I would avoid having clear-cut nice/neutral/mean dialogue options, though. That only serves to force people into picking a single option based on their preconceptions, even if it hasn't been officially locked in through the final choice yet. The dialogue options leading up to the major decision should be all be neutral and exploratory, so there is no dissonance between, for example, picking mean options and then deciding to go down a "love route." Don't think of them as illusory choices, but rather as ways to help the player decide which route they want to go on. Even if a choice doesn't offer a unique route, it can still matter by giving different information.

Thank you for your input. That's smart, I will go with the "exploratory" dialogue options that fit the main character's personality while giving different information about the love interest.

 

[moskyx]

Thank you for your input. That's smart, I will go with the "exploratory" dialogue options that fit the main character's personality while giving different information about the love interest.

I think that's a good approach. Just think about how real-life relationships actually develop. You meet a girl and you don't act like a total ass to her... at least until you get to a point where you know she totally likes that. There's an exploratory phase where you get to know what she likes, what she thinks about life or whatever, and then you act accordingly, trying to show the side of yours that best aligns with her interests to make her like you. I think you can still give some nice/neutral/mean dialog choices but only to let players express themselves as they'd like, and use them to get some useful reactions from the LI, like minor warnings to the players to stop acting like that or some info about herself. You can still check those nice/neutral/mean variables every once in a while and make the LI say something like 'I don't really like your sense of humor' if someone is choosing too many mean answers, or 'Sometimes I feel you are not really interested in what I say' if the player remains mainly neutral: this gives some 'illusion of choice' as the game actually reacts to player's choices, and it also adds to the LI's characterization with flavor text. But more than these 'characterization' dialog choices, I feel that, in order to open and close paths, a more natural way is how the player reacts to certain story-related events: it may be one big impactful event or a series of minor ones, but those reactions at those critical points should show your LI that you're here for her, no matter how nice you were to her before or how many times you complimented her during this playthrough. Design the story you want to tell around those 'checkpoints', and then use the other 'characterization' choices as the main dish seasoning.

 

[PTSdev]

I've been brooding over this exact question for the last year or so. I'm developing a game as well and story progression is TOUGH if you want something that goes beyond the usual "love/corruption" dichotomy. In the end, it comes down to the quality of the dialogue and the writing in general. If you manage to put your characters into interesting situations where they actually have meaningful conversations, it gets much easier to create rewarding decision trees.

Having clearly defined choice types like "nice", "mean" and "neutral" is very dangerous. Think of a game like Fallout 4. That game had 4 basic answers to EVERY dialogue prompt: "Yes", "Yes, but...", "Yes (sarcastically)" and "No (but actually yes)". This made the game's dialogue extremely dull.

How you're going to design your system depends on how much branching you want to have in your game. The more options with consequences you add, the more complicated it gets. I wouldn't try to get stuck on a rigid system, instead you should think about the story first. Which choices make sense for the characters? What are the possible end states for each relationship? Are there ways to "fail"? And so on.

 

[simarimas]

We have several options for choices, in our VN. The more choices you have, the more branches you will have. We just did a scene where there were 4 different options that came together in this one scene. The dialogue for the single scene ended up being around 2300 lines of code, with images to go along with this. So be careful how much you are willing to do, and how much time you want to spend on this type thing. It can get overwhelming pretty quickly. While it is great to have those choices, I would suggest keeping it as simple as possible until you are comfortable with the coding of it. Lots of if/elif/else lines to make it all work, at least in Renpy.

 

[KaeruVN]

Maybe make just one big degradation or love relationship choice after a bunch of illusion dialogue choices that will settle it?

What do you think?

Well, in my game I use a bunch of different variables to track affection. Of course there's a more standard variable tracking whether you're nice or mean to them, but also ones that track important decisions, because realistically it should affect a LI a lot more.

Like others said, just look at what you feel comfortable with. The more things to track and branch out with, the more difficult and harder to becomes to track all these variables and story lines.