tracking MC's status from Niceguy to Jerk

[khumak]

One of the things I think most adult games are missing is some mechanism for simulating the tendency that a lot of girls have to prefer the bad boy over the nice guy. Something I came up with for the game I'm working on is basically kind of a tit for tat mechanism where a girl loses respect for MC when he does nice things for her that she has not done anything to earn. That doesn't have to mean sex, but in the context of a relationship I think it usually focuses on that. I can't really think of any other way to simulate something like that in a simplified way.

For the game I'm working on I decided that it makes sense for the girl's contribution to depend partly on where she falls on the bad girl vs nice girl spectrum. A nice girl that MC has a good relationship with might surprise MC by inviting him over for a home cooked meal where she cooked his favorite food. An approach close to a pure nice guy would work fine for this type of girl as long he didn't do too many nice things for her back to back without giving her a chance to reward him for it.

A bad girl would be more likely to reward MC with some type of sexual favor. But in both cases, if MC repeatedly showers her in affection/gifts/favors/etc without her doing something nice in return she loses respect for him and he pretty much friendzoned himself. She still likes it so it still builds relationship with her but she's less and less willing to do anything sexual. For me the bad girl type would respond better to a guy who is more of a dick and more selfish about how much he wants in return for giving her nonsexual attention.

So a guy who acts like more of a jerk, basically just doing whatever he wants even when he knows she doesn't like it, only doing nice things for her if he gets sex in return, etc hurts his relationship with her but increases her respect for him. So she's mad at him but as long as his relationship doesn't fall too low she's more likely to have sex with him than the nice guy who has higher relationship but lower respect.

I think the tricky part is figuring how how to set it up so being a complete asshole raises her anger or reduces her relationship by enough to overpower the increased respect while also making respect count for enough that a guy who acts like a simp is just not getting any action no matter how nice he is.

Curious what you guys think. Most of the games I've tried that try to do something similar to this fail at getting the right balance to me. They typically either set it up so the best approach is to play as an absolute simp or they set it up the other way and the best approach is to be a total psychopath. Both of those extremes I find immersion breaking and unappealing.

 

[Cosy Creator]

I think it's nigh impossible to map this aspect of male/female relationships onto simplified game mechanics, and I'm also not sure how fun it will be if you actually succeed. Most people play adult games to fulfill their fantasies, and I think one of the most widespread male fantasies, spanning almost every genre, is that treating a girl well makes her like you sexually. Having a game where you're forced to choose between a girl liking you but thinking you're an unfuckable "nice guy", and a girl disliking you but fucking you, doesn't sound like a fantasy I would want to live out in a game.

 

[khumak]

Yeah that's the hard part is finding some kind of balance. I don't think most people want to play as a total doormat or a total psycho, but most games seem to only reward 1 playstyle or the other. Playing a guy with more of a middle ground attitude where he demands some investment by the girl in return for his affection without just being a fucking asshole all the time rarely pays off in games.

Personally I get tired of games where the way to get sex from your girlfriend is to do all the household chores, buy her gifts constantly, let it slide any time she disrespects you, etc. In most of those games I find the side chicks more appealing and only end up doing the bare minimum to keep from a game over bad ending with the primary love interest because she's just not worth the effort. IRL I would dump a girl like that.

 

[Chalker]

toxic relationship game mechanic.

 

[woody554]

it might work for a romantic game. less so for a domination angle, as the mechanic amplifies what the GIRL likes instead of what a jerk mc wants to inflict on her against her will.

I'm doing something slightly different, where the girls all have some internal bias to begin with. to have some complexity the bias is NOT 'nice girl likes nice things' but something different that she's acquired through earlier trauma. ie. they're all damaged in different ways, and to help them with their trauma (as a good guy) you might need to make them face something sick in them.

but my system is also quite open, ie. you CAN romance/dominate/abuse any and all of them if you like. but if it's against their bias it's gonna be much much harder. sort of a hard mode. secret unlocks for those routes. like abusing someone who doesn't secretly want it is gonna have VERY narrow path to victory without bad endings. but it will be possible, you just have to find the right way.

(and yeah, you will be given plenty of ways to instant game overs if you try things the girls are not ready for yet. it's not gonna be one of those games where you can just brute force options to see what wins. bold moves will be dangerous, and clicking without thinking will end the game early.)

 

[HarveyD]

I don't think most people want to play as a total doormat or a total psycho, but most games seem to only reward 1 playstyle or the other.

That's because most games are made by amateur writers with no idea how to create an interesting character or how to pace their story. I don't wanna sound too negative, I appreciate them trying, but they are amateurs.

 

[khumak]

it might work for a romantic game. less so for a domination angle, as the mechanic amplifies what the GIRL likes instead of what a jerk mc wants to inflict on her against her will.

I'm doing something slightly different, where the girls all have some internal bias to begin with. to have some complexity the bias is NOT 'nice girl likes nice things' but something different that she's acquired through earlier trauma. ie. they're all damaged in different ways, and to help them with their trauma (as a good guy) you might need to make them face something sick in them.

but my system is also quite open, ie. you CAN romance/dominate/abuse any and all of them if you like. but if it's against their bias it's gonna be much much harder. sort of a hard mode. secret unlocks for those routes. like abusing someone who doesn't secretly want it is gonna have VERY narrow path to victory without bad endings. but it will be possible, you just have to find the right way.

(and yeah, you will be given plenty of ways to instant game overs if you try things the girls are not ready for yet. it's not gonna be one of those games where you can just brute force options to see what wins. bold moves will be dangerous, and clicking without thinking will end the game early.)

Yeah I'm still ironing out the details for my game but I want it to be flexible and as simple as I can manage. I'm kind of leaning towards a system where relationship is basically how much she likes you as a friend. This is mostly built up by being nice to her and just generally spending time with her. At various thresholds she will spontaneously do something nice for you on occasion as well. What "nice" means depends on her respect for you. The lower her respect for you, the less naughty she'll be when she's "nice" to you. She'll make you dinner or buy you a new shirt or something. The more she respects you, the naughtier she's likely to be when she does something "nice" for you.

Respect is more of a combination of things that essentially amounts to a cap on how freaky she's willing to get with you. It combines things that affect first impressions like fitness and outward display of wealth with reputation (basically notch count), and finally how fully she has given herself to you sexually.

Each girl has a nice guy rating for you that measures how lopsided the relationship is in your favor or hers. If you're a total simp then it reduces her respect significantly but it's really easy to build relationship (you're the best friend that's never getting any action). If you're a total asshole then it raises respect significantly but maintaining relationship high enough for her not to just tell you to go fuck yourself is harder.

I also wanted some variety in how different girls react so I divided girls up into either nice girl, normal girl, or bad girl. Each girl has a minimum threshold for respect below which you're a pure simp to her and she will never do anything sexual with you in this range.

This threshold is lowest for nice girls so they're the easiest to be friends with but the hardest to get freaky with. This is the girl next door type who you slowly build up a friendship with and eventually make it out of the friend zone if you play your cards right. She's the girl you still haven't seen naked after dating her for a month but she wants to hang out with you all the time. She's also not seeing anyone else on the side.

Normal girls have a higher simp threshold so they're harder to be friends with but are more likely to add "with benefits" once you manage it. She's the girl who kisses you on a first date, let's you play with her tits on the 2nd date, and sucks your dick on the 3rd date. She makes no secret of the fact that she's dating other people on the side.

Bad girls have the highest simp threshold and relationship with them is pretty irrelevant unless you already have a reputation, good fitness, money, etc. But if you do she's the girl who will fuck you on a first date or suck your dick in the mens room of the bar after you buy her 1 drink. She's also the girl who wants the roller coaster ride. She's the most likely to fly into a rage and smash your car up with a baseball bat when she catches you cheating. She's also the most likely to invite herself over for a threesome in the exact same situation (depending on how high her respect is).

 

[anne O'nymous]

I think it's nigh impossible to map this aspect of male/female relationships onto simplified game mechanics,

This is absolutely not a problem, it's one of the most basic game mechanism.

[Il use ren'Py as example, because it's the most used, but it works with any game engine]

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And it's done.

Then you can make a finer selection, by making the girl liking a nice guy, but not too nice, or a jerk, but still a bit respectful.

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And you can even have this as generic in a class:

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And you can even extend this with a limit where a nice guys loving girl will find MC too much of a jerk and breakup ; or the opposite.
It's really not something too complicate to do.

and I'm also not sure how fun it will be if you actually succeed.

This is another problem, but not one that can't be worked around depending of the kind of game and story.

A pure and true sandbox game, like Super Powered by example, can perfectly deal with this kind of game mechanism. Instead of having the love that increase each time the MC is lovely, and decrease each time he's a jerk, it would increase/decrease each time he make a move on the right side. A girl liking bad boys would love him more each time she see him trick someone, and a girl liking nice guys would fall for a flower bouquet.
In a grinding game, or again true sandbox one, you can do it by having extra scenes when the MC is on the right range. A BJ at the movie theater ? It's something that she'll only do with someone she love. You want anal ? You need to be sure that she like you enough for this.
In both case, since the scenes are repeatable as much as you want, it wouldn't be a stopping point.

Most people play adult games to fulfill their fantasies, and I think one of the most widespread male fantasies, spanning almost every genre, is that treating a girl well makes her like you sexually.

Hmm, I'm pretty sure that the most widespread male fantasy is that the girl will love you whatever how you treat her, agreeing for a nice romantic night one day, and letting you ravage her ass the next one, this without a single change in her feelings for you. There's still a lot of cavemen out there, believing that a girl is their property and that treating her well is for weak pussies.

Having a game where you're forced to choose between a girl liking you but thinking you're an unfuckable "nice guy", and a girl disliking you but fucking you, doesn't sound like a fantasy I would want to live out in a game.

It's not what he said.
If she like bad boys and you act nice with her, she will friendzone you and you'll never have sex with her. It's by being a jerk (relatively speaking) that she'll fall in love and let you fuck her.
Therefore, the choice isn't between a girl that don't like you and let you fuck her, and one that like you and don't spread her legs. It's between being loved and not being loved, each girl needing a different kind of attention to fall in love.

 

[khumak]

If she like bad boys and you act nice with her, she will friendzone you and you'll never have sex with her. It's by being a jerk (relatively speaking) that she'll fall in love and let you fuck her.
Therefore, the choice isn't between a girl that don't like you and let you fuck her, and one that like you and don't spread her legs. It's between being loved and not being loved, each girl needing a different kind of attention to fall in love.

Right. The basic idea I'm going for is that all girls have a minimum level of respect that you have to reach before they consider you for naughty time. It's not that they want you to be an asshole. They want you to show that you have a backbone. She won't respect you if you show that you don't respect yourself by letting her walk all over you.

So when she's nice to you, she feels like she deserves it when you're nice to her. She's earned that attention. When she shovels a heaping pile of bullshit your way she wants you to throw it right back at her. She might get pissed at the time, but she'll respect you for it later. Tit for tat.

If she's having one of those days where she's just being a total bitch and you treat her like a queen, she knows she doesn't deserve that treatment and loses respect for you for not only putting up with that but actually rewarding it.

 

[khumak]

it might work for a romantic game. less so for a domination angle, as the mechanic amplifies what the GIRL likes instead of what a jerk mc wants to inflict on her against her will.

I'm doing something slightly different, where the girls all have some internal bias to begin with. to have some complexity the bias is NOT 'nice girl likes nice things' but something different that she's acquired through earlier trauma. ie. they're all damaged in different ways, and to help them with their trauma (as a good guy) you might need to make them face something sick in them.

but my system is also quite open, ie. you CAN romance/dominate/abuse any and all of them if you like. but if it's against their bias it's gonna be much much harder. sort of a hard mode. secret unlocks for those routes. like abusing someone who doesn't secretly want it is gonna have VERY narrow path to victory without bad endings. but it will be possible, you just have to find the right way.

(and yeah, you will be given plenty of ways to instant game overs if you try things the girls are not ready for yet. it's not gonna be one of those games where you can just brute force options to see what wins. bold moves will be dangerous, and clicking without thinking will end the game early.)

Yeah to me having it be flexible is important so you can customize your game to your own play style. The general idea is that respect raises your status with girls and they will let you get away with more as a result of it. Less so with nice girls. More so with bad girls. So you can play however you want if you raise relationship and respect to decent levels. It's just less effective with certain girls than if you give them what they really want.

Nice girls want a guy who's nice, but not too nice. Normal girls want a guy who's balanced. Bad girls want a player.

I'm not a big fan of the game over, bad ending unless you fuck up in a blatantly obvious or repetitive way. I want fuck ups to have consequences that are worth seeing while still being recoverable unless you're obviously doing it on purpose.

For instance to use an NTR bad ending as an example you see your biggest rival flirting with your girl and getting a bit handsy. You can intervene or just watch. If you intervene you run him off and he doesn't do it again. If you just watch he gets more handsy until your girl slaps him or something and then the scene ends. The next time same thing except if you still don't intervene this time he kisses her before she slaps him. Each time you fail to intervene he goes further before she stops him. If you just never intervene he eventually fucks her and then it's game over bad ending. But you knew that was going to happen and you obviously wanted it to.

 

[Deleted member 5410619]

The games i like tent to start off with a nice guy but as he gets more and more control over woman he becomes more and more domineering.
I dont know if anyone else notice it but most games dont pay any attention to it.

Woman are not attracted to jerks.
They are attracted to confident men who know what they want.
And they want her.
It is about the feeling of being wanted.
Simps are looked down upon because they will do anything just to get laid with her.
She isnt a person to them.
Just the object of there desire.
Funny.
In a way the "jerk" threat her more as a person then the simps.

But too answer your question.
Your game sounds like the standerd:
Farm x amount of stats.
With the added challange of needing to do well but not perfect.
Doesnt sound anything special.
Still better then the visual novel crap that lesser lifeforms seem to lust after.

 

[Doorknob22]

I think the tricky part is figuring how how to set it up so being a complete asshole raises her anger or reduces her relationship by enough to overpower the increased respect while also making respect count for enough that a guy who acts like a simp is just not getting any action no matter how nice he is.

You're thinking numbers which are hard to balance universally, instead you might consider per-girl-flags. Let's say that for each girl the MC can win her cunt heart by doing two nice things or two mean things. Now you have a "do assholeish/nice stuff to win the girl" system which is easy for you and the player to maintain, allows the player the flexibility of how to tackle each girl and saves you, the developer from the head-implosion of coming up with a universal system of mean/nice which will not completely break the game once the number of LIs reach three or something.

In other words: allow the MC not to be a universal nice guy/asshole but tackle each girl the way he chooses to.

 

[desmosome]

Variables are good for flavor text variations about character dispositions. When it comes to actual route defining events, always use flags.

Actually, let me rephrase that. Don't use just variables to determine a relationship dynamic. Variables are fluid. It can tell you things about the overall balance or sum of the nice guy/jerk choices, but it cannot tell you anything about specific events. I've seen devs rely on variables too much when designing their routes, and it always leads to a lot of headaches.

Make use of variables when it's appropriate, but make sure you create flags for any significant events so that you can actually keep track of specific moments in the past.

 

[khumak]

You're thinking numbers which are hard to balance universally, instead you might consider per-girl-flags. Let's say that for each girl the MC can win her cunt heart by doing two nice things or two mean things. Now you have a "do assholeish/nice stuff to win the girl" system which is easy for you and the player to maintain, allows the player the flexibility of how to tackle each girl and saves you, the developer from the head-implosion of coming up with a universal system of mean/nice which will not completely break the game once the number of LIs reach three or something.

In other words: allow the MC not to be a universal nice guy/asshole but tackle each girl the way he chooses to.

That's what I'm doing with the nice guy meter. It's a per girl variable. So I might be close to a pure nice guy to a nice girl and I might be a selfish dick to the bad girl. I do have some things like fitness, swag, and notch count that affect respect for all girls that kind of serves as a combination of the player's appearance and reputation.

Also having a selfish rating doesn't necessarily mean that MC is being mean to her. It just means he's doing things that the typical "player" would do. If he takes her out on a date and doesn't get as much "attention" as he thinks he should have he'll ghost her for awhile. Or he'll invite her on a date and cancel at the last minute and intentionally let her find out that he went out with another girl instead. Or he'll wait for her to ask when they're going out again and he'll respond with a booty call at 2am. Then when she gives it up the next time he'll do something she likes like take her to her favorite restaurant or buy her something. He's basically training her to expect to be punished when she does something wrong and rewarded when she does something good.

Most girls won't put up with that shit unless they have some combination of high relationship and/or respect. Nice girls will respond the worst to that kind of treatment and bad girls will respond the best to it. Also since having sex with them builds their respect with him he will get to the point where he doesn't have to be a dick as long as he's having sex with them frequently.

So initially he kind of needs to be an asshole to the bad girl type, but can be nicer if he wants after he's gotten to where he's fucking her. He kind of needs to be nice to the nice girl initially but doesn't need to put as much work in after he's having sex with her. That kind of thing. It's just creating a different path to conquest for each type of girl.

 

[danarchist_lewd]

this is some incel ass shit

 

[khumak]

You can't just bring reality into a game. The whiteknights will hate you. It's law written in stone since the 2D japanese games from the 90s that men get pussy by sucking up to them. It seems this has never changed in the game industry. You might overstrain them.

Good lord, the simp above me called you incel already for being reasonable.

You might actually bring benefit to guys by making a realistic game like that, since it seems most games only reinforce wrong assumptions about dating. Would like to see a game like that and wish you best of luck.

I think you have to have a thick skin if you want to have a chance at succeeding as a dev. No matter what you do some people aren't going to like it. Some people are going to tell you your game sucks or call you names or whatever. If you can't handle it then you're going to fail no matter what. So you ignore the trolls and just look for constructive criticism. I actually think negative feedback is generally more useful than positive feedback but only if it's actually useful.

Positive feedback certainly feels better but it's less likely to prompt you to change something for the better. The exception might be if a majority of your fans like a particular type of scene you did, then you know you've probably stumbled onto something and should do more of whatever that was. Maybe I love titjobs but most of my fans would rather see blowjobs for instance, so I might shift the emphasis towards that a bit more. Or the opposite might be true so I might make sure to include a nice in depth titjob immediately prior to most of the blowjobs. I get what I want and so do the fans.

Sometimes you just have to say no though. When I was making my mod I had a lot of requests for footjobs. I tried it but I just don't get the appeal for that so I gave up. Someone else can fill that niche.

 

[Pervtron3000]

I think you have to have a thick skin if you want to have a chance at succeeding as a dev. No matter what you do some people aren't going to like it. Some people are going to tell you your game sucks or call you names or whatever. If you can't handle it then you're going to fail no matter what. So you ignore the trolls and just look for constructive criticism. I actually think negative feedback is generally more useful than positive feedback but only if it's actually useful.

Positive feedback certainly feels better but it's less likely to prompt you to change something for the better. The exception might be if a majority of your fans like a particular type of scene you did, then you know you've probably stumbled onto something and should do more of whatever that was. Maybe I love titjobs but most of my fans would rather see blowjobs for instance, so I might shift the emphasis towards that a bit more. Or the opposite might be true so I might make sure to include a nice in depth titjob immediately prior to most of the blowjobs. I get what I want and so do the fans.

Sometimes you just have to say no though. When I was making my mod I had a lot of requests for footjobs. I tried it but I just don't get the appeal for that so I gave up. Someone else can fill that niche.

Even better, you can put your haters in the game as loser cannon fodder

 

[Bombmaster]

Fine. I bite.

The mechanics for being a jerk or a nice guy are somewhat basic. Most games have a pure route and a corruption one.

In my understanding having different stats for every LI would make most sense.

Problem in making the game nuanced is how much work would it be all this branching and stuff.