So I've been having some ideas for a while now about a making a dating simulator. My main inspirations are those very old flash dating sims you used to play on Newgrounds back in the day like Simgirl or Love Hina Sim Date and games like that. I have the plot pretty much figured out but I want to know in your own words, if you're a fan of this genre of game, what makes a good dating sim and what things would you like to see in a dating sim type game?
Oh man, blast from the past.
My favourite back then was that Twinkle Revue dating sim by Overdrawn. The one that actually ripped almost all its assets from a Japanese VN by the same name. Dude just wrote a new plot from scratch. And it actually worked - the plot was mildly absurd and cynical, and it had just the right balance between grinding (stats, money) and socializing.
As for what I like to see in dating sims: chainedpanda already covered the most important part - the girls need to be appealing characters. Both looks-wise and personality-wise. If they're just generic moeblobs with flat expressions and no real difference between them other than their outfits and hair colour, I won't be very motivated to pursue them.
Expressiveness and emotion work really well for that. And of course, personality. The girls need to have a recognizable personality in order to be appealing. But there's no hard-and-fast to give a character a believable personality, though. You can set up a decent basis with questions like "what does she look like?", "what are her likes and dislikes?", "what is she doing here in the story/setting right now?", "why is she here/how did she get here?", etcetera, but even then you won't get a good feel of the character until you've written a few drafts or snippets about her.
And, how do the girls feel about eachother and (if appliccable) about any background characters? Throw in a few scenes featuring some of the girls talking to eachother as well, if you can. The story will feel a lot more realistic if the reader realizes that there's more going on this story than 'MC talks to the girl whose scene the reader picked'.
On a side note: adding in one or two recurring but non-romanceable side characters can also go a long way in adding some depth. Especially if one of those characters seems like she'd be romanceable, but isn't.
Bonus points if she's got a pseudo-romance route that only leads to disappointment - but I'll admit that I like bittersweet stories and downer endings
And of course, the characters need to hook into the overarching plot in some way. The plot doesn't need to be anything big or mysterious, as long as it ties everything together. For example, the overarching plot at that Twinkle Revue flash game was basically just "MC gets a summer job at a studio", and it worked perfectly.
As for *how* big the overarching plot should be... that's a tough one.
On the one hand, any dating sim becomes a lot more interesting if there's a bit more to it than chatting up the available girls. But OTOH, if you go in too heavy on the story, the dating elements can become disjointed. That's the main flaw of
Sakuranomori Dreamers, to name an example. That one has dating sim elements shoehorned in in the first half, while the second half is basically just a postgame romance story + porn featuring the girl you got closest to. It's a big mood whiplash, and it just doesn't feel right with the tense, dark story of the first half of the game.
That's not to say that a story-heavy plot and dating sim elements can't mix, though.
Enzai: Falsely Accused does it pretty well (that VN would be one of my top recommendations in general if the plot didn't hinge on gay prison rape), even if the 'dating' aspect in that one is mainly restricted to hitting scripted triggers.
Overall, I'd recommend to stick to a minimal story though. As long as it provides a plausible reason for the MC and the girls to be where they are, it should suffice. I mean, you're planning on making a dating sim, rather than something story-focused. You'll want to keep things manageable, after all.
On a very related note:
(...) but i liked the idea of hidden darkness. it reminds me a lot about what david lynch has said about secrets, that he likes the idea of them existing but not finding out about them. that they should always remain unexplained to maintain the mystery. it gives layers to reality.
I'm echoing this. Little hints and secrets that are never quite explained are another thing that can give the story a lot more depth - even when almost nothing is actually said or shown.
For example, you could have a scene in which you come across two of the girls talking about something bad that happened to one of them in the past. You catch like half a sentence, and then they cheer up and say hi when they notice you. Maybe you half-catch them talking about it once or twice after - but the matter never actually gets explained. Everything else is left up to implication.
I'm really not a fan of anticipating what a character wants to hear and picking that option to raise some kind of arbitrary love stat. It's counterintuitive to choice-based narratives as the incentive to get the right choice means there's an "optimal" way to play.
Echoing this one as well.
I just hate it when irrelevant stuff like picking coffee or tea already affects whether a character will like you. The more recent Dharker games are especially bad about this. You get bombarded with seemingly irrelevant little choices, with no way of knowing beforehand how your love interest will react. Just pure trial and error gameplay with a dozen choices per scene. Ugh.
What would you propose be a valid alternative to that?
There's something from Simgirls and Twinkle Revue that could work really well, if done right.
You make smalltalk with a girl, and sometimes she mentions some serious or important. Like, for example, details about her family life. For example, she drops that she used to love the grey cat that her parents had as a kid, which later on unlocks the ability to get her a stuffed toy grey cat at an event. And then she really appreciates that because it shows that you pay attention to her and that you remember this sort of thing.
The Newgrounds-era flash dating sims usually didn't handle this mechanism well - they'd do stuff like have the girl interrogate you about bullshit minutiae during dates. And then you could actually fuck up and ruin the date by not remembering whether the girl was 173cm or 174cm tall.
But if you handle this well (i.e. don't do too much of it, stick to details that would matter to people IRL, and make it so that important tidbits dropped during smalltalk unlock more serious dialogue options in later conversations) then it could work well as a game mechanic & still feel natural.
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Then a few more points in general:
Having a map (or at the very least the option to go to different locations on your own) is a must IMHO.
Alongside endings where you get with one of the girls, also throw in a neutral or bittersweet ending where you don't end up with anyone. One of my biggest disappointments with Katawa Shoujo was that there's no loner ending beyond the (in)famous manly picnic bad end. And if you opt for writing in such an ending, it should have a little bit of story to it. Something that explains a few story details that you wouldn't come across in any of the girls' routes.
Too many dating sims and romance visual novels either don't have a loner ending at all, or the loner ending is just a regular bad end or a no-content afterthought. But IMHO a loner ending that actually has some substance - something that actually tells you something about the now-former love interests and what happened to them - hits so much harder. Knowing that you can fail ups the stakes.
(...and were I writing this, I'd also throw in a badass secret end wherein the MC unravels some big secret in the metaplot and has a confrontation with some hidden malefactor - but in which the MC also remains alone. But that's just what I'd do. I gravitate to the more story-heavy stuff anyway)
And lastly: for God's sake, don't make the MC a useless awkward idiot.
Especially not for comedy relief. This almost always falls flat, and the results are invariably cringeworthy. Not to mention that wimpy useless protagonists have been done to death in manga and other Japanese media in recent years. And a few too many Western amateur content creators are shitty weebs who are actually trying to emulate this sort of thing.
The protagonist doesn't have to be a genius or Mary Sue - but few things are as grating as a protagonist who frequently says and does stupid shit and then gets called out on it by the other characters. This
can be done well (case in point: Rance), but 99% of the time it just falls flat in the cringiest way possible. It just leaves the readers with secondhand embarassment.
