ROMANCE IN YOUR GAME (VALENTINE'S DAY)

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Hi, since it's Valentine's Day, i wanted to see if any of you have included romance or love in your game?

In my side project, "I DROVE ALL NIGHT", an indie Romantic Adventure, about two Lovers and their long distance relationship. Augustus is a member of a Notorious Gang, while Ophelia is part of High Society. Can the two from two different worlds keep their love alive?

The story is inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo and Romeo & Juliet, the greatest love stories of ALL TIME in my humble opinion. Simply a story about a man who must struggle through great lengths and tragedies in order to keep his love alive.

What about your game? Any romance or love?

Personally, i think the most touching and moving romance in RPG's is FFVI with Setzer and Locke's memories of their loved ones. Back in the day, those stories were so emotional i just felt moved by it.
unity
You're magical to me.
12540
Luxaren Allure, an RPG I made a couple of years ago, is all about love and romance, as the hero is in love with the evil overlord that she must defeat (tho it ends up a little more complicated than that XD)

I hope to learn to write better romances in future games, as it can be really difficult! Still, it's a lot of fun, and I love a good romance in games! ^_^
Yep - one of the major themes in my current game is love and accepting love into your life. I thought it was a pretty good theme - but the Lego Batman Movie had to go and steal it from me! ;)
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
Oh shit today's Valentine's Day?

As for your question, I'm attempting to tackle a romance between the two lead characters in my current project, Prayer of the Faithless. But even then, the romantic aspect is just one factor that influences their evolving relationship, not the primary focus. Beyond that, no. I've tried to stay away from romance in my games if it's not directly related to the story I'm trying to tell.

I want to tackle it at some point, but I don't think I'm a good enough writer yet to attempt a story primarily focused on romance. And the last thing I want to do is shoehorn a romance into a game just for the sake of having it.
I like love stories, and I wanted to to tell a truly EPIC love story. So i decided to create the side project, a Choose Your Own Adventure/Visual Novel that is sprite based like To The Moon, rather than picture by picture visual novels.

It's not an RPG, there is no combat. It's heavy on dialogue, plot twists, and story. Like an interactive movie, where the player decides on multiple choices and endings.

I'm also using variable stats to give it a adventure/game feel. So far i got 2 stats per main protagonist, Augustus and Ophelia. Infamy, Love, Loyalty, and Sanity. I had more stats but it complicated dialogue choices and simplified it to 2 stat per protagonist.

My goal is to move my players emotionally in some means, with a heart gripping story.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
I try to stay away from depicting romance in my games because I have little to no experience with it in real life. Or, I guess more accurately, I stay away from it in my games for the same reason I stay away from it in real life - I find the very idea of it dull and obnoxious. Unless you're writing porn, I feel like romance itself is unlikely to be a drive for any interesting action. If anything it's usually presented as a drive to settle down and enjoy what you already have, which makes for a terrible story.

However, the aftermath of romance - betrayal, rage, retreat from society, unbreakable commitments, absolute devotion, death of a loved one, broken families - these are things that can be really good motivators for both heroes and villains. I use those a lot, skipping past what was probably a temporarily successful relationship, and going straight for the disaster stage. I think people can understand a character's motivation a lot better if they're motivated by love, instead of by something that most of us have never really experienced firsthand like power, politics, riches, or murder. Love is probably the strongest motivator most people have ever personally experienced in their lives.

I have a strong tendency to give romantic motivations to villains rather than heroes for some reason - maybe an indicator of how I feel about romance in general.
Soma Spirits has a subplot about a character and his deceased wife. But other than that I usually try to avoid active romance stories in my games. I've always found that a lot of RPGs kinda just throw it in and usually I find it to be a distraction. Those are just my personal tastes though. it's just something I've never really had a desire to explore in writing.

But fans will eventually start shipping characters on their own if your game gets big enough anyway, so it's one of those things that I leave up to the players if they so desire.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
The only thing worse than having a love story in your RPG is having characters who are clearly attracted to each-other and fumble around with incompetent flirting for 50 hours but it never goes anywhere.
it's not always romantic, but Relationships are pretty much the only thing I write about
There's a hidden route in my first game (BETA) that leads to a romantic event, but I don't think many people who played it managed to find it, lol.
author=LockeZ
I try to stay away from depicting romance in my games because I have little to no experience with it in real life. Or, I guess more accurately, I stay away from it in my games for the same reason I stay away from it in real life - I find the very idea of it dull and obnoxious. Unless you're writing porn, I feel like romance itself is unlikely to be a drive for any interesting action. If anything it's usually presented as a drive to settle down and enjoy what you already have, which makes for a terrible story.


Weeeeeeell you really did say you have little experience with it which makes that last phrase a bit less funny and understandable. LOL

Also, "heroes and villains"? Boooo-ring. Heroes are, imo, dull. Villains even moreso! People, people that ain't villains nor heroes are much more fun. Maybe that's why I like horror games that pit you not as a hero but as some dude, fighting not a villain but the circumstances. (even if it often just circles down to a villain by the end of said games)


Regardless, love as a motivator to settle down? Have you ever talked to a teenager LOL these beasties will literally do anything to satiate their petit hormones, and im not even talking about sex. Love, romance, passion, fuzzy feelings, all that are extremely powerful motivators. Moreover, the way people see romance can often shape the way they see life and themselves, so a rejected person who finds comfort in a loved one will have a link of vulnerability that can serve to kickstart a really interesting story. Conversely, the feelings of unwillingly bonding with someone you antagonize are another fantastic setup for a plot and so on, all with numerous intensities and variations.
All in all, romance is a powerful tool and rarely ever it leads to settling down, like how it rarely ever does irl

But no, other than writing about how I met my ex, I've never written romance.
Then again, I haven't written much of anything to be honest.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Well, a story about doing crazy stuff for the sake of love is fine with me. I just like it a lot more when you focus on the crazy stuff, not the love. Romance is a means to an end, for me, in terms of stories.

Part of me wants to say you should add exactly the bare minimum amount of gushy crap required to make the characters' motivations believable, and not a second more. But obviously you should feel free to develop the romance as much as you want if one of the characters is brutally murdered mid-game! That's the best.
I'm not against romance in games but I wish it were a bit better handled in a lot of cases. The usual "boy meets girl, boy saves girl, girl falls in love" is cute (no matter the gender) but ultimately feels stale more often than not.

Love can be a great motivator for characters, though. It doesn't have to be romantic love - familial love, close friendships that involve love, love of self, love of things... all of those can motivate a hell of a lot of great stories.

That said, in my own games I've tackled it a time or three. Realms Shattered had you have to pick between two worlds, but it ultimately came down to who you liked most between two characters - your brother who you only got to know over the course of the journey, or the boy the character was in love with and had known before the journey began.

I've also got a lesbian dating sim dungeon crawl type game in the works that focuses on giving gifts to the person you like and trying to woo them that way. Shallow? Yes. Fun? Yes. Nothing wrong with some shallow gameplay in order to push a romance along in-game.

One other game I'm working on revolves directly around the romance between two women. There's not much shown of the romance itself, bar it being the driving motivation for them to climb a tower in order to gain permission to marry from a Goddess. Of course there are small scenes, but it could read more as a warm friendship than a romance most of the time due to how comfortable the two women are with each others' company. Of course, there's also challenges to their romance that are thrown their way during the climb, such as one learning that expressing love more often is necessary in a working relationship, and the other learning that joking all the time makes it hard for her partner to know when she's being serious.


Overall, though, I quite like romance in stories and games as long as it's not instant "OMG WE'RE IN LOVE". One game I think did it quite well in many ways was Three the Hard Way. The build up to the romance in that was really nicely done. Check it out if you haven't already.

Oh, btw, did you know of this myth - Pyramus and Thisbē? It was around well before Romeo and Juliet and was where old Billy Shakes got his inspiration.
Jeroen_Sol
Nothing reveals Humanity so well as the games it plays. A game of betrayal, where the most suspicious person is brutally murdered? How savage.
3885
I agree love works better as a motivator behind characters than the main focus of the game. Don't give me a love story. Give me a story that has love (or the after effects) in it. But I don't agree that if someone is motivated by love to do stuff, that the stuff itself is more important than the motivation. The why is more interesting to me than the what.

author=LockeZ
But obviously you should feel free to develop the romance as much as you want if one of the characters is brutally murdered mid-game! That's the best.

20 years, and it's still too soon.

author=Liberty
Oh, btw, did you know of this myth - Pyramus and Thisbē? It was around well before Romeo and Juliet and was where old Billy Shakes got his inspiration.

Impetuousness of youth + love + lion = tragedy. Yup, Romeo and Juliet is basically Pyramus and Thisbe. Well, you know, minus the lion.
Libby, does said dating game involve catgirls or cardgames? Manchego cheese is the best romantic gift. Its the ultimate firm cheese.

Dangit Locke...

For me, romance is fine if its done well. Less 'hurr you haz massive boobs so I must be all over you like cheese on a pizza' (cheese-less pizza is an abomination! or foccacia bread) and more 'hey, we've known each other a while, we're traveling together on this epic adventure where we can die any minute, wanna give it a shot?' Also a healthy dose of trust building and understanding is important. Characters on shows/games who instantly think their partner/interest is having an affair at the drop of a hat /really/ need to get it under control or just not be in a relationship. Seriously.

The romance options in Persona 4 were cute, Persona 3 as well but not as developed as 4. For example, Chie doesn't want the protag's D from the get-go. And neither does she do the whole 'I hate you, but will fall for you in an hour and be part of your dangerously young harem'.

Another good example would be from the Witcher series, mostly Witcher 3. As the player you have the choice of Triss, who you get to know 'very' well during Witcher 2, or Yennifer who is like Geralt's true love. (Even though she can aggravate the crap out of him, they're kinda fire and ice about a lot of matters. Particularly high level politics. *Hint Hint*) And if the player tries to get both of them, because Harem Get!, then you lose both of them. This is a good lesson for kids, 'DON'T TRY TO GET A HAREM! PEOPLE'S EMOTIONS WILL GET HURT!'

Speaking of unhealthy relationships, look up The Nameless One and Deionnara's in Planescape: Torment. As you learn what happened its so good. And you know, sad, depressing, without a happy ending.

Anyways, thats it for now. 6am ramblings ho!
unity
You're magical to me.
12540
author=Liberty
I've also got a lesbian dating sim dungeon crawl type game in the works that focuses on giving gifts to the person you like and trying to woo them that way. Shallow? Yes. Fun? Yes. Nothing wrong with some shallow gameplay in order to push a romance along in-game.


Nothing wrong with it at all ^_^ That sounds like a lot of fun!

author=Liberty
One other game I'm working on revolves directly around the romance between two women. There's not much shown of the romance itself, bar it being the driving motivation for them to climb a tower in order to gain permission to marry from a Goddess. Of course there are small scenes, but it could read more as a warm friendship than a romance most of the time due to how comfortable the two women are with each others' company. Of course, there's also challenges to their romance that are thrown their way during the climb, such as one learning that expressing love more often is necessary in a working relationship, and the other learning that joking all the time makes it hard for her partner to know when she's being serious.


Wow, both of these are games I'm dying to play! :DDDDDDDD

author=Liberty
Overall, though, I quite like romance in stories and games as long as it's not instant "OMG WE'RE IN LOVE". One game I think did it quite well in many ways was Three the Hard Way. The build up to the romance in that was really nicely done. Check it out if you haven't already.


I really need to play that game. I'd certainly like to get better at writing believable romances, tho part of that is just to keep practicing ^_^
The way i wrote my love story, for "I Drove All Night", is the main protagonists, Augustus and Ophelia are already in love, but you get a flashback early on to scene when they meet for the first time, a cute young scene about school and education. (How most lovers today meet in school) but the twist is their not in school!

Yes im aware of Pyramus and Thisbē libby. The Greeks have lots of stories, that have inspired many great works of literature and art even.
It exists in my games, but isn't a major focus most of the time.

In Illusions of Loyalty, there's tension between two characters. The protagonist, Julius Logan, and the Sniper, Sarah Hawke. It remains just that, though, as Logan is too absurdly dedicated to his work as a Captain in the army to pursue her, although he does have some faint feelings in her direction. It never really develops into romance.

In The End, I have a stable relationship between the hero Swiftheart, and the darkness-hunting elf Luna from start to finish. There's a nice sweet scene near the beginning of the two of them together, and then the rest of the game happens, more or less impeding them from having anymore sweet romance-y moments.

And in Mayhem Maiden, part of the opening is a breakup between the Heroine and her boyfriend, which is a decent chunk of his side of the story (He's a nut with a hero complex who is having trouble getting over it). It's not central to the main plot of the four heroines breaking out of the tower they were kidnapped into, but it informs some of what the main heroine does, and is central to the ex-boyfriend's little side arc that you see between dungeons. It's less "romance" and more "dealing with the aftermath of romance crumbling to pieces".
A major theme of my game is unspoken love and how it can spring up unexpectedly through comradery. No, there's no cheesy section of my game where the main characters burst out with a "...I LOVE YOU, MAN!" and talk about their broship. I think that most of us have felt a special bond with a friend that didn't need to be put into words because it was so inherently implied, right? Well, that's the kind of feeling I want to get across by the end of my game.

Another theme is that of hopeless romance. Sometimes, circumstance prevent lovers from getting together. Love is often ill fated.

The Way and A Blurred Line both handled romance rather well.
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