Danger: long post!

Here's a concept for a game that could be called "Alpha Cute: Dating 101." And before anyone gets the wrong idea, no, this concept does not include naked women.

I'm thinking that a "dating sim" would be ideal for XNA Community Games. Generally, gameplay consists of walking through a number of dialog trees against a number of backgrounds, trying to make various date-able characters sufficiently impressed/attracted by you to be considered a "win." Additionally, there may be a meta-game (why are you dating, anyway?) and mini-games (perhaps you go to work in the middle of each day, and need to earn money to impress your date). Hopefully, there are several sequences of meaningful choices that lead to different intersting outcomes, leading to reasonably good re-playability.

You'd probably make the game simulate some range of time, say 1 or 2 weeks in the life of your person, to make it important to make the right choices through the dialog tree, and make the performance of the minigames important for earning cash. Additionally, you'd probably have some possible story thread where you're unemployed, and meet some girl (artist? student?) during daytime. Additional interesting wrinkles might be either/or situations, such as where date A goes to powder her nose, and B shows up in the same restaurant/club, and you have to make a choice to shoo away B or dump A. Finally, to show solidarity with gay pride, there might be a dateable guy, too. (That might be good for some underhanded publicity, too, if you plant seeds in the right intolerant communities ;-)

Dating sims are apparently hot in Japan. One game in the "Doki Doki" series for Nintendo DS apparently pre-sold 2 million copies a year or two ago! However, the genre has never really made it to the US. As I don't read Kanji, I haven't had the opportunity to experience it first-hand, but games with similar gameplay (like "Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney!") have done okay. It seems like XNA Community Games has suitably low threshold for entry, and suitably low overhead, that a niche could be established.

The gameplay does not require a lot of hard-core CPU simulation, so the weak CLR JIT doesn't matter. Instead, what's important is writing, to create a number of interesting characters, art, to illustrate the characters and the locales where you can interact with them. Additionally, a slick user interface engine and state machine system is required from the programming side, and you'd need some variety of background music (something like Cinescore could stand in there, though -- you don't buy the game for the music).

If I were to make this game, how would I do it? Programming state machines that can keep various state (desire, schedule, likes/dislikes) etc is something I find easy. I'd probably want to write a test driver that can analyze the state machines to make sure that each win/lose scenario is actually reachable (if you have some number of characters and some number of options, that could be hard to verify manually!). Additionally, I think I can deal fine with sound, GUI art, and similar bits. Writing is not my forte -- given enough effort, I could probably get something usable, but for this game to be successful, you'd want someone truly talented to write funny, engaging, and brief dialog/scenarios. Finally, art: I'm not one of those people who can draw nice 2D art, so if I were to make this game, I'd have to team up with an artist (and, likely, a writer).

I guess another approach would be to identify a suitable existing property, and license the art/story, and then work on translating it. Then all you'd need would be a programmer and a translator, plus some wa of identifying a reasonable property to license (that you can afford!). Perhaps that would be a good follow-on for an initial entry into the market? Perhaps you could even build an entire small studio around that concept?

So, there you have it: Dating Sims for XNA Community Games -- winner or triumph?

Discuss.

lol, i think dating sims are definitely workable at a low price point like with community games. If you haven't seen them already, sim games have made a big impact using flash on sites like newgrounds.com. I hardly check the place out anymore, but I distinctly remember sim games being featured on the front page and even being the highest rate flash content on the site. They were all pretty naughty, though, which I imagine was a large part of the appeal. One of hte things I noticed with the flash games is they placed a heavier emphasis on the minigames aspect than the dialog. I've heard that Japanese gamers tend to be a lot more tolerant of games that are little more than an interactive book.

The idea to use an existing property seems like a good idea. Too bad it's not possible to make a Hannah Montana dating sim. That would sell like hotcakes.

crabby:

Too bad it's not possible to make a Hannah Montana dating sim. That would sell like hotcakes.

Great thinking :-)

Additionally, I've had two more ideas that may make the original idea even better.
1) I can use Microsoft Avatars for the NPCs/dates. No art skillz necessary! (Still need backdrops and writing)
2) Why not turn it around? Harlequin-style romance novels sell at a brisk pace to all kinds of women. Women gamers are generally under-served. The biggest question is how you convince Mom to download and play this game on little Bobby's gaming console...

I imagine you want to set up your own character when you start the game:

"Are you a [male/female]?"

"In your childhood, which of the following happened?
[broke arm]
[stung by a bee]
[rescued farm from burning down]
[forced to work in sugar plantation]"

"Do you want to date a [male/female/both]?"

This character set-up would, in turn, affect how the different characters react to you (and allows the game to allow you to tell lies, or bare your soul, in character).

jwatte:

Women gamers are generally under-served. The biggest question is how you convince Mom to download and play this game on little Bobby's gaming console...

The Wii would be a better platform if you want to target women, and trying to appeal to fans of The Sims would be a good angle.

Licensing a property (Hannah Montana or whatever) would be a bad idea for the Community Games platform, the customer base just isn't large enough yet to justify that. Translating it to Japanese would be pointless until Japan gets access to our games, and enough Japanese-speaking people are in the review forum to get it passed through.

Actually, getting a license to make a 'Perfect Massage' dating sim might be a good idea :)

It's hard to tell if you're suggesting someone else do this or if you're thinking of doing it yourself.

The main problem with this is that XNA is full of programmers and few content artists. Dating sims are mostly content-based

FortisVenaliter Productions:

The main problem with this is that XNA is full of programmers and few content artists. Dating sims are mostly content-based

It's easy enough to get a content artist though.

It's hard to tell if you're suggesting someone else do this or if you're thinking of doing it yourself.

I am discussing the idea with the community, because I felt it actually was an open niche. Getting outside reality checks on ideas is always a good idea.

And, no, you wouldn't translate *to* Japanese -- you'd license something suitable *from* Japan and translate to English, to avoid having to make all the content yourself.

Whether the market for XBLCG is too small or not I think is entirely dependent on how many quality games with widespread marketing there are. Currently, I can count the number of those on the fingers of one hand. If someone ran banner ads on some sites, and clicking on the ad went to xbox.com, where you could purchase-and-queue-download the game, would it matter whether it was XBLCG or not? I don't think so.

If you don't think women have X-boxes, something like "XBLCG Dating: Megan Fox on the Beach" probably would sell pretty well to the hard-core male Xbox players ;-) I think that with the right marketing, you'd get the girls to play on the Xbox just fine -- it's the number and make-up of households with Xboxes that matter, not necessarily the number and make-up of owners/primary users. If most Xbox players are either males in established relationships, or living-at-home teenage boys, for example, then there's clearly a woman (SO and Mom, respectively) ready to be sold to in each of those households.

And if you don't think this works, consider that my kids started playing Wizard 101 (on the PC) after seeing a TV commercial, but through osmosis, we have ended up in the situation where my wife is using her own high-level character to power-leveling the youngest so he can keep pace with his siblings...

I'm curious how the dialog would be implemented. My guess would be a hierarchy of state machines loaded with tons of predicates to describe the circumstances of each dialog tree. If the predicates are simple 'Is she Rich?' and 'Good sense of humor?' then you'd even be able to support custom user-created girlfriends via an out-of-game Dream Girl Editor and have their personalities reflect in their dialog. Though the importance of some sort of testing machine would be even more important because you'd have to ensure that no character ever runs out of things to say no matter what their personality is.

I would actually expect to script most of the dialog per character. It would be a custom state machine per character. I don't think you can get meaningfully complex and varied dialog any other way, and I have a feeling that most of the allure should be from the story, and the articulated characters, rather than "pick the right menu choice for teh w1n!"

Hence, why I still think a writer is necessary :-)

A writer and artist are definitely critical. For some reason I'm reminded of some old flash games. I mean really old, they were done in flash 4. They're mediative games where you have a goal like seducing a bar girl or negotiating a raise. They're still pretty fun and you might get some ideas from them. I like the interrupt button used in the Angry Neighbours game. Sometimes the best option in it is to say nothing, an option that many games don't allow. Here's a link to the games. Some of them feature some racy content so heads up.
http://crageous.newgrounds.com/flash/

I'd love to write story/dialogue for a game like this :)