Date Ariane

Date Ariane The Game: One Year Later

arianeb30 Comments

mosmile8

This weekend marks the first anniversary of the release of the Renpy version of Date Ariane: The Game.

Since its release, it has been downloaded 2.7 million times, which is pretty darn good for an independently produced game. There may be some overlap as multiple versions were released, and people were updating, but in the same time frame I have had over 2 million unique visitors to the web site.

Some numbers: 55% were windows downloads, 38% were android downloads, 6% were Apple Mac, and 1% were Linux.

61% of the downloads were in English, 28% were in Portuguese, 8% in German, 3% in French, and 0.6% in Spanish.

Pretty impressive considering the foreign language versions have only been around since late March. The game has gone viral in Brazil, with 750,000 downloads from there in the last 4 months.

Date Ariane has a gaming channel on You Tube with over 100 videos listed. (almost all the most recent are in Portuguese). A general gaming search produces 473 videos currently.

I’m currently in the process of uploading new versions of the games that include over 100 new renders like the one above. Notice how the window reflects the interior now, which happens when it is dark outside. All the new renders are in the living room and the drive-in diner.

English version build 112 has a number of fixes and tweaks to game play covered in detail here.

I can’t change the international versions much without killing the translation mechanism, so the minor tweaks I made to the English version are not in the International versions. However, the improved pictures are there, and also a new TITLE SCREEN! Once released the French, German, and Portuguese versions will no longer say they are in beta.  More build notes and bug fixes here. All versions should be updated by the end of the month.

Something’s In The Air has now passed 500,000 downloads. There seems to be a lot of call for a Portuguese version, but it would need 6 to 10 translators to do it right. I could release a machine translation that I know everyone would hate.

Got some ambitious plans for the future, including a 6 episode season of stories involving Ariane and Rachel where this is the first episode. I’m also thinking about new games involving SITA girls Paula, Wendy, and Janice. (You are probably trying to remember who Janice was, aren’t you?)

I’m also considering an HD versions of Date Ariane and SITA that I could make available for sale on Steam or something, that would be made from high resolution PNG files like this one or this one.

I think I got my work cut out for me.

Date Ariane in 4 Other Languages

arianeb2 Comments

daspanish

One of my projects for the year was to arrange translations of Date Ariane in at least 4 other languages: French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, and I am happy to say all 4 should be available by the end of the month.

Date Ariane Español

Spanish is widely spoken throughout the America’s and I kind of sort of speak it. Once upon a time I was actually fluent.  The problem was that there really hasn’t been a demand for a Spanish translation, so not a lot of volunteers to help translate it. But I needed to do one translation to figure out what I was doing, so I basically “Machine” translated the game with Google Translate.

If you ever tried to translate anything in Google Translate, you know how inaccurate it is. I used my limited Spanish skills to fix as much as possible, but still the results are according to one native Spanish speaker who tried it, “A little creepy”.

I’m hoping soon that the game will go viral in a native Spanish country, so I can get some volunteers to correct the translation, until then, you’re stuck with “a little creepy”.

If anyone wants to take a stab at fixing the translation you can go here.

dafrench

Seduire Ariane Français

Date Ariane has caught on in both France and Quebec so much so that there are guides written in french for “Seduire Ariane”, which I know literally means seduce Ariane, but I’ll roll with the common translation.  Part of the popularity is due to http://sharks-lagoon.fr/ an French/English website dedicated to games like mine.  I posted a notice for translation help and got quite a few volunteers.

The French version is 100% human translated, and even I a non-french speaker can tell the difference.  The funny thing is that just a week before the French version was ready for a beta release, the game went viral in France thanks to a popular vlogger name Squeezie who posted a video on March 7th that got over a million views:

The result was that my site crashed, first time that happened since I removed the online version.  Anyways, I have been posting links to the french beta around french websites that link to my english game.

I’d like to thank Mathieu Martineau, who got the ball rolling, Pseudo555 (one of the guys from Shark’s Lagoon) who did the bulk of the translation work, and OL, who came in near the end and did a ton of grammar and spelling corrections, including the download page. Other helpers: Dipsode, maniusz, Ramses212, Thedevilsadvocate, and Ticamus.

The Spanish version has gotten around 1,000 downloads in the month it has been available, the French version has gotten 6,000 downloads in the week it has been available.

Odd version trivia: Only version with a translated title.

dagerman

Date Ariane Deutsch

Just released.  Since the beginning of 2016, Germany is the #1 source of visitors to ArianeB.com, and I have reason to believe it may be due to another vlogger name Pandorya, who posted a series of “Let’s Play” videos in German. This was the first of what looks to be 9 videos:

Anyways the German line translation was 97% complete when I realized I need to do the scripting and testing ASAP.  I’m getting it down to a science and I finished it over the weekend, just as the final items in the German translation were being done.

Thanks to Thomas Kiehl who has done 70% of the work, Bardo did another big chunk, and Daff, Airjoe, ebenezum, Nico, Kurai, Terrorbait, Crowd, and crayon all pitched in.

I should warn you that Thomas has a wicked sense of humor:
german

Kind of wish I knew German, who knows how many odd jokes are in his German translation.

Odd version trivia: The board game Pachisi has been renamed “Mensch ärgere dich nicht” or “Dude, don’t get angry”, which is a version of pachisi popular in Germany going back to World War 1.

daportuguese

Date Ariane Português

This is now released. Unfortunately, it is only 93% human translated for now. There is one page left on the Portuguese translation page that was machine translated and needs to be corrected. There will be updates once it is done.

Update 3/25: The now 100% human translated Portuguese version is now available to download!

brazil1Date Ariane has a huge fan base in Brazil. Two years ago while I was making the graphic updated version, a link to my page on a Brazilian based “hot links” tracker spent most of the year in the top 40.  Also my Facebook page has so many Brazilian visitors, that Facebook apparently thinks I’m based in Brazil.

So yes, I wanted a version of the game that Brazilians can enjoy. My two primary translators are Henrique Riffel who speaks Portugal Portuguese did most of the pre-dinner and dinner texts, while Danilo Bini who speaks Brazilian Portuguese did most of the post dinner scenes. Hopefully the sudden change in accent isn’t too jarring to native speakers.

Odd version trivia: This version substitutes “Country” music with “Samba”. There is such a thing as country music in Brazil called Sertanejo, but it is slow melodic music that is difficult to “fast dance” to.

Update 5/12: Date Ariane has gone viral again in Brazil thanks to yet another popular video blogger. I find it charming that there are crazy video bloggers in every country and language.

Other languages?

I have had inquiries about the possibility of other languages. The lesson I learned from the Spanish version is that there needs to be a decent amount of interest in a language to make it worth while, so if you can organize a group of translators and I can see interest via web traffic, I may entertain other languages in the future.

As for “Something’s In The Air”, its popularity is significantly lower than Date Ariane and it has nearly 4 times as much dialogue, so for both of those reasons it will remain English only.

Date Ariane English

Since its release in July of last year, the renpy version of Date Ariane has been downloaded over 1 million times! That’s a huge milestone for an independent game!

New Projects For 2016

arianeb22 Comments

arhottub2n

New Years is the time to make promises for the new year, which may or may not happen. So here are two projects I am already starting to work on that hopefully will get done sometime this year.

Date Ariane International

I have had a few requests from volunteers to translate Date Ariane into other languages.  Renpy has already translated the game interface into the following languages: Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and both simplified and traditional Chinese.  Basically, I am looking for some bi-lingual volunteers to translate Date Ariane into as many of these languages as possible, especially French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese as my games biggest fan bases are in countries that speak those languages.  Japanese would be interesting, too as this kind of “Bishojo” game is already popular there.  I can’t pay anyone, but you’ll get your name in the credits of all future versions.

For my part of this project, I am creating a branch version of the game with less randomized text and less slang to make the game easier to translate, and putting together two “fill in the blank” files with English lines and blank foreign language lines, that when completed will result in a translated game.  I am trying to work out a way to provide these translation files online so anyone who wants to help can do so, either via Google Docs or set up a Wiki.  I may resort to machine translation on some versions if I can’t get enough volunteers.

I also have not decided if I will release each language version individually or one big international version where you can select your language in the settings menu.

To show you how big the project this file contains around 70% of the text in the game, not including text stored in variables and lists.

Rachel Meets Ariane: The Game

As a second project, I want to make a game out of the Rachel Meets Ariane story I wrote back in October.  I’ve been inspired by the game Life is Strange to do a 3rd party perspective visual novel, or more accurately a visual short story. Unlike Date Ariane and Something’s In The Air,  the player will not play a role in the game but may make decisions for the characters that change the outcomes.

The Halloween meeting will serve as an introduction and the bulk of the game will cover their “second date” set in November as Rachel visits Ariane’s house. It will be a lot shorter than any game I have done; maybe 50 to 60 pictures total and maybe around 4 endings.

This is sort of an experiment. I want to see how well a short game with a 3rd party perspective can work and how difficult it is. If it proves both fun to make and fun to play, there may be more of them.  I got an idea for a Heidi and Wendy story if it works out.

Date Ariane Wiki

In hopes of having a place to post files that groups can edit, I decided to start a Date Ariane Wiki. Due to the large number of questions, the first thing I did is post a list of the Date Ariane achievements and how to get them.  The address is http://virtualunderworld.net/datearianewiki/pmwiki.php Currently, public editing is disabled but that may change in the future.

Unplanned Obsolescence and “Lost” Art

arianeb9 Comments

dating1

The above picture is the oldest picture from the oldest version of Date Ariane. The modified date is listed as August 6, 2004.

As I was finishing the Renpy version of Date Ariane, I decided to dive into my archives and attempt to play the oldest version I could find.

It wouldn’t run on any browser, not the way it is supposed to anyways. The game was written for Internet Explorer 4 using some HTML coding that only worked on IE4. Over the years I updated the code to run on as many browsers as I could, but the first version is now completely obsolete.

It gets worse: Date Ariane was written using Microsoft FrontPage which basically has ceased to exist. This week I upgraded to Windows 10, and FrontPage loads on Windows 10 but it is unstable. I have been forced to switch to KompoZer, a nice open source HTML editor, but I can’t mass edit a thousand web pages at a time which makes further upgrades to Date Ariane Online version way more difficult. Besides that browser security issue is already a reason to throw in the towel and stick with Renpy version from now on.

But it is a little sad that a piece of my history, a “work of art” I created, is likely lost to the future.

I’m not the only one facing unplanned obsolescence

Obsolescence is becoming an issue on the web now.  Recently security flaws were found in Flash Player, one of the most used programs on the web. You Tube, once the biggest supporter of Flash has now basically stopped using it. Worse yet, Mozilla turned off Flash by default until Adobe released a secure version, which they have now done, but who knows how long it will last.

So now as the world scrambles to move to HTML5 or some other substitute to flash, what happens to the millions of flash based videos, and online games which someday soon may no longer run?

Preservation efforts for the internet?

We humans like to preserve the past.  There are whole industries devoted to film preservation thanks to the unstable nitrate most of the old films were originally filmed in. More than half of the movies made before 1950 no longer exist.

This is why film gurus get excited about discovering a lost reel to a classic movie thought lost.

Similarly we are slowly losing our musical heritage as most master tapes before 1990 or so are on a medium which also degrades over time. Most all of it has been digitized, but many music gurus will tell you music is better in the original analog, and the original analog sources are decaying.

We see it also in video games. Many of my old games will no longer run on my computer, and the ones that do run in a tiny 800 x 600 window, since that is how they were designed. Some classic games like Age of Empires II or Leisure Suit Larry, have gotten the HD treatment, but hundreds never will.

Will much of the internet content suffer the same fate?

Yes, I know about things like The Wayback Machine which archives lost text and picture content, but what will preserve online games?

The “medium” problem

When the medium by which we distribute content changes, it becomes necessary to find ways to bring old content to the new medium. Entire libraries are being digitized, although paper books have largely proven to be a resilient medium, sometimes finding that rare volume is a lot easier online.

Except that “mediums” themselves are radically changing every few years it seems, so we are constantly having to convert, especially as popularity wanes in the old medium.  Sometimes we lose some things in the conversion, even as recent as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Simpsons.

Communication mediums eventually get replaced, by better mediums that we all convert to.  But in so doing we lose some of the “art” of the old medium.

twitter

For example: “Twitter”

Here is one I bet you didn’t see coming: Apparently Twitter is dying.  Yes, one of the most popular web sites on the planet is seeing a sharp decline in active users.

My solution to fixing it is pretty revolutionary: Drop the 140 character limit.  We can thank twitter for the abundance of short link generators. Those links leave Twitter and go to other web sites that allow long essays. Why can’t Twitter users write long essays on Twitter itself and have it show up as a title with a “read more” button, instead of a link to another site?

Yes, I know the 140 character limit was what made the site famous, but the novelty has worn off, and prevents people like me who can’t write in 140 characters to not even bother using the site.

If twitter dies then so does the hashtag. (Yes I am aware that other sites support hashtagging, but they also support other types of tagging, which are more useful except they can’t be printed on a t-shirt)

That’s a whole chunk of internet culture lost if it happens.

Date Ariane is Now A Real Game

arianeb90 Comments

dresspurple

I have gone ahead and released Date Ariane in Renpy. This is like the ultimate edition of the game that has been a dream since I started working on Something’s In The Air.  All the favorite moments are here on a format that is faster and smoother than ever before.

I have temporarily taken down the online version. My web traffic has increased 40% with the better graphics version and I could almost never get into my own website.  Since I don’t rely on advertising, traffic is not that important to me.

Now when you go to arianeb.com/dategame.htm you get a website where you can download the game. I made it available in Windows, Mac, and Linux, and there is an experimental Android version which I have no idea how to use.  You can still download the offline HTML version.

What’s so cool about the Renpy Version?

Aside from the obvious, no more “page not available” errors, you can now save games, auto advance, go back much more reliably, skip whole sections you have seen before, hear actual music when you dance which you can customize if you want, and the game is full of immersive sound effects as well.

Go to the options screen and you can turn on hints, go full screen, and turn off music and sound effects if you want.

A lot of this stuff is available on the lower right corner of the screen. Try clicking on “Auto”, it is probably the funnest way to play. you can control the speed of the auto advance in Options.  The lower right menu is very helpful if you are on a tablet as well.

delivery

Anything else new?

There is also some new content, the majority being expanded scenes that existed before, especially in the museum, night club, and dress shop.  There is a short new “ice cream” scene, an a new little dance puzzle at the night club.  The museum and nightclub play a little differently depending on what Ariane is wearing.

There are also a handful of little surprises I won’t spoil.

I also added a new character, a pizza delivery man named Evan. An online friend for 12 years named Evan Kirk recently passed away suddenly, and as a tribute, I have immortalized him as an NPC.

Like me, he was way more famous online than off, with a sharp twisted sense of humor and a community leader.  He was a gay dude from Alabama which he joked about all the time.

This is not a picture of him, this is a young Chris Pratt, who he idolized and used as his avatar. My tribute NPC uses the “Chris Pratt” look, which he would have appreciated.

The Gallery of Achievements

One of the things that people enjoyed about Something’s In The Air was the gallery of endings and trying to fill out the character notebooks.

That really won’t work with Date Ariane as there are basically only two endings, a kiss goodnight, or getting kicked out of the house.

Instead, I went the traditional route and created 78 “achievements” for you to try and achieve. They range from easy and obvious, which you will probably pick up naturally, to some spectacular failures, which some of you may get naturally as well but veterans may not realize are there.  There are also some hard ones that require some knowledge of the game mechanics to complete.

Speaking of game mechanics, besides the reliance of traits explained here, there is actually now a scoring mechanism. When Ariane says “On a scale from 1 to 10, you get a _”, that score is a real value, not just something made up like it used to be.  This score is used to calculate some of the achievements.

Once you complete an achievement, open up the gallery, and click on the name to see why you earned it.  There are some other cool “extras” in the gallery.

Here are the names of the 78 achievements, with some notes on the harder ones.  You can probably figure out the rest by their name:
Multidate achievements
1. kiss (1, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000)
2. sex (1, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000)
3. date (1, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000)
4. All 5 Dinners

House Achievements
1. Rochambeau
2. Couch Sex
3. Six Pack
4. Yahtzee
5. Dance Champion (dance at home until she won’t anymore, then dance at the nightclub)
6. Three Naked In Bed (a Rebecca achievement)
7. The Quickie
8. Green Fairy
9. Ariane Owes You A Favor
10. Lucky Spin
11. Impromptu Strip Show
12. Kitchen Disrobe
13. Cheap Thrills (before dinner touch her boob, then walk in on her while changing)
14. Boobie Prize

Backyard Achievements
1. Hide and Seek
2. Hot Sex
3. Hand Job (involves the hot tub)
4. Wet Clothes
5. Backyard Play
6. Steal From Rebecca
7. Wrong Breast (lose at Marco Polo)
8. You Got Mail
9. Swim Champ
10. Underwater Explorer
11. Voyage to the Moon
12. Squeeze Play

Downtown Achievements
1. Designated Driver
2. Dizzy
3. Trivia Buff
4. Devil In A Blue Dress
5. Topless Model
6. Bottomless Model
7. Twinkle Toes (win the new dance game without cheating)
8. Art Expert
9. Rebecca Shirtless
10. Let’s Go To The Mall (finish dinner at home with extra “nice” points and then let Ariane drive to town)
11. Shopping Spree
12. Downtown Nudity (a multi date achievement involving different locations)

Neighborhood Achievements
1. Nude Pics in the Park
2. Shutterbug (all 5 versions of the park photoshoot over many dates)
3. Three for Three (Ariane has to hit all 3 of hers, too)
4. Air Ball
5. Nice Uniforms
6. Naked Ball
7. Great Outdoors
8. Playing Without Pants
9. Playing Without Clothes
10. Naked Beer Run
11. Well Protected (involves buying lots of condoms)
12. Ice Cream Run

Lake Achievements
1. Ski Trip
2. Moonlight Serenade
3. Wet Dress
4. Head Stand

Scenic View Achievements
1.  Moon for the Camera
2. True Artist
3. Money Shot
4. Blow Job
5. Kiss Where it Counts

Cabaret Achievements
1. Amateur Night Victory
2. Win Without Nudity
3. Live Sex Act
4. Two Nude Dancers
5. A Dirty Mind

Special Dates
1. Casual Date (finish a successful date without changing clothes)
2. Friendly Date (finish a successful date “as friends”)
3. Perverted
4. Kiss you all over
5. Sex Endurance
6. Not So Smart (get a perfect 10 date without the “smart” trait)
7. Not So Sexy (get a perfect 10 date without the “sexy” trait)
8. Not So Nice (get a perfect 10 date without the “nice” trait)
9. Not So Funny (get a perfect 10 date without the “funny” trait)
10. Exceeding Expectations (finish a successful date with only two traits)

Any other hints to playing?

The walkthroughs have now been updated to the Renpy version.
Enjoy!

Date Ariane: Hooray for Bad Reviews

arianeb11 Comments

As I stated before, when I first started making Date Ariane my goal was to do something a bit outside the norm, to create a game where sex and not violence is the primary driver of drama. I also had to make it with no budget so compromises in quality are inevitable as well.

For both of those reasons, I never really cared if someone did not like Date Ariane. The game is not meant for everybody, and I am very well aware of its flaws.

I mention this because there are now well over 100 videos on You Tube of people playing Date Ariane.  Some of them are funny, some of them are well made, some of them are good reviews, many of them are bad reviews, including some extremely popular ones.

I’m of two minds on this phenomenon. On the one hand, reviews of my work do not bother me in the least. I am very well aware that You Tube bloggers like to make fun of stuff they find online, it is what they do and it brings them a lot of subscribers.  As I said above, the out of mainstream nature of the game and low budget nature of the game makes Date Ariane a very easy target to make fun of, in fact I do it myself.

On the other hand, I can’t watch these videos. There is something about watching other people play my games that feels a little creepy.

I have never been able to get through any of them. My feelings when I watch them is similar to someone standing uncomfortably close to me. It also does not help that I know the answers too well, so when they make the wrong choices I know it’s going to end badly many moves ahead.

I wanted to know if I am weird feeling this way, so I reached out to a few other indie game producers. Reactions are split around 50-50. Some developers are like me, a little weirded out.  Others enjoy watching others play their games.

Developer reactions to mixed reviews seems split as well. I guess it depends on what your goals are.  My goals are to make something I enjoy and just put it out there and let the audience find it.  Other developers with more loftier goals of mainstream success can take bad reviews a little harder.  I can understand that. Even though I say bad reviews don’t bother me, if Date Ariane got nothing but bad reviews when I first put it out there, I would have taken it down and would have never made improvements or expansions.

arrenpy

And speaking of improvements, my on again, off again project of making a Renpy version of Date Ariane is on again. It was absolutely necessary to do the graphic update before attempting it again. My previous attempts were way too ambitious, my goal this time is to keep it simple. My other goals:

  1. A downloadable game that works on any computer without needing a browser.
  2. Much cleaner code that can be edited and expanded easily.
  3. Sound, music, and special effects you can’t do in HTML.

Why make a downloadable Renpy version of the game when the online is so successful?

It is true, the online game gets over 1 million unique players annually, while there have been less than 200,000 downloads of the stand alone only Something’s In The Air.  My first instinct was to try and make an online version of Something’s In The Air.  Two things prevented that from happening, one was the accidental erasure of a hard drive with my only copy ( I was only 5% complete anyways).

The other was the growing popularity of Date Ariane having an affect on my website’s stability. I researched expanding the web sites capacity, but I so far can’t justify the cost. An online SITA would just make it worse.

Making an improved stand alone version of Date Ariane available should make it better instead.

I have no idea how long it will take, probably at least the summer. I am basically rewriting the entire game as there is no way to port the game directly over.  What you see above is all I have done so far, about 28 lines of code.  Better get started.

Finishing Up One And Starting The Next

arianeb24 Comments

dessert1

Official walkthroughs

One last thing I wanted to do with Date Ariane was create some official walkthroughs. There are a couple of unofficial ones out there designed for Classic Date Ariane, but I decided with the changes I made they are going to be out of date.  So I started posting walkthroughs at arianeb.tumblr.com, coming up with 24 that will pass through all 53 points of interest in the game.

I then created a page you can go to on my website: https://arianeb.com/walkthrough.htm containing links to the 24 walkthroughs as well as an alphabetical index of the 53 points of interest and where to find them.

One of the reasons I did these walkthroughs, besides the constant questions I get of “how do you do this?”, was to make sure every aspect of the game works correctly. I did find a handful of bugs, nothing major, but the walkthroughs will work best if you download the game again or use the online version.

ac-sita1

Experiments for the next game

Another thing I did since finishing the game update was try out Tlaero’s Adventure Creator which is a tool designed to quickly and easily create the hundreds of html files needed for a dating sim type game like Date Ariane.  I wish I had this tool before, because it would save me a lot of time and effort. Version 5, just released, creates pages which will highlight hidden picture links so you can play these games on tablets.  Again, something I wish I had earlier.

That’s the problem with being a pioneer in the field, you don’t have access to all the cool tools that are developed later.

I tried out the program, first by doing some of the tutorials, and then by trying to create an HTML version of the Rachel portion of Something’s In The Air.  I think the experiment was a success in that I learned that converting a Renpy developed project into HTML simply involves a lot of copying and pasting between a Renpy editor and the Adventure Creator. Graphic Puzzles are not so easy to convert as the scripting is in two different languages, but because the Rachel portion of SITA does not involve any puzzles like that it shouldn’t be difficult to convert it to online.

Why would I want to convert it to online?  Popularity.  It took a little over a year for SITA to reach 100,000 downloads. In the past year the online version of Date Ariane has been played by around 1 million unique visitors.  Download reaches about 10% of what online does, a figure more or less confirmed when comparing online virtual worlds with ones you have to download a client first.  Habbo, an online virtual world in 2D, gets 10 times the traffic of Second Life, which is in 3D and requires a client download.

I only finished about 10% of the conversion so far.  I’m mostly doing it as proof of concept.

That concept being that Renpy is easy to develop games in because everything is laid out in a nice script, but once developed I can fairly easily convert it to HTML using Adventure Creator for online play. The download version would be the Renpy game which you could play without having to do stuff that breaks your browser’s security as it would be a stand alone game.

The next game?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what my next game would be like. I’m still thinking, actually.

The first concept I thought about and was actually planning to do (hence all my references to a Rachel game being next) is Rachel’s Fantasy Dating. The game would be played from Rachel’s point of view as she goes out with different people.

In SITA, I established she has a fetish for fantasy, so she goes on what seem like ordinary dates, but then she starts to imagine a fantasy scenario to make the date more interesting. Because you are seeing the date from Rachel’s perspective, the costumes and settings would suddenly change to fit the fantasy. The challenge would be to get your dates to play along instead of sit there very confused.

The first trouble with the concept had to do with this being a date simulator of Calvin and Hobbes. The scenarios would be difficult to write as I spent months and could only come up with two: a lake boating trip turns into a pirate adventure, and a particularly awkward date suddenly becomes an alien in Rachel’s eyes.

The latter made me realize this would work better as a web comic than a visual novel. Thinking also about the cost of new 3D sets and costumes for each date also made me realize this would work better as a hand drawn 2D web comic. So I am no longer going to do that project, back to square 1.

My next concept I imagined was an Ariane part 3, that starts where SITA ends: You and Ariane are on a trip together on a tropical paradise. I like the idea of taking Ariane somewhere exotic where nudity is not a big deal, and a new location might get Ariane to be more sexually adventurous.

Trouble with the idea came when I tried to come up with a conflict. Without conflict, the game would just be a bunch of tropical vacation slides.  The only thing I could think of is Ariane’s fear of relationships has her undermining the relationship throughout the trip, your job would be to try to get her to stop and prove you are the one for her.

It is a good idea for drama’s sake, possibly involving probing Ariane’s psyche to get to the root of her fear of relationships. That’s a pretty dark concept and I learned my lesson in SITA not to mix Ariane and dark concepts. Bottom line I would not have fun making a game like that, nor do I think many would like playing a game like that. Maybe once for the sake of the story, but there is no replay value.  Moving on…

My third concept is “Date (someone else)”. Create a new character and create new activities.

The biggest problem here is “What activities?” because there is very little I have not already done in either DA or SITA, so I would just be repeating myself a lot.

But I think I may have found a solution to this one: What if I set “Date (someone else)” in a future where the world is a different place? I could throw in a bunch of sci-fi concepts I have brewing around in my head as well as pick and choose concepts from many of my favorite sci-fi books and shows. Borrowing from the “Rachel Fantasy” concept, I want to make the game 3rd person as you play from the heroine’s perspective, and borrowing from the “Ariane 3” idea, I could make nudity and sexual openness part of the culture as well. I could also make up a bunch of new activities that are not possible today thus mostly avoiding the self repeats.

Here’s my first concept render for a main character and special tech clothes:

scifi3

It’s a start, one that I am considering as I try to come up with enough ideas and stories and puzzles to make a game out of it. I’m not even sure if it will be an actual dating sim or more of a classic adventure type game, guess I’ll see how it plays out.