So, I began working on a dialogue mod for Sebastian that eventually grew beyond its initial scope and has gotten me thinking about how the romance can overall be improved in this game. The two main issues that I would like to solve are the following: Romancing characters feels too game-y and unnatural at times, because most of what you do to woo them is spam them with their favourite gifts. This is a classic dating sim mechanic but I personally find it breaks my immersion. It doesn't feel like I'm building a relationship with this character, more like bribing them into loving me. The dialogue is too sparse. CA has done very well in establishing each character's unique personality through a simple framework, but overall there are too few dialogue lines. As a result, they start repeating pretty early in the game. Adding more lines can get tricky with the way the dialogue is currently coded: too few and the player is likely to miss them, too many and the player will never see them all. Repetition is almost impossible to avoid. What I've been looking to do, using Sebastian as a guinea pig, is change things around to make the relationship feel more organic. The goal is to shift focus away from the gifts and instead encourage the player to talk to the character daily by making conversation more rewarding than it currently is. This change is meant to simulate real relationships, where talking to the person and spending time with them is how you get to grow close. My plans include: At least one year of unique dialogue lines, one for each day. This makes for 112 lines with no repetition. The dialogue would also be longer than the original single or double-sentence lines, with more questions directed at the player to simulate conversation. It would also get longer as the relationship develops to show how the character is growing more trustful and open. The effect of Heart Levels on the dialogue would be more gradual and more subtle. The goal is to encourage the player to keep coming back and see each day's unique dialogue. Since dialogue on its own adds to the Heart points, it's easy to calculate whenabout the player would be at 2 Hearts (end of Spring), 4 Hearts (end of Summer), and so on, even without any gifts. Around these times, additional dialogue variations can be added to the standard lines. So if the player and the character have been speaking regularly and have exchanged a few gifts, the character will talk more. For example, instead of simply mentioning the rain (0 Hearts), Sebastian might admit to enjoying the rain (2 Hearts) or elaborate further by explaining some emotional connections he has to it, etc (4 Hearts). The basic conversation remains the same, but variations indicate familiarity. Variations of the 2 and 4 Heart Level would begin to appear in the Summer, while variations of the 8 and 10 Heart Level would not emerge until Fall and Winter. This is to simulate trust and affection building over time. The effect of gift-giving would be diminished. This one can be done simply by reducing the Heart points earned by gifts and increasing the points earned by talking. Gifts would act more as compensation for missing one or more days of dialogue. As a continuation of the above, event cutscenes will not appear until a certain amount of time has passed, even if the player and character are at the appropriate Heart Level. This can be done by tying the events to a specific season. This is to again emulate the concept of trust and affection building over time. Ideally, we wouldn't want the player and character to be married until around the year mark, which is a realistic amount of time for so big a decision. I thought that making a custom Heart event where the character asks the player out by giving them a bouquet (and later proposes by giving them a mermaid pendant) might be cute too. It would be a bit awkward having the player gift these symbolic items back to the character to actually trigger the relationship change (as per the actual mechanics of the game), but this can be justified in dialogue ("You can bring it back to me when you feel ready to commit" or something similar). Things I would like an opinion on: Does this sound worthwhile? Would you play it? Does it sound like the kind of romance you would enjoy or do you prefer the current system? I'm asking because in its attempt at realism it requires more effort and patience on the player's part. You won't be able to sashimi your way into Sebastian's heart like you did before. Instead, you would have to spend a lot of time with him, get to know him and wait for him to open up on his own. How should the dialogue be handled in Year 2 and beyond? Even if I wrote a whole second year of unique lines with the appropriate variations (which I would, I love writing), I cannot keep doing this forever. Some players might want to spend 10 years in the game, but I can't feasibly write 10 years of dialogue. I'm committed to my mod but there are boundaries, you know? I thought about writing two variations, one where the player/character are in a relationship and one where they are not, with the latter showing some familiarity between the two but not close intimacy. The second year lines would repeat in the third, fourth, etc. year, until the character's relationship changes into romance or marriage. How can I edit the marriage dialogue? I've found no information on this and it doesn't look like the same as the standard dialogue. Like I said before, Sebastian is only my initial candidate. If there is a demand for this, I could expand it to more characters. Thanks for reading my wall of text! Any feedback is super welcome! Progress so far: Spring and Summer dialogue for Year 1 finished and tested in-game Added two new facial expressions to Sebby's portrait spritesheet Found a way around the code's stubborn refusal to acknowledge heart levels on date-specific dialogue (syntax issue, feel free to ask)
Personally, I think this is an amazing mod idea! I've always felt the romance part of the game was very lacking and the act of actually talking to a character was such a rare thing ;; I'd download a mod like this in a heartbeat. So I really encourage you to make it! But...on how much you should write...I'd say you should write for 1 year before marriage (until you marry the character) then do 1 year after marriage. Once the first year of marriage is over then it can start repeating itself. Even though that may make marriage seem a bit stale after a while...it's still more refreshing than the current system of romance. (You're only one person so don't overwork yourself!)
Thank you! I'm glad to see someone so excited for his! I've written about a third of the Year 1 dialogue already, so this part should be done soon. The cutscenes might take a little longer, but I'm trying to focus on the core aspects of the mod first. I will probably do a year of completely unique lines, a year of unmarried dialogue with some variation for heart levels (that repeats at the same rate as the default) and the marriage dialogue. This is going to be a lot of writing (~300 lines) but it should maintain interest in the relationship for an average playthrough's duration which is about 2 in-game years. If this plan turns out to be too ambitious, I can tone it down a bit but things look manageable so far. Modifying the gift value turned out to be a bit more difficult than I thought, the algorithm for it is rather complicated and a lot of villager tastes are universal. What I might do is turn all his Loved and Liked gifts to Neutral, so instead of +80 and +45 points they only give +20. The points are multiplied on a character's birthday, but I think that's acceptable. It's a special occasion and all.
i'd be behind this and would even offer feedback/testing if you needed it, i found harvey and elliot both to be charming but it got really stale fast with elliot and harvey seems to do a complete 180 from being super unromantic(And seeming to really dislike you) to being eager to move in and have kids. expanding dialogue would certainly make it more appealing to romance because you like the char instead of picking the least obnoxious npc so you can tick a box for grandpa
This sounds amazing! Romance (specifically marriage) is the main area this game could used improvement. This sounds like a really big undertaking, but like it'll really pay off. One thing I would be worried about is stuff like adding expressions to the portraits. Mainly because portrait mods are a necessity for many people (myself included) and that would create incompatibility with basically all portrait mods. But that's just my two cents.
Yes!This is amazing!I'm hype by just reading your thread.In the vanilla game you can remember most of their dialogue in the middle of year 2 The dating dialogue is only like a tiny bit and you will soon get bored to interact with the character.
I'm SO excited for this! Where are you at the moment? I'd be happy to test anything you have so far if you need people to do that!
This looks awesome! Romance is in desperate need of an overhaul. How did you manage to work around the heart levels on specific dates?
