How many love interests

I want to write a polical game, must for my own sake, how many love interest should there be in such a game, as it is now i have 3 male and two female, but i dont know if i want more or not… what would be the best amount

A game doesn’t necessarily need romance, although a lot of people prefer it. If you are going to add romance, at least two (one male, one female, or one NPC that is gender flippable) would be needed so everyone could have an option.

There is no maximum, but you should feel confidant that you can give each RO their own unique personality and a few scenes and try to integrate them into the plot, which can be difficult with lots of characters.

7 Likes

I generally recommend that each player (male or female, gay, bi, or straight) should have at least three ROs to choose from, with a range of personalities. That said, you shouldn’t add extra ROs unless you actually have a role in the plot for them. One way to counter this might be to make one of your guys genderflippable, although I know some people dislike this (I find that how well it works depends on how gendered the setting is).

8 Likes

The maths for that would work out at minimum 6 romance options (3 male, 3 female, all playersexual). Any less and non-bi characters will have less than 3 choices. Are there many games that meet that requirement?

I’d say it’s good to have an even amount of love interests of each gender, so three male and three female sounds good to me. More than that would be good, but the more characters you add to a game, the more unique personalities you need to come up with, and having a massive collection of characters can sometimes be a struggle.

Basically, add as many as you want, but it’s better to have a handful of extremely interesting and well fleshed-out love interests than a massive harem of character’s whose only defining qualities is that they’re all attractive and they’re into you. :yum:

8 Likes

I’ve seen this work well in sci-fi settings, where one of the love interests is a genderless alien. :yum:

2 Likes

I love the romance options. They’re usually my favorite part of whatever CS game I’m playing. If I’m honest…the romantic subplots are the biggest part of why I play these games, and when I dream about writing myself its the love story that comes first.

That said. I actually prefer fewer quality RO’s than just a whole lot of choices. For me the best love interest is a legitimate main character in the story. How many true main characters can most stories support? Three seems to be pretty common. Maybe you can stretch that to four or five. So by the time we get to having half a dozen love interests some of them are probably going to feel kind of tacked on.

10 Likes

I’d say at least 2 females and 2 males. I played games with just 2 ROs (a male and a female) and it felt sort of bland. The fact that one of the options was an a-hole, didn’t help either.

3 Likes

Not as many as I would like, no. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

(But yeah, I realise it can be difficult to get that many characters in the game, which is where I feel genderflipping can help, although it doesn’t work in worlds with strong societal gender roles.)

Yeah, if 100% of your options are unpleasant, then it’s not a fun game. (Even at 50%, it means we don’t have much of a choice…)

4 Likes

I also like love interests not to just be there for a romance option. They don’t need to be a main character, exactly, but they should be developed more than “X is very attractive and nice”, in my opinion. I have talked to some people that think making every love interest playersexual detracts from the character of potential romance options, and I can see why, but it has personally never bothered me overmuch.

8 Likes

If the game is mainly about romance, then 4-5 ROs of the player’s prefered gender would be good. This is the typical amount of ROs in an otome. This way someone should be able to find at least one RO with a personality that they like. The story is usually more romance heavy than plot heavy, which OK if the main theme is romance.

A non-romance as the main theme story shouldn’t have to have the entire story focus on romance. However, if you’re going to add an element like romance or different story branches, you might as well try to make everything good and complete which is why at least 2 is good. If a player feels the few available ROs are meh, they should still want to play for the great plot.

If you lock players out of certain romances because a RO is gay locked or straight locked or nb locked, then more ROs would be needed to make up for the missing RO.

5 Likes

it you work it your choice if you what it lilke that go head it your choice and we all wish you good luck and have good day friend

I can’t say I’m the best at writing romance options, but why make them limited to a player’s gender/sexual orientation/preference? Every player will experience the game in whichever way his/her imagination takes wants, so isn’t it better to make all RO available to all players? This is not difficult to code at all, and allows more freedom to the player. I know that in real life people do not behave like this, but in interactive fiction the objective is to give the player as much freedom as possible (but, as I say, I’m not great at writing RO, so maybe this also results in players not being interested in them, and this could be part of the problem…)

2 Likes

Just make evryone a romance option

That would take a lot of effort(and coding). :no_mouth:

1 Like

I think i will stick to my 6 then, two who o=are only straight and 3 who are both and one genderplippbe…

I am not really sure if it should be entire romance based, I believe it would be to mush like ROC, but i want to make a game where romance are an option to get what you want, and you can do this with or without emotions…

I want a game where you need to get alliances to protect your family from others, and in these alliances you can Ro some of them, and some will pursue you just for shit and giggles. Some want to use you and other just want friends, some trust other and some dont

2 Likes

Okay, well now we have another problem. :roll_eyes: If you’re having straight ROs, you should have an equal number of gay ones to balance it out, but I wouldn’t suggest this unless you’re confident you can do the gay romances justice compared to the straight ones. It would probably be best for you to just make everyone bi.

2 Likes

Yeah, I guess I understand the logic. The current game I’m working on is set in a world with no religion, where bi-sexuality is considered the norm, since there was never any stigma or prejudice against same sex relationships. In that setting, I figured having all romantic interests as player-sexual made sense.

In another game I’m working on though, I found that there were certain characters that I just couldn’t see as player-sexual, so in the end I decided on making some characters straight, some gay and some bi. :blush:

1 Like

What if some of the characters are your family members? :yum:

1 Like

Have you been following Game of Thrones? :stuck_out_tongue:

Incest is the new tampon sex which was the new standing in people’s room and watching them as they sleep.

3 Likes