Hello. I’m not sure if there’s a topic exactly like this one but I haven’t found one during my searches. If there is, I apologize for any inconvenience.
How do you decide how big of a relationship boost to give a certain choice? I have trouble deciding when to give a conversation choice a relationship boost or how big of a number to use. There are some conversation options (such as small talk) that are confusing in this.
Also, how do you decide what the cap for friendship is? Some games such as Choice of Robots have a system that declares the relationship as good, great, etc. Some don’t. I’ve seen 60% and higher caps to indicate friendship and close relationships, but I haven’t been able to find out a standard.
Any help or discussion in this matter would be much appreciated.
There is no right or wrong answer to this. Just use what fits with your game. You can use a simple binary choice (relationship true/false) or increasing numbers (if relationship = 0, you haven’t met the character. 1, just met. 2, they enjoy your company, 3, great friends, 4, can I hear wedding bells?). You can use a percentage or a verbal description. Whatever fits best for the scenes you want to write.
As @andymwhy said, there’re no “actual” set of rules when it comes to designing this. It all depends on how you want to handle relationship on your Whispers of the Stars
I personally learn from my previous mistake, which is having a boost for every conversation choices albeit a small boost, and decided to go with “Unimportant bantering choice & Important major plot-twisting choice”.
This way I can let the player to go chit-chat with the NPCs without being worried if the chit-chat will affect their relationships (and the game), but when they’re encountering a Big Choice, I’ll let 'em know.
And… Oh! Might be worth it to mention that I don’t show the player’s relationship bar anywhere on my game
