I'm working on sort of a dating sim/autistic friendship simulator...

I'm working on sort of a dating sim/autistic friendship simulator, but I would like to make this element just one half of the game. The problem is that I cannot think of anything else that would lend itself to having romance/friendship roleplaying on the side. I don't want to make a Harvest Moon clone or an outright RPG with combat, maybe you can think of something else.

pixel beat em up ala scott pilgrim

shooter either sidescrolling or fps

how often have you seen the 2 genres overlap?

Survival with friends

Zookeeping.

RTS. You have to best your waifu's troops in open combat before she will love you, and then you unlock her units to use in further battles.

Serial killer and rapist simulator.

Horror game.

zombie 4 player co-op survival game with a crafting system

So weird it might just be perfect desu
I second zookeeping

I wasn't thinking of putting it on Early Access.

Why not? If you can make a game similar to rune factory that has good farming, crafting, fighting, and waifus you would be a God among men. The pic is especially hurting for something like that. Stardew valley did so well because there is almost no competition in that market, it just did it half assed.

Pc*

Your protag is postman in training.
Depending on the area of the town, there is different love interest. In order to progress love story with a girl in the town part, you must perform gradualy difficult typing tasks. As the player types in the prompt, MC drives on a bycylce to deliver letters. After the missions is done withing bonus paremeters, he gets praised by the girl of that part of the town. Something like time chalange/type gameplay.
And off course develop it further if u start progressing too much on two sides and have unique story of a love triangle play out. Its fresh, it was never done and it will keep people at the edge of their seat.
If someone needs mechanics/ideas for a game - i am happy to help
[email protected]
This is my user mail adress in order to dodge trolls

Grand Strategy where you spend resources like energy, humour, flirt, etc. on your friendships/relationships but you must also stay in a good physical and mental health.

Your a villain in a universe where the power of friendship is everything
Your job for the first half is to befriend as many people as possible, and even romance them
different results based on who you befriend or romance (imagine having a halrey-quinn esque sidekick girl or a harem of evil chicks competing for your attention by working harder and harder for your evil plots)
The final boss is the hero and he pulls off amazing bullshit thanks to the power of friendship, you must outbullshit him

Secret ending where everyone just gives you rulership because you're everyone's friend

Could definetly be approached in many ways, like turn based isometric rpg

>If you can make a game similar to rune factory that has good farming, crafting, fighting, and waifus you would be a God among men.
Yeah, that's the thing. I couldn't make something as diverse in gameplay as Rune Factory without it being shallow shit.

The zookeeper idea is more feasible in comparison, I think. No crafting, no fishing, no fighting, just taking care of animals while sexing up your colleagues.

Seriously zoo is done by Stardew Valley
See this:

Anything that involves managing a large enterprise. A business, a school, maybe even zookeeping like said. Think about it, you could reappropriate funds both legally and illegally towards the dating sim, make deals with friends or find yourself possibly antagonizing them. Also be sure to add a criminal element like embezzlement and the possibility of warming people up to you then cutting them in or not warming them up enough and fighting with them if they aren't persuaded. As for the "no full blown combat mechanic" just include the possibility of arranging hits and deaths instead of full on combat. You can arrange for someone to be killed or do it yourself depending on how much time out of tour day you spend practicing your knifing skills or out on the range.

We both know this is going to turn into fucking the animals.

This is very interesting.

Well, there's a lot of routes you can go with this, because really, you can crowbar romance into anything, but maybe try these:

- A rhythm game. Be it a game where you befriend punk grrls with your guitar shredding skills or woo maidens locked up in towers with your busking skills, music-based games lend themselves well to romance.

- A sports game, probably tending more towards management sim. Basically, you'd take the standard h-game motif of "male coach of female sports team", but instead of banging all the girls, it's genuinely about team spirit and friendship. I think that'd be a nice change of pace.

- A city-builder of sorts. Imagine SimTown, but with more personal relationships, and a bit more smaller in scale. You'd be some sort of district or block manager, inviting new families into the neighborhood, enacting certain rules and regulations, organizing events to bring the community closer together.

- A gambling game. Imagine a Leisure Suit Larry type, broken by repeated rejection and financial problems, heading to Las Vegas in one last-ditch effort to fix his life with the big jackpot. If you do manage to find success in money, then comes the real question: How do you find success in love when you can't tell who's after your money and who's legitmately interested in you?

That's just some ideas I came up with off the top of my head, I'd probably have something more fleshed out with time.

So, a tokimeki-style stat grinder?

There's a shit ton of those.

Cooking

How about a point and click adventure game? A cooking sim?

The waifus are the animals, but they're regular ladies in elaborate costumes.

I'm intrigued by this. I'll think about it, think a little bit about implementation.

part time jobs

coffee shop, bar, burgers, cleaning

Instead of wasting your time on a dumb, poorly thought out gimmick, stick to the actual staples of the industry.

The first is stat building, do X task, get points in Y. You could very easily expand this out to a system including shit like minigames while you have to make money for rent and to buy items, etc.

The second is time management, girls only show up at certain times and events have specific days they're available on. It's impossible to go after them all, and X event might lock you out of Y event. If you hate your players, you could always add in a bomb system.

Of course, both of these systems require an immense amount of work that's basically unheard of from a 2-bit indie like yourself.

Idea man here again - regarding the postman :
The setting I imagined would also give the MC ability to open letters to the girl that is a love interest, giving him unfair advantage over a girl. Random events would include : realizing u have a competition (some battle of wits against another dude) realizing that someone in her family is sick etc etc... But this would destabilize u the more u do it, making it hard to maintain cover that u are match made in heaven. This could influence a popularity in surrounding area, limitng your interest options. But clever players will settle for 1 girl and max out the control to utilise the knowledge the best.
Idea is to comprise a game with many layers of social interactions trough mini-games.
I hate- romsims but give it a fresh idea and pack it with engaging goals and minigames... it can be quite interesting ride.

Roguelike.
Search for Azure Dreams.

Honestly, just make a puzzle game. That should be the easiest option. Something like Puzzle Quest or Clash of Heroes, but with autistic dating sim elements added to the campaign.

You need basically no budget for shit like this.

hey i love romance and shit

you should add dating futa, trap, loli and vore fetishes. also add the option to kill your love interest whenever you want because a soul in love is dangerours when hurt and that´d make it interesting. bonus points if you can fuck the corpse too.

Oh yeah and have a scene where main character browses reddit & talks shit about love interest who´s into ponies just to meme

also above all else for love of god have porn scenes, gifs about sex and truly hot girls (male) coz dating is about boner and realism sucks.
Oh yeah and if you fuck up the game it should lead to being cucked by BBC

Mahjong game with superpowers.
School/Town administration simulation.
Base building/Tower defense.

Oh boy, another stat-grinding game. Not like there's not a million of those already. What a creative and original idea.

>everybody always shits on the ideas guys
>without us none of your """talent""" would ever be able to be put to use
>call us useless and wont pay us
>then beg for our services

NO

You're not a real idea guy. For a real idea guy, seeing the idea come to fruition is its own reward.

What should be original and fresh are the heroines. The counterpart sim aspect is just a simple timewaster at best.

>Sup Forums is all one person

Well, your best bet is to provide variety of girl/boy love interest. Remember the more coverage u can make - the better the game. So you can draw a map of a town, split it smaller areas (diverse in design) Each area would have a love interest. Initialy, player would just complete basic delivery tasks. Untill they get a letter that rings in their ears. Then a short cutscene of love interest opening doors. Based on players preference they can start completing tasks in said area (type-time delivery challenge) and progress with getting to know the girl.
However, players should keep track of progress on other areas, cus u are postman after all. Fail state is forgetting to fill the lowest quota on other regions. Game should also feature random events. Ur ex shows up as a boss battle. Their ex shows up as a boss battle. Chance to peek in special letters to gain more tracktion or contain urself in order to boost ur protagonists moral meter for firmer personality. Each love interest will live different kind of behaviour and players should experiment with minigames : Movies, party, dance club, relaxed walked, a fun ride, ice cream on the beach, ferris wheel, dinner table with candles. A bit of money management minigame too to make it more pressing on the player.
Relationships are a bit of work, but sometimes they can just happen.
I hope i tickled ur imagination a bit.!

Add spooky mysteries to solve like scooby doo.

>Of course, both of these systems require an immense amount of work that's basically unheard of from a 2-bit indie like yourself.
That second thing is really not that hard to implement, not in Lua anyway.

I'm not saying make the love interest boring, but at least put sone effort into the gameplay itself.
>sengoku rance
>kamidori alchemy meister
>huniepop
These are all romance games that people ebjoy the gameplay of. Is that not a bad thing to strive for?

What if you're tasked with zookeeping Monster Girls

You could have it set in the 50's, back when the mailman would actually come to the door and be friendly. Take them to the roller rink, the drive in, the malt shop, ect.

Put in FiM themed characters

When you add in the possibility for players to miss events, you then have to write other events to catch them up. It gets pretty complex, pretty quickly.

2 out of 3 of those games are absolutely terrible by all possible standards, and the first is average, while also not really being a dating sim. When the gameplay comes at obvious detriment to the story and characters, it's a bad thing in a game meant to be about romance.

a game where you climb steel girders n shit, jumpin over barrels n shit and you fight a big monkey at the top n shit

What, you don't like bejeweled? It's inspired dozens of look-alikes for a reason

That idea will even further refresh the shitty regurgitated dating sims. It sould good. I hope I helped OP at least a bit.
As an indie dev, even as a hobbyist, originality and giving old things new twists makes u get a brake trought.

Bejeweled is fine. Tacking it onto easily one of the worst games I've ever played in an awful form isn't exactly my idea of a fun time. It's the least offensive part of the game, but when the rest is about as fun as washing out your eye sockets with battery acid, that isn't high praise.

I'm making something similar in my spare time, the main game is about playing a TCG with friends with possible relationship building on the side. You collect cards, prepare for tournaments and recruit new team members and have the opportunity to chill around with them.

Instead of managing something like a farm or a zoo, it can be about managing a team of people for some sort of competition and dating your teammates.

It doesn't have to be about a TCG, it could be any competitive activity:
>sports team
>paintball
>gymnastics
>martial arts/brawling (so gameplay is )
>giant mech battles
>spaceship racing

Yeah, huniepop in itself is not a good game, but the point is it was able to do something other than
>pick option
>watch numbers go up and down
>repeat

What's wrong with numbers going up and down? There are plenty of ways to make that engaging.

Instead of focusing on the gimmick, which is something that very few games get right, and the few that do usually have large budgets and home console releases, focusing on the actual game instead of the secondary system is a much better approach.

But hey, we both know OP is just looking for the next hilarious wacky game idea idiots will buy off steam because PDP played it.

rythm game

Music game. You must not only practice music segments in preparation for performing live, but you must also improve the bonds of friendship between the band members while drama unfolds at different points of the plot.

>The problem is that I cannot think of anything else that would lend itself to having romance/friendship roleplaying on the side.
Only add other gameplay elements when they actually complement and influence eachother.
So many games say "look at this videogame that is actually just interesting because of the setting and characters!" or "look at all these different things you can do in the game that do not influence eachother meaningfully in any way and just makes all the different parts more halfassed then if you dedicated to one of them"