The Road to Dates & Wires (Patreon)

In less than a week, we'll be releasing Dates & Wires, our first foray into the wild world of visual novels. Until now, we kept a pretty tight lid on the whys and wherefores of the game, but with the final product just around the corner, it seemed appropriate to chat a little bit about what to expect - and how we got there in the first place. 

As per usual, the joke's on us. 

The spark of Dates & Wires was born of Mary's multi-month obsession with Fire Emblem: Three Houses - specifically, the dating sim-style character interactions that anchored most of the game's narrative. Having wrung as much play time from FE:TH as feasibly possible, she then began poking around for similar game experiences and promptly tumbled head-first down the deep (and occasionally distressing) rabbit hole that is otome.

Otome ("maiden") games began as a sub-genre of Japan's prolific dating sim industry aimed specifically at women. Like most dating sims, otome titles typically give you a stable of prospects to woo, with players negotiating various choices and challenges to end up with their husbando(s) of choice. Unlike most dating sims, otomes are still regarded as something of a niche genre - though more of these games have been localized for Western audiences in recent years, fans' options are still pretty slender compared to the massive catalogue of get-the-girl titles on Steam and elsewhere.

They can also go in some seriously off-kilter directions. 

Around this time, we were also rapidly approaching April 1st, which meant figuring out what dumb-yet-vaguely-canonical prank we'd pour far too much of our precious free time into. And so - with our usual clear-headed thinking - we hit on the idea of going otome, D&W-style. Not with a joke game, though - that would make entirely too much sense, and visual novels already had a long enough history of being treated as a punching bag by folks looking for easy laughs. 

No, we decided to take it seriously. Not in the sense of providing satisfying romantic interactions, natch: this was still going to be a Drugs & Wires product, and anybody expecting a good time from Stradania's least eligible and most self-absorbed singletons probably hasn't glanced at our comic's tagline in a hot minute. But the dating sim framework was a chance to dig into characters that hadn't really had the room to develop in the comic itself - and potentially open our weird little world to a new audience in the process. 

That just left the whole "making the game" part, which threw up two kinda-distinct challenges.

One: We only had about a month and a half to crank through design, writing, programming, testing, and whatever else needed doing if we were to have something ready by April 1st.

Two: Neither of us actually had made a game before. 

The first part was easy enough to address: we drew up a streamlined scope of work that'd use a limited cast of familiar D&W characters and offer one date for each. This kept the number of assets we'd have to create to a manageable size and wouldn't require a huge amount of overly complex programming.

The second... well, that's where going the visual novel route turned out to be a real boon, because as it turns out, there's plenty of robust engines for VN-style games doing the rounds these days. Out of the gate, I advocated for Ren'Py, a Python-based platform with a reasonably low learning curve and an active global developer community. The larger userbase meant more resources and support if I hit any brick walls - and more games that could be played through to get a sense of what the engine could pull off.  I'd still have to learn how to use the damned thing, but since we managed to put out an entire harsh noise album with zero prior experience the year before, this seemed like a minor-ish hurdle at best. 

So while Mary worked on the script for the very first date (Dan, of course), I started poking at Ren'Py to figure out the implementation parts. 

Off to the races.

All told, things fell into place quite quickly once we knuckled down. Mary's first script got slapped into a playable build after a day or two of work, and within a few weeks, we had a feature-complete game that ticked all the boxes we'd originally set out for ourselves.  

An early placeholder title screen, back when the look and feel of the UI was still getting nailed down.

The finished script was a reasonably even split, with each of us contributing three dates. In addition, I wound up authoring the game's "wrapper," meaning the various scenes that connected the individual dates and introduced the overarching story. All told, we were in good shape. But by now, word had gotten out about the project, meaning there was genuine buzz and anticipation to live up to - as well as the prospect of being stacked up against full-fat otome titles.

So rather than push for an April 1st release - especially since the project was no longer going to be a dead-of-night surprise drop to "prank" fans - we opted to take a few weeks extra to make the whole package just a bit more substantial. 

At this stage, significant tweaks to the game's scope were a no-go, at least not without a lot of extra dev time we didn't necessarily want to commit to. However, there was still an opportunity to improve polish and immersion through smaller, more meaningful tweaks. These included touches like adjusting character art to match the lighting of particular backgrounds: 

Color variants were done the hard way - manual adjustments made to Mary's base art by yours truly to eliminate the need for her to recolor the characters from scratch - which I'm told is more effort than many proper otome games lavish on their character art. 

Where the extra time really paid off, though, was in the story structure.  Initially, all dates were self-contained entities, but we both liked the idea of each date feeding into others, with setting and character knowledge from one meet-bad progressing into other events down the line. Problem was, we'd opted for an open-ended structure where dates could be tackled in any order, meaning there was no way to explicitly direct that experience. 

Instead, I expanded the script so the order in which players tackled the available dates would have a direct impact on dialogue and even events, and in a way that would require more than one playthrough to fully assess. Dan, for instance, might mention his VR work if you play your cards right, which will come up again if you have an opportunity to try out one of his mindtrips - or you could end up running one of his sims before meeting him, which in turn opens up a bit more of his background when you're finally face to face. (There's other, often more subtle examples, but that's for you to figure out once the finished product releases.)

From a design standpoint, the big goal was to support players who wanted to experiment a little by encouraging them to ask "what would happen if I did (Thing X) first?" and getting the game to provide an appropriate narrative payoff. The branching choices in Dates & Wires aren't necessarily going to give, say, Bioware cold sweats, but there's a number of fun little moments tucked away that'll only emerge under specific circumstances, and I'm looking forward to seeing which ones people discover during play.

All the right sounds. 

One final note: while Dates & Wires was a two-person show from start to finish, we did have support from one other collaborator. NINGEN, who previously lent his talents to (or squandered his talents on) Privation Sensorielle last year, and who was kind enough this time around to let us raid his entire back catalogue for suitable BGM. Given our short development time and extremely limited scope, having a fully original soundtrack was never going to be on the cards for us; the NINGEN discography, though, gave us access to a treasure trove of different moods and textures that ultimately tied the whole package together. There's even two new compositions created specifically for the game - three, if you include my own contribution to the Dates & Wires OST, which is... well, I guess you'll see.