What makes good romance IF? (resources, advice, examples)

Continuing the discussion from 25 games: A retrospective and review of my own work to this point:

I feel similarly about romance in games. Me and husb were talking about making a romance IF with political elements and then stopped cuz we realized it was all politics and no romance – we had no idea how to do it!!

I find good romance in IF super compelling and fun-- my favorite examples come from the juggernauts of CoG, such as Choice of Romance and A Study in Steampunk (I kicked my feet with joy getting the love interests I liked). That sort of approach often has to do with “courting” and stats, following the right path and skills to woo someone. Creatures Such as We (another CoG IF) is a whole commentary on that approach!

But that’s not the only way-- I also found the romance in @30x30’s Revenant’s Lament touching and there’s no “wooing” game there. The love in Will Not Let Me Go is heartbreaking, in Birdland the puppy love is adorable, and iirc the grief and loss of love in Eurydice also touched my heartstrings way back when I first played it. These are only a few examples (uhhh 3/4ths of them are sad, but you get me) and they approach the topic in very different ways.

I can think of one specific romance resource for IF (not that there aren’t more, I just haven’t seen them) and that is the Narrascope 2023 talk, Trust, Lust, and UST:

But it doesn’t answer everything.

So, any advice? What compels you in a romantic IF, why, and how does it do so? If you’re a writer, any tips?

Note: I’m specifically talking about romance in interactive fiction, and would not like to expand it to like, how Mass Effect or Baldur’s Gate or whatever do it. They’re nice I’m sure, but I cannot make Mass Effect and I can make IF.

If you don’t like romance IF please do not hesitate to avoid the thread entirely! You are totally free to not comment or engage with topics that you dislike and/or cannot contribute to in productive ways!

9 Likes

My one and only foray into PC romance in IF was with Loose Ends, where it kind of fell out as a natural consequence of the mechanics (the core of the game mechanics is having a tracked relationship value with various different NPCs, and getting more allies than enemies before your life is on the line). When we were writing the “high relationship value” endings, Anais realized that some of them were coming across as distinctly romantic, so we decided to lean into it.

Even so, it ended up being pretty subtle, because we wanted to let players also interpret it as platonic if they wanted to. I don’t know if anyone actually took the romantic interpretation in the end.

But, to me, that’s why romance works so well in Choice of Games stuff: because it fits those mechanics the same way medium-dry-goods puzzles fit parser mechanics.

2 Likes

Hm. Not much a player of romance IF per se, but seeing some of the examples under the romance tag that I have played does cause some thoughts. Snowblind Aces makes the wooing a matter of conversation rather than abstract statistics—I suppose you could say it all comes down to state manipulation in the end, but it’s more granular and feels different to me compared to the generally more coarse-grained actions of CoG games (I mean, I presume conversations in CoG games can influence romance stats, but it’s just one mechanic rather than the centrepiece).

I wouldn’t class The Play as a romance per se—that makes me think of games where the PC is a focus of romance rather than side characters, which isn’t exactly the case here—but how the Karl/Erica romance bit works suggests making the romance derived from more general stats rather than any explicit Affection to/for X thing.

Black Closet’s a VN with a strategic investigatory mini game, so might tack closer to the Mass Effect area than anything you want to discuss but it’s on the IFDB so. From playing it I’d class it as firmly in the wooing category, but the premise provides a good reason for the protagonist to engage in wooing beyond just romance (I suppose you could say that any good romance IF might do that, but that doesn’t seem to be necessarily the case).

2 Likes

I think two of the biggest parts of romance writing are characterization and pacing.

The characters need to be appealing, which doesn’t necessarily mean they need to be likeable in a traditional sense—they can be sexy trainwrecks, they just can’t be boring or the whole thing falls apart. The more romance options you have, the more work you need to put into making sure they’re all distinct from one another.

As for pacing, two of the most common failure modes of romance are having the characters get together too quickly and easily or, conversely, dragging the will-they-won’t-they out too long. The advice that you hear a lot in static-fiction romance writing is that in every scene you should be asking yourself, “Why can’t they get together right now?” and I think that’s no less applicable to IF. So, like, if you find yourself throwing a lot of random new obstacles at your characters in order to artificially drag out the getting-together arc, you have a problem. And while that aspect of the advice tends to get focused on the most, something that was really helpful for me personally was having it pointed out that this also means that every scene (or every scene significant to the romance subplot, if it’s a subplot) needs to be chipping away at something on that list. Audiences don’t generally want instalove but neither do they want to feel like the two characters are stuck in a holding pattern, circling each other at a fixed distance. You need tension but you also need a sense of progress.

It’s not that there’s an ideal length for romance in general, though; it’s more that the time it takes them to get together needs to be proportional to how many issues the characters have and/or how deep/complex those issues are. It’s frustrating to the audience if something that should be resolved easily (such as your classic romcom miscommunication where the heroine sees the hero seeming to be affectionate with another woman and it turns out it’s his sister or whatever) gets dragged out forever; it’s equally frustrating if something that should be difficult to resolve (such as, like, trauma or one party having legitimately seriously hurt the other) gets dispensed with too quickly.

Of course, this is more about romances between two characters with specific personalities rather than blank-slate protagonist romances with a selectable love interest, but IMO most of this stuff still holds, just with a slightly more lopsided focus—you’re working through the RO’s internal and external problems and the protagonist is along for the ride, and as long as the RO is appealing and their problems feel like they’re being resolved at a reasonable pace and in a reasonable way and the PC’s involvement doesn’t start feeling like a deus ex machina, people will supply their own chemistry for the RO and their own particular version of the PC.

13 Likes

Static fiction can also switch POVs easier (because of not having to handle the player being thrown off by the POV switch), which makes presenting the RO as their own character with their own motivations and strengths separate from the lead easier. Of course there’s no reason IF couldn’t do something like that—see Walker & Silhouette which apparently does something like that, though whether or not that’s the intention I can’t tell as I’m just going off reviews—but there’d still be more of a cost than there is to the author of static fiction.

EDIT: And of course, this would probably be more difficult for games with paper-doll type love-interests, as a fair amount of characterisation would then be up to the player. I suppose it could be handled in a sort-of storylettish way by writing a bunch of different characterisation scenes for the RO and filtering them and interpolating text based on how the player chose to characterise thus far, but that sounds dubiously practical without tools to do so?

EDIT 2: I imagine you could simplify it to just interpolating text if you limited how much customisation of the RO(s) there is, but that only goes so far. If it’s some sort of fantasy Golden Age of Sail pastiche and potential love interests are a pirate, a Naval officer, a tavern owner, and a merchant-explorer, you can hardly all give them the same characterising scenes unless it’s very generic.

2 Likes

I wrote a game with dual POVs; it’s not strictly romance, as there are multiple possible endings (you can choose to play out a make-up arc or a break-up arc), but the two POVs are two people in a romantic relationship: Structural Integrity - Details. It’s a short game but it was a lot of work to code, making sure each character’s mood and possible responses fit with the choices the player made in the other character’s POV. But it was fun, and I’d like to do something like it again at some point.

4 Likes

EJ said most of what I wanted to already (we did have a discussion sparked off by this post!) but I will add on that if you want to write romance, you need to read romance. Much like anyone wanting to write sci-fi IF would be directed to the likes of Asimov and LeGuin as well as Coloratura and Superluminal Vagrant Twin, you need to get familiar with what good romantic fiction looks like in a variety of mediums. This is way less straightforward though, because:

  1. Romance is in almost everything to some degree (and a lot of it is bad),
  2. Pure romance works have a reputation for being trashy/cheap/for women only, especially when they also contain sex scenes and
  3. Reader preferences play a huge part in what any particular person likes (gender configurations, tropes, personality types, etc).

So unlike other genres there’s no easy “starter kit” of the greats to point newbies to. And there’s so much out there that doing your own research can be intimidating!

For anyone interested in writing romance I’d recommend doing your own research anyway to find stuff you like and feel is well written. Games with romance are good, of course, but you’ll also want to read static fiction (of which your local library will have a surprising amount of!) and maybe even branch out into movies or TV. Fanfic might seem like a good idea but I don’t necessarily recommend it for this purpose because it relies heavily on the audience already knowing the characters. Introducing your characters to the reader and establishing chemistry between them is an important part of writing original romance, so if you only read fanfic you’ll miss out on lessons in that arena.

(For anyone who would like to go down this path but prefers to avoid erotic content: anything advertised as a “closed-door romance” won’t contain explicit sex.)

7 Likes

I mean, sure, non-IF romance fiction can swap perspectives, but as far as I’m aware it’s just as common if not more common to have a single POV character and I’m not sure that that makes it that much harder to flesh out both characters. And the advice I mentioned never came with the rider of “of course, this is if you are swapping POVs, if you don’t swap POVs it’s a terribly different and much harder problem to which none of this applies.”

Also, maybe things have changed since I started to lose interest in the CoG formula, but I’m not sure it’s all that common to just have a single set of romance scenes that you slot each RO into as opposed to each of them having their own distinct romance scenes? (Frankly, I’m tempted to argue that the former is straight-up not a good way of doing IF romance—now you can’t give distinct character traits to either character involved, or at least those traits can’t appear in the romance scenes, which would seem to ensure that the scenes are going to come out bland and generic—and that if you don’t have the resources to write separate scenes per character or at least heavily customize the scenes, you should maybe just leave the romance out entirely. But I don’t like to be that dogmatic about things, so if anyone has an example of this that they thought worked well, I’d be interested to hear about it.)

5 Likes

as people already known, my major WIP is around an established romance, and I’m not shy about intimacy and sex details; I’m starting the actual heavy work (the PC/NPC interaction and their working toward a common goal), but I feel that from a narrative standpoint is much more easy working in the framework of established romance than in the framework of building a romantic relationship (one of the major criticism of First Contact is the too fast romantic bonding between the trio, and personally I agree with this critique)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

3 Likes

I wasn’t saying swapping PoVs was a necessity or portraying romance without that was more difficult, I was just thinking along the lines of “hm, what technique can static fiction do easily that interactive fiction might have a bit more trouble with?” and treating that as a springboard.

Also, I was probably more thinking in terms of (non-romance) genre fiction with a strong romance subplot than romance per se. The advice I was thinking of myself was more along the lines of avoiding the RO becoming an appendage of the MC, noting one of the ways of doing that as portraying the RO as acting separately from the MC. Now, I suppose static fiction can do this without changing PoVs, if it’s written from an omniscient viewpoint, but prevailing styles of parser and choice based IF both tend to favour a concrete ‘doer’ rather than a more abstract style of interaction that might be favourable to that sort of approach. I suppose in both IF and static fiction you could just throw hints about what the RO is doing outside the MC’s PoV, but that could come with its own problems about feeling exposition heavy maybe? I fully admit to not being at all sure here.

I wasn’t suggesting that CoG romance routes worked like that, I was just suggesting what looked like (from my layman’s perspective) a brute force simplification of my (purely speculative) idea beforehand. I don’t find CoG romance particularly memorable—I played A Midsummer Night’s Choice and couldn’t remember anything other than the friend and the knight (I think) being among possible love interests, even though I could remember that the game involves a constable in a bear costume being confused for an actual bear—so I couldn’t tell how CoG romances routes are structured from playing them nor have I read anything re: CoG and romance plot structuring.

When using suggesting “characterisation scenes”, what I meant was more like, given a mystery-romance, if the MC is investigating abroad, use the opportunity to select a scene where the preferred RO(s) investigate back home.

——————————————————

Does focusing on established romance negate any need for mechanics simulating romancing, or does it move from simulating the establishment of a relationship to how the relationship changes?

1 Like

Dissolved: let’s say that the PC initially must navigate thru this established romantic relationship… (not necessarily with EU openess, mind you…)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

1 Like

established romance is still romance and belongs in this discussion. I mentioned Will Not Let Me Go and Eurydice!

1 Like

I have no thoughts at the moment about games where there’s a mechanics of romancing, where you have to make the right moves to ‘acquire’ the love interest; such games tend to make romance feel mechanical, but there is no doubt a lot to say about how to avoid that.

My own forays into romance are my last two games: Turandot and Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates. The first is about the PC and the NPC coming together; the second is set at the very end of a relationship, but it’s still, I suppose, about the PC and the NPC coming together.

The main thing, as I see it, is to have one or two strong central characters, and to set up both an attraction and a tension between them.

Turandot posits, by fiat and totally out of the blue, that the PC falls in love with the NPC. It then has some work to do. First, it has to show us princess Turandot in such a light that this falling-in-love becomes understandable; ideally, the player falls a little bit in love with Turandot too. Second, it has to set up barriers to be overcome. There is a genre of romance where the barriers are external (Romeo and Juliet, princess locked up in a tower), but I’ve only been interested in cases were the barriers are internal. With Turandot, well, you know… she wants to kill you. But why? And does she really? And what do you feel about her past deeds? And, for that matter, about your own? Overcoming the barriers requires empathy and soul-searching; it requires the courage to engage in empathy and soul-searching. As Carl Muckehoupt wrote in his review:

That is the core of romance – or at least, the kind of romance I myself find especially interesting.

Xanthippe is in some ways very different, but the building blocks are not too different. Strong characters that make the attraction believable – in this case the PC might be the stronger one, but the NPC has a lot of background personality and does show himself to be a good match for the PC – and a tension that makes it hard for them to come together. This tension is again purely internal to the characters, and they have to understand each other and themselves to overcome it.

9 Likes

What I’m saying is that many romance novels do perfectly well at making the love interest not seem like an appendage of the MC without being able to show their thoughts or have scenes in which the MC isn’t present. It’s more about how they’re characterized in the scenes in which they are interacting with the PC and the inclusion of details that make it feel like they have a life going on off-screen. And honestly, in works with a blank-slate protagonist and romanceable characters, the romanceable characters usually end up feeling more fleshed-out than the PC. You’re right that the PC being the “doer” can be a bit of an issue, but the failure mode I see commonly is less the RO not feeling like a full character and more that (going back to what I said about blank-slate PC romances being about the RO overcoming internal and external problems) if the RO doesn’t take an active enough hand in solving their own problems, you kind of get a “this character is the problem haver and this other character is the problem solver who comes in to singlehandedly and unilaterally fix the first character’s life” dynamic that tends to scan as unrealistic, uncomfortable or even creepy to the audience.

I did misinterpret your second paragraph as being about games that currently exist rather than spitballing about how you could do dual POV when there are multiple romance options, and I’m sorry about that; my revised response to that is that, again, I don’t think dual POV or omniscience are necessary to flesh out an RO so I don’t think this is a problem that needs solving, unless it’s something you’re interested in for its own sake.

5 Likes

I had a lot of conversations with people before I wrote my first game for Heart’s Choice, and some really interesting stuff came out of that - will just touch on the one bit of feedback that I found the most enlightening!

Something that kept coming up was people feeling very uncomfortable when, in games with multiple ROs, there was text where player character expressed overt attraction towards characters that the player had never shown any interest in - this was particularly keenly felt in cases where, for example, the player was a lesbian/playing a lesbian character but her PC would talk lustily about male NPCs, which caused discomfort for obvious reasons.

This led to me developing a way of tracking whether a player had expressed explicit interest in the different ROs and if so to what degree, whether romantic/platonic/physical etc., and having that reflected dynamically in the game’s text (the ChoiceScript multireplace function was a GODSEND for this). I think that feature went down very well and it’s something I’d definitely want to incorporate into any future romance games. It also allowed to build in what I hope were satisfying friendship routes for all NPCs without the player accidentally ending up romantically entangled with someone they didn’t want to be entangled with!

11 Likes

The best romance in IF I’ve encountered is the relationship between Lady Thalia and Melpomene. It’s a side-story to the heist-plot, but it sparkles and shines. @EJoyce and @Encorm created two amazing characters, and the romantic magic between those characters feels like it just flows naturally from putting them in the same room and letting their personalities bounce off each other.

IFDB: Lady Thalia Series

8 Likes

Aww, you’re too kind! I’m blushing!

Some other games that we like and may have influenced some of the writing choices are Choice of Broadsides, Analogue: a Hate Story, Birdland, and Jigsaw. Anyone who liked Lady Thalia and either wants more or wants to broaden their IF romance horizons should check them out!

5 Likes

I was going to post this same thing. I’m not a huge fan of stories that are just romances, but I’m a fan of romance as a narrative device to provide tension in a story. I’m not sure I agree that the romance is a side-story to the heist; it’s so integral to making the heists interesting that I think the two things (romance and heist) are inextricably interlinked, and that’s what makes the Thalia games so great.

7 Likes

If experience has taught me anything, whatever runs counter to my intuition and natural advice. Might be worthwhile to find someone without a romantic bone in their body and make sure your work safely also fails to vibe with them, lol.

ETA: On second thought, that was probably too trite. I can appreciate a good romance, I just don’t think I could replicate one in fictional format or advise someone else in the attempt.

4 Likes

I don’t know that I have anything to add personally, but a couple other talks that haven’t been mentioned yet:

Rebecca Slitt is an editor at Choice of Games and Heart’s Choice, she gave a 2022 NarraScope talk outlining the way they think about romance games at Heart’s Choice: Choosing Your Happily Ever After: Choice and Agency in Romance IF.

Michelle Clough talks a lot about sex in games, I think her most recent talk is Kindness Coins, or Chemistry Casino: A New Take on Romantic-Sexual Narrative Design (she mentions a bunch of other talks and things that you could probably chase down, including her book Passion and Play: A Guide to Designing Sexual Content in Games.

I thought there was another talk that was more similar to Amanda Gardner’s NarraScope 2023 talk linked in the original post, because I remember seeing the title on the schedule and thinking that I had recently noticed a talk somewhere else on a similar subject, but I haven’t found it…


This has gotten me thinking that I like romance in static fiction but have never been able to get into the usual dating-sim kind of games. And I think in the one I can be rooting for these two characters to work things out whereas in the other I’m looking at all the ROs and going “eh.” So I’m probably never going to be into the blank-slate protagonist who-do-you-want-to-romance? games but i could see liking games with a defined protagonist. Like, y’know, a fair number of the games mentioned in this thread.

Feels like those are at very different points in a possibility space (you’re here to play one side of a romance and you want to pick your favorite partner(s) versus here’s this particular romance that’s going to happen, how (how fast?) are you going to get there). And I wonder what other possibilities there are that we maybe don’t see as often…

6 Likes