It would make no sense to be singleplayer, why would someone want to be “friends” with a bot.
We’ve switched to a friendship sim not a dating sim
That is fine i guess then, just don’t make references to your original idea
Because it won’t turn their back on them, it’ll take them through journeys that players can’t normally get. A controlled and simulated experience of friendship that can’t go wrong for them. It’s safe, reliable, and evokes emotions without them having to worry about them leaving or not wanting to be friends anymore. Plus they are there whenever they want. You could say that games are a player’s best friend. They give them happiness and exciting new adventures, as well as being reliable to be there when they want to play.
It’s definitely not something for everyone, because there are people who make friends and have friends and don’t need these kinds of experiences. However, there are a lot of people who don’t have friends and are in situations or environments where friendships aren’t easy to come by.
Wouldn’t that feel very fake?
Remember that ux is a part of game design, if you just make it all in the developer’s favor it is unfair to players however if you make it all in the player’s favor the game will be too predictable and it will get boring.
There are twists and turns in adventures that people can’t predict. Let’s say your friend nearly falls off a cliff and you save them or vice versa depending on your choices. Or, what if you let them go.(And then something else happens and they survive etc, but your friendship with them would be in shambles and that path would close off a lot) There will be all sorts of options, paths and choices that change the game in it’s entirety for what you can do. Obviously I’m not going to sit here and explain all the games choices, ideas, and game design. I just needed to know if this genre of game was allowed on the platform. Which the dating sim is a no-go for sure, but a friendship version should be perfectly fine.
But they would only be friends in that game, so if the player wants to play an actual game with a friend they would be out of luck.
A friendship simulator would probably be fine however, I dont find it very useful since roblox already got the friend system where you can friend people. And it could make people feel worse since they would require to play a game with bots to have friends (Just a mindset, its not really like they wouldnt get friends but, they can still think that from playing it).
Roblox at all is an pretty much friendship simulator.
Probably not. I suggest you go with single player story, players choose how they want the story to happen, etc. (Just like Life of an Otaku)
Friendships are fine. I might play it because I have no friends.
This is against the TOS. Any way of this is still against the rules. I’d not take the risk because you can get terminated because this is a severe rule.
Wait, are you talking about visual novel-esque gameplay? I feel like there’s a bit of context to your idea that we aren’t getting here.
I would be confused too if it were a single-player game with NPCs as characters.
Well the point is it’s a game for people who don’t have a lot of friends or have trouble making friends. Or just want a controlled friendship experience. If they want to play a game with a real life friend they just wouldn’t play this game.
I’m not sure a friendship sim is the right way to go. The problem with a friendship sim is that you’ll never need to choose just one “friend”. I think a key part of dating sims is the final selection between multiple desirable options.
Unlike real life dating, a dating sim isn’t building a relationship - this is not a real person, this is a pre-written NPC. The point of it is to evoke desire, and fulfill a fantasy of being in a fortunate situation where you have desirable options. You don’t actually need people to do this - there’s a reason dating sims often have attractive potential dates. It’s because it’s not selling the relationship, it’s about the aesthetic.
So what do you do instead of people? Well, one option is you can literally swap it out with material objects. Imagine a simulator where the entire experience revolves around choosing a college, or a car, a house, etc. The player gets the opportunity to immerse themselves in a world where they are wealthy (as opposed to attractive / popular) enough to afford various desirable options (houses/cars/etc instead of dates).
Bonus points if you lean into the silliness of it a bit, such as what the KFC dating sim did. Like what if for each option you still gave it a personality? Like actually allow the player to talk with it. For instance say you’re buying a car. You could personify the sports car as an athletic achievement focused overachiever. You could have luxury car be this elitist snob with a sensitive side. The pick-up truck could be a down to earth rugged independent type.
Point is, you can definitely get the same fun core game design as a dating sim on Roblox, just don’t actually encourage dating.
If they’re already in a situation where they don’t have friends, this is a great output for those people to experience feelings that have either been absent or they just haven’t been able to have in awhile. It’s the same thing as watching your favorite youtuber and feeling like best buddies after watching their content for so long.
You’d have multiple options. It wouldn’t be like a single path, you’d be able to go on different paths at the same time whenever you want.
Like let’s say you were trying to raise your friendship with one npc, you’d be able to go raise your friendships with other npcs at any time. Just like a regular dating sim. The only difference is this is for Friendships only, but friendships can have just as powerful of an effect as dating.
That’s perfectly fine, you could do things like go on test drives with the car as “relationship” improving experiences, only being able to make the decision after driving all of them.
But the actual implementation isn’t super important, I just think it’s important to appreciate the player motivation when designing it - that’s why I don’t think the friends idea will work. In my opinion the core of dating sims’ game experiences is to provide escapist fantasy orbiting around the idea of choosing between multiple desirable choices.