Any Idea For A Soap Opera Computer Game?

Ok. So, what does the player control? What challenges do they face? What do you reward them with? What vantage is the game from?

Are you going to have a series of scripted choices or an engine capable of generating these situations?

Just something to think about.

I had an idea for a similar kind of thing, aimed at the female market. I called it and IDA, or Interactive Dramatic Adventure. My main idea was based upon the story of a french clown girl, who after living in the circus from a child to a young woman, goes on a journey home to find her real parents. I found designing the game to be a friggin boat load of work, as there had to be several alternativs to every situation. It started to read like a choose your own adventure book halfway through, and I bever got around to finishing it other than the main story path. But I think that this kind of game could really do well in todays market. People are hungry for unconventional games, and this kind of IDA might be it.

I think that the major problem with this concept is that if you don''t give the player enough options, it''s only as good as an "interactive movie" from the early CD-ROM days, which died out by dint of not quite being a movie but also not quite being a game, and ultimately being frustrating in most cases. But if you try to give them lots of options at every moment(for no reason at all, for example, your character takes a kitchen knife and kills his/her lover, gets sent to jail, has the option to escape...) it''s an exercise in frustration to construct a complete script for.

So the only way you could make a satisfying game from an interactive soap opera is to simulate everything. But we can''t do that in a totally satisfying way yet. And so on....

Making the world furry one post at a time

it sounds like a super advancement on the dating sim idea. Of course, handling the script for this game would be hell itself

Yeah, Japan has an extensive list of "Dating Sims" which does basically what you''re describing here, just, not at complex in the story department. At any rate, it sounds like a marketable idea, though, I''d never buy it. By the way, Betty La Fea, would you say thats "Ugly Betty" or "Betty Ugly"? I only ask because the second is almost "Butt Ugly." Eh, forget it.

Anyways, since the term Soap Opera has already been coined, and we can''t get any decent common ground with the difference between console and computer rpgs (crpg vs crpg), how about we use SoapRPGs from now on to refer to rpgs that are driven by a (semi) linear narrative story?

-> Will Bubel
-> Machine wash cold, tumble dry.

Please... do we really want that sort of crap here as well? Isn''t it enough that sort of degenerate stuff is 24/7 on televsision? Is there no peace!

Doubt it''d work. Scripting would be hell, as would any decent engine. And how exactly would the graphics work? 2D, 3D, or everyone''s nemesis, FMV?

Yeah, I''ve thought about doing something like this also. My idea wasn''t to have it be an interactive movie or be heavily scripted, but to use some emergent stuff and social based gameplay. It would basically be a very large expansion on the dating sim theme, probably with a lot of topics that didn''t have to do with romance. Basically it would be an RPG style game where the gameplay would center around a repuation\relationship system instead of a combat system.

Interesting, Impossible, no details?

In the past, I proposed an that a game could be based on acting principles, with a die-roll for successful acting based on player stats. The trick would be acting out the right emotion, say, for the particular situation and doing so successfully enough to bluff other players (a treasure hunt scenario would be effective).

I don''t know, I know it hasn''t been done before.

Yeah, implementing an "acting" system as an interface would be interesting. I''m not sure exactly how it would be done (done well that is), but it would definitely be interesting. Some games have conversation system where you choose a tone or an emotional state, but this would have to be a lot of complex if you designed an entire game around it.

What if you used an interface similar to that used in The Sims? That is, you could sit back and watch and things would happen on their own and you could jump in whenever you wanted and direct a character''s actions. It would have to run on a dynamic story generation engine which I''ll admit would be difficult but should definitely be possible (after all I''m guessing that soap operas are fairly formulaic). When the user wanted to affect the sim-soap, a context-sensitive menu would pop up with a list of applicable actions given the situation. For example let''s say that Sam is arguing with Marsha about Marsha''s affair with the milkman. If the user clicks on Sam the following menu might pop up:

- Insult
- Accuse
- Appease
- Apologize
- Change the subject
- Walk away
- Shout

Each of these menus might then bring up a sub-menu, etc. Since everything is dynamically generated and formulaic (and thus bounded) you would not have to hard-code these menu choices.

It should be workable, if not easy.