My Lovely Wife Devlog #2: The Peculiar Marriage of Resource Management and Visual Novel
Back again with me, Lasheli, in a new devlog of My Lovely Wife! Previously, we’ve talked about My Lovely Wife’s development journey. Today, I’d like to invite the game designer, Dodick Sudirman, to show us more about the “inside” of the game!
Having the experience of being My Lovely Daughter’s game designer, there are surely many lessons learned. It did not take long for Dodick and the team to apply that knowledge into the making of the new title: My Lovely Wife. Taking only months after the release of My Lovely Daughter in March 2018, the first prototype of My Lovely Wife was already in process.
Let’s hear the idea behind the design of My Lovely Wife in this interview with Dodick!
1. What vision did you and the team have for My Lovely Wife when you first designed the prototype of the game?
We want the game to have a better affection system compared with our previous game, My Lovely Daughter, by incorporating strong emotional aspects to the story. For this to happen, we decided to add a visual novel element to the game. That way, players can establish an intimate relationship with the fantasy creatures in the game.
Not only that, but we also plan to make quality improvements in the game’s resource management system. We realize that the gameplay of My Lovely Daughter is kind of repetitive — and we thank our players for mentioning that. That’s why we did some research by studying similar games. All to create unique resource management for My Lovely Wife.
2. What kind of “uniqueness” do you want to present to the players? And what kind of challenges do you face when doing it?
What makes My Lovely Wife unique is how emotions become the core experience of the game — instead of the gameplay. All decisions that affect the gameplay or the story would be based on whether or not it will enhance the players’ emotional experience.
The challenging part is how we have to constantly experiment on getting the right composition for the game since we’re mixing several gameplay elements (resource management, visual novel, alchemy simulator). There weren’t many references that we can follow, too. Some of the games that we studied were This is The Police for its UI and resource management interface and The Shrouded Isle for how they implement emotional experience in the game.
3. Are there any gameplay ideas that got scrapped during the development?
There are some ideas that we had in mind to revolutionize the gameplay of My Lovely Daughter, for the improvement of its sequel, My Lovely Wife. One of them is to make the game more “real-time” by letting the players freely decide what they want to do for a day, thus preventing them from getting stuck only in the resource management system. The other idea is to implement a “procedural” element, where players get to decide the schedule for the day, at the beginning of the day, just like in Princess Maker. However, those ideas got scrapped because they didn’t work well in terms of My Lovely Wife’s game flow.
4. We’ve heard of what didn’t work for the game, but is there any spontaneous idea that actually got implemented into the game?
The answer is: not really. Mostly, My Lovely Wife’s game design is adapted from the existing game elements. For example, the trait system is inspired by Darkest Dungeon. We also have a chat history system that is commonly found in visual novels.
However, I have to name one spontaneous idea, it might be adding succubus’ responses to not only dialogues but also towards events in the town. The purpose of having that feature in the game is to add sentimental value for the players.
5. With the game nearing its completion, what are the lessons that you get during the development? Is there anything that you want to improve?
I still think that there is a lot more potential that we can do with our affection system (deep dialogue with the succubi). Not only to improve its integration with the resource management game but also to improve player interaction with their lovely creature. We are still researching alternative approaches as we speak because I believe that there are various interesting ways of combining both features. Hopefully, we can continuously increase the quality of our future My Lovely games.
So, we can say that even though there are many ideas coming up during development, ultimately, the developers have to decide which works best for their game. And it’s the challenge that My Lovely Wife’s team has to face as well. We hope that you’ll enjoy the game when it’s released next year!
My Lovely Wife is planned to be released in early 2022 on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Xbox.
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Thank you for reading, and see you on the next devlog!
