The Game

Saccharine Love is an old-school dating sim with roguelike elements, that aims to put the dating and sim back into "dating sim". Based off of old Newgrounds and Tokimeki Memorial-style dating sims, there's no story on rails for you to coast on. You'll have to actually court the girls and impress them, as if your life depended on it.

After aggravating an ancient deity with your non-stop complaining about how much you want a "yandere girlfriend", she descends from the heavens to grant you your wish, several times over. As if it's been granted by a monkey paw, you're going to die over and over providing months of entertainment for the goddess you annoyed.

You will be granted seven girls who will force themselves into your life as both your romantic partner, and biggest danger to your well-being. You have 30 days to either chase away or eliminate all but one of the girls (peacefully or not), otherwise they'll all discover each other and it'll result in a bloodbath. With you right in the middle.

All hope is not lost, however. Using stolen government mind-reading technology, you'll be able to detect the girls emotions and hopefully steer them towards a much healthier (for you) state of mind.

Each of the girls have two stats you have to maintain: their affection for you, and their sanity. To maintain their sanity, you'll have to spend time with them on dates. You can impact their affection for you this way too; both in a good way or a bad way if you want to deal with them as a pacifist.

The World

You'll be dropped in the center of Sulphur City, which you'll be confined to for the next month. Fret not, as there's lots of things to do and places to take your dates to. Maybe you'll pick a safe option like the Café to get a drink and something to eat, the Mall where you can get your bank account drained, or something more daring like the Nightclub or Stadium. You'll have to figure out which girls like which locations the most.

The world itself is very different from the one you came from. The year is 2029, and while technological progress has steadily remained the same, the world is culturally 20 years behind. George Bush is the president of the US, and everyone is still foaming at the mouth over boybands. Something isn't right here, but frankly it's your least pressing concern.

All of the locations are living, and change every time you visit. The mall has a sale going on every weekend, and the nightclub turns into an 80s style disco on Wednesday nights. Each of the girls will react differently to the location depending on the current event, so you'll have to be strategic and plan your dates in advance.

Development Goals

The game will be made in FNA / MonoGame. There are certain things we really want to achieve with the finished game:

4K graphics

Something I've noticed is that a lot of visual novels struggle to have higher quality graphics, either because of engine limitations or just mismanagement of assets. I've already done a lot of coding in the engine to make sure that it looks really nice and sharp at any resolution.

Suitability for low-end hardware

This is a strange one for the genre but a lot of dating sims I've seen tend to be built in massive engines like Unity (or even Unreal!) that completely chug on low-end and even sometimes on mid-tier gear. I'm spending most of my time developing this on a potato laptop, so it'll definitely work on computers of any size and capability. (Perhaps even mobile)

Modding support

Considering my backstory this is a massive one for me. In another similar game, I made a mod that allowed the game to load custom girls to date. It was by far the most popular mod for the game; there was a shitload of custom characters people made, which I was completely surprised about since it was mainly a tool for me to shitpost with. I want to recreate that here; I want to add functionality to load custom created characters, and integrate something like BepInEx to fill the gaps for any more advanced modding.

Source code

When the game is finished, I want to release the source code. Frankly it's borderline useless collecting dust on my harddrive, and I'd be much happier to have other people learn from it (and the suffering I endured), and even have it help with modding. I'll have to figure out what license I'll release it under and similar details, but it's something I want to do.

Translations

I'd love to have this game translated into other languages, both by providing them myself and giving the community the tools to do so as they wish.