Another bug, if you go to the strip club with Rebecca then have sex with Ariane in the hot tub you can’t stay the night because Rebecca is in the bedroom. I had always felt bad about ditching her at the strip club anyway, but I think I would have noticed if we had brought her home with us.
The easy fix is one new line of code, but I realized he has a point about the post strip club party, and thought of a fun new scenario to add. I then found myself in a common problem with this project which I call the “theme vs format” conflict.
A running theme in Dating Ariane simulator is that Ariane is a modern feminist who is not delicate or submissive. She does only what she wants to do. If it gives her pleasure, she will do it. If it gives others pleasure, she may do it if she is assured a mutual exchange. …or really drunk.
The format of the game is (mostly) still images in a first person perspective. It is supposed to play like a comic book, where you decide what happens next. The advantage is that I do not have to usually show the player doing stuff, only Ariane’s reaction to the player doing stuff.
The conflict between the two is that it is difficult to portray a worthy mutual exchange of activities when we only see one point of view. Like for example, how do I portray the player doing a striptease show without showing the actual player? A series of reactions “stills” is kind of boring. Then I came up with an idea that if the player is in motion, then his first person point of view will be in motion as well, so
Its a silly enough idea, it just might work, and I know it is possible because I have seen similar moving image effects on other HTML/javascript websites. Its just a matter of figuring out how to do it.
While researching the problem, I ran into the old “every browser is different” problem, before eventually finding some code that smoothly moved an image linearly on all modern browsers. That’s the good news. The bad news is I did not want to move images linearly, I wanted wavy motion and circular motion. The linear motion code is all done with loops, one loop to move the picture to the left, then another to move the picture to the right. Since circular motion is a constantly changing direction, that complicates things greatly.
Then it hit me, what math functions go round and round and up and down? Trig functions! (yes, there are opportunities to use Trigonometry after college) I can rewrite the code to move in trig functions with ever increasing angles. Start with angle a=0, x = sin a, y = cos a, then increase the value of a and recalculate. (x, y) will form a perfect circle. You do not even need to check for an end of the loop, the value will just go round and round until you change the page. Scaling the direction will create ovals instead of circles, and adding an absolute value y = |cos a| will make a U shape pattern.
Anyways, I wrote a new scenario using these tricks, and because it is only a small update, I am releasing version 6.45.
So I created a cool new scenario, what else can I do to finish out? I have been thinking that the Comic Sans font I have been using, while fitting for the comic book theme, was getting old. The best way around it is to convert the whole thing to external CSS, so with one line of code I can change the text font of the whole site to whatever I want. This could be a fun new feature to play with.
Except I am running into another “every browser is different” problem. For some reason Firefox does not register ongoing “onMouseover” events in one frame while handling an external CSS file in another frame.
Let me show you what I mean. Go to the online version of the date simulator here, then click on “Introduce yourself” and “Give her a hug”. What you should see in the space below the picture is the words “You let go” written in navy blue in an Arial font. If you are using Internet Explorer, that is exactly what you will see. If you are in Safari, Opera or Chrome, you will see the text as soon as you move your mouse a tiny bit, which is wrong, but I can live with that. In Firefox, you will only see the text if you move your mouse out of the picture (triggering an onMousout event) then move it back on the picture. The only difference between this page and all the other pages is that this page uses a link to an
. If I put in CSS code internally into the page, Firefox works fine, but that means changing 500 web pages to change a font, which defeats the whole purpose of doing CSS in the first place.Date Ariane, originally called Ariane’s Date Simulator, was a vanity project I made for my personal website in 2004. At the time I was playing a lot of social 3D virtual world games, where virtual dating was encouraged. I was not a fan of virtual dates, so I created a date simulator. It went viral in 2007, and spawned a lot of imitators.
If you played the online version, you got a lot of “error 503” errors due to high traffic on the web server. This makes playing online not very enjoyable. I made the game available offline so you can download and play it on your own computer, but growing concerns about web security is making the offline HTML version harder to play for many people, especially if you are using anything other than Firefox, and that may change soon as well. I don’t want to rely on browser versions anymore.
This version of Date Ariane runs on Renpy, a well respected open source visual novel engine used by hundreds of games. Besides pictures and text, it can include music, sound effects, as well as special visual effects not possible in HTML. Renpy also allows you to save games, auto forward time, run in windowed or full screen modes and even use a text reader. It creates versions for PC, Mac, Linux, and Android automatically.
The same reason I had to switch from online to stand alone, popularity. The bandwidth cost of hosting a free game made it no longer economically feasible to offer the game for free. More info here.
I have released a Android version, which has been downloaded thousands of times without complaint so I assume it works. There is currently no IOS version in the works as 1. It is very hard to make without a Mac, 2. Apple would not let an erotic game into their app store.
A Visual Novel is a story based video game. They are extremely popular in Japan. Think of it as a cross between a “Choose Your Own Adventure” comic book, and an adventure game with puzzles to solve. While comic books traditionally feature action stories involving super heroes, and computer adventure games traditionally feature mystery stories, visual novels are traditionally romantic stories. Visual novels (like comic books and adventure games) can really be about any genre, though Date Ariane is a romantic comedy in the Bishoujo tradition. More info on my blog or on wikipedia.
The most obvious is that you use menu buttons instead of links. Player text appears after your choice instead as hover text. Initially this may seem like the game is slower, but after a while you will notice there is a better flow to the conversations in the game.
Because Renpy uses Python instead of Javascript, and the Javascript code had become an indecipherable mess over the years, I decided to write all new code from scratch. Differences in game play is inevitable as a result, however where differences exist I focused on making the Renpy version better than the online version. For testing purposes, I made sure the walkthroughs I wrote for the latest online version work on the Renpy version as well. They almost do, but there are differences.
One of the biggest differences is the elimination of “ponytail hair”. This change was way too difficult to make in the online version, but I really wanted to drop the use of ponytail hair to represent hair that could be wet or dry. Instead Ariane’s hair is always wet when in the hot tub or the pool, and remains so until she goes inside to dry off or after a shower. Ariane no longer wears a towel indoors, either. This eliminates two dress states which reduces the picture count a little. Some other rule changes have been made that make some events slightly harder, I’ll point them out in updated walkthroughs.
Other minor changes have been made as well, the
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