Dev Log : Relationship Checks

Ohhhh. This is an actual development log rather than me just rambling on about nonsense.

Let’s talk about your relationships.

No! Not the one with your Mrs or your fella. Leave that to daytime talk shows. I’m on about the relationships in game towards our four main characters.

I’ve deliberately kept away from them in Chapters 1 and 2 as I balance my ideas out and play around with the relationship modifier system – getting it fixed in my head about what decisions should impact the relationships and by how much. It’s an on-going thing and I may even go back and tweak a few relationship mods in Chapters 1 and 2 before Chapter 3 comes into play.

But now – in Chapter 3 – they start to come to the fore. Not major. Again, this is an on-going thing so I don’t want to charge straight in and have everything in the VN depend on relationship scores .. but, I’m just starting to write the code to work out what happens when you ask a girl for a Blowey : Will she oblige and drop to her knees or will she slap you across the face and call the cops?

And I have to do it in this chapter as there’s definitely two scenes early on where the relationship matters .. Without spoilers – one when Jack tries to reconnect with an .. erratic .. work colleague and one with another girl come the end of a full-on chat up scene : does she buy Jacks Bullshit and drops her panties or does she see right through it?

Math

Urrgh. As it IS a proper dev log – I’ll give you a little peak behind the scenes. I’ll have to give a little bit of math so you know what’s going on.

Sigmoid Function. No. It’s nothing to do with how your bowels work.

A sigmoid function smoothly turns a number into a value between 0 and 1, making small numbers stay close to 0, big numbers close to 1, and everything in between curve gently in an “S” shape.

It’s often used when you want to gradually increase something (like success chance) — starting slow, ramping up quickly in the middle, then levelling off again at the top. Think of it like a dimmer switch for probability.

What this means is, for any relationship score, we can plug it into the function – generate a number between 0 and 1 (to give us a percentage figure) that mitigates wild crazy results when doing a relationship check.

So for instance, if somebody has a 90 relationship score – doing a simple d100 roll against this needing to roll equal or under - will always leave us open to a 1 in 10 chance that your besotted wife won’t give you a hand job on Valentines day and will instead stab you in the head. In the VN – you want this to be pretty much guaranteed (hope my Mrs is reading this)

Likewise, if a girl in the VN hates your very being and wouldn’t bang you if you were the last guy on Earth because she has a 10 relationship score towards you .. there’s still a 1 in 10 chance on a d100 roll that she’ll screw you if you ask nicely.

Trust me. That doesn’t happen in real life. I’ve tried.

The sigmoid function looks to change this so as to “almost” guarantee those things that should happen and practically rules out those things that never will.

If you look at the graph below – a 50 relationship (along the bottom) gives a 50/50 chance if you see where 50 intercepts the graph. But a 60 relationship will be pushing close to 75% chance of success .. and a 80 relationship will be close to a 96% chance.

Going the other way – a 10 relationship score will give just over a 1% chance of success (I can relate - seems like the odds every time I chat a girl up)

In the function above, there is a scaling component to the sigmoid – to stretch and compact these even further and it’s that that I’m currently playing around with. At what level do I want a highish relationship score to be practically nailed on for happening and what score do I want a not a snowballs chance in hell of something happening?

So now, when a character in the VN is now faced with a choice – their relationship score towards the character doing the asking will enter the function, a percentage chance will be calculated and they’ll either assume the position or not after a little random roll chicanery.

I’m toying with adding a modifier to this also depending on what’s being asked. Trying to convince your 100% straight girlfriend to bury her face in another girls muff might come with a little downward modifier or two no matter how much she’s into you ( ... again ... )

So there we have it.

A real dev log for a change.

Remember: Ironman rules .. ;)