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This has been in the works for a while, but it's getting more complex, and I thought starting a Devlog would give me the motivation to keep going. :) 

Best Fiends is a role-playing game that's meant to be more like a soap opera. The focus is not on the events in the game, but on the human drama and interactions between the characters that arise from the events.  The goal is to be the most popular person in the game, based on where you go and what you do, say, and wear.  I want gameplay to be pretty flexible, so you have the option to be really unpopular or to just stand by and watch the drama unfold.  Ideally, someday this game would simulate all human drama, but I'll be happy with just a 2D Harvest Moon clone. :) 

I represent friendships a bit differently from other sims. Each actor has a "conception" of everyone else's relationships. If they see you do a favor to someone, they assume you are friends with him.   They also assume that you are friends, to a smaller extent, with his other friends.  To use an analogy, if you knew one of your friends was in the campus Young Republicans, you would assume that any favor to him was a smaller favor to the Young Republicans, and an even smaller favor to Republicans in general. Conceptions are only updated if an actor actually *sees* an event take place, so you can make all the under-the-table deals you want.

Initially I want to have four game mechanics, in order of implementation:

Gifts - Actors can pick up items, either at meetings or off the ground, and give them to each other.  Offering a gift earns you friendship points with the recipient.  If he accepts the gift, he earns friendship points with you, and if he refuses it, he loses friendship points with you.

Meetings - The game starts off with certain actors assigned to certain meetings.  If you earn enough friendship points with others, you can be invited to their meetings.  The more time you spend at a meeting you're invited to, the more friendship points you earn with the other participants.  The more time you spend at a meeting you're NOT invited to, or out of a meeting you ARE invited to, the more points you lose with the other participants.

Appearance - Actors can wear different outfits.  Showing up to a meeting with the same outfit as the other attendees earns you points.  If you're the most popular person at the meeting, other characters will start wearing your outfit.  Users should be able to design their own outfits with MSPaint. 

Gossip - Actors can talk to each other about recent events.  Human players will choose what to say from a list of preset conversational topics based on recent events. For example, if you're at a meeting with four people, you'll get four gossip items, one for each person, stating that "Actor X was at meeting Y".  The more you interact with people, the more you'll have to talk about.  If you hear gossip, your conceptions are updated the same as if you were at the event.

Some of the books that inspired me:

Cybernetics
http://www.amazon.com/Cybernetics-Second-Control-Communication-Machine/dp/026273009X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317817286&sr=8-1 (http://www.amazon.com/Cybernetics-Second-Control-Communication-Machine/dp/026273009X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317817286&sr=8-1)
Norbert Wiener was critical of "Von Neumann's gamesters", i.e. traditional game theory, because it assumed that people were self-interested actors that always chose the optimal strategy, when, in fact, we see every day that they act against their self-interest for solidarity's sake.

Propaganda
http://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Edward-Bernays/dp/0970312598/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317817308&sr=8-1 (http://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Edward-Bernays/dp/0970312598/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317817308&sr=8-1)
Edward Bernays pioneered the heavy use of propaganda in PR and advertising.  For example, he successfully marketed a new product by paying popular people to wear it at public events, knowing that their admirers would follow suit. 

The Prince (http://The Prince)
http://www.amazon.com/Prince-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486272745/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1317817366&sr=8-4 (http://www.amazon.com/Prince-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486272745/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1317817366&sr=8-4)
Niccolo Machiavelli wrote this to demonstrate how leaders could screw up by following moral codes out of a misguided sense of virtue.  To me, it begged the question: if those moral codes were so bad, why did they have them in the first place?

The Genealogy of Morality
http://www.amazon.com/Genealogy-Morality-Friedrich-Wilhelm-Nietzsche/dp/0872202836/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317817332&sr=8-1 (http://www.amazon.com/Genealogy-Morality-Friedrich-Wilhelm-Nietzsche/dp/0872202836/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317817332&sr=8-1)
Nietzsche takes a more relativistic view of morality, where it's not so much what you do, but who you are and who you do it to, that makes something "right" or "wrong". 

Queen Bees and Wannabes
http://www.amazon.com/Queen-Bees-Wannabes-Boyfriends-Realities/dp/0307454444/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317817407&sr=8-1 (http://www.amazon.com/Queen-Bees-Wannabes-Boyfriends-Realities/dp/0307454444/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317817407&sr=8-1)
This gave me the idea that gossip can be a kind of intellectual capital that can be hoarded and traded just like property.  People with good memories can be "bankers" that keep track of who's on your good side and who's on your bad side.

Natural Selection and Social Theory
http://www.amazon.com/Natural-Selection-Social-Theory-Evolution/dp/0195130626/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317817459&sr=8-1 (http://www.amazon.com/Natural-Selection-Social-Theory-Evolution/dp/0195130626/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317817459&sr=8-1)
Robert Trivers developed the concept of "reciprocal altruism", the idea that societies could evolve (instead of degenerating into a Darwinian dog-eat-dog world)by building up trust through good deeds between members.

Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language
http://www.amazon.com/Grooming-Gossip-Evolution-Language-Dunbar/dp/0571173977/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1317819382&sr=8-3 (http://www.amazon.com/Grooming-Gossip-Evolution-Language-Dunbar/dp/0571173977/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1317819382&sr=8-3)
Dunbar has a theory that human brains evolved to keep track of social networks, and that, for this reason, there's a limit to how big societies can get before collapsing.

do i get to use the sword??

Perhaps if "drama" is the objective of the game, players can generate it via fame or infamy. For instance, you could be the lovely love that everybody loves, or the backstabbing bitch/bastard that everybody boos - maybe even a mischievious character as opposed to outright mean, somebody sneaky and conniving who tends to get their way, but not completely heartless.

Depending on the theme of your "meeting" (say, a personal party as opposed to a business meeting), fashion might be scored at how well you differenciate yourself from the crowd instead, appropriate use of color coordination, and maybe even other factors such as your transportation or house. (Just don't make everything supergirly, okay?)

Finally, you should have a double-layer of character interconnection. There's the way each character outwardly acts towards one another based on external conditions (IE: They work together, they've dated for so long, known each other since they were kids), and a second "underlying feeling" about each of the characters, which affects their decision-making on a more subtle level, providing a real mystery to the player to figure out (including how they feel about you - and there's always at least two characters that dream of getting together with you, and at least two that dreams of killing you in your sleep, but one seducing their way into doing so, and the other a little more... obvious about disliking you).

Just remember, feelings don't have to make sense. Remind the player of that once in awhile, too.

@im9today :
I haven't figured out how to fit in combat, but I really would like to add it at some point!  It would be a high risk/ high reward action where you would gain and lose a lot of friendship points if you were observed.  Those are just placeholder graphics, btw - I'll post some current screenshots at some point.


I plan on having some NPCs whose friendships are preset to a very high or low level when loading the game.  Other NPCs will react based on characters' popularity, so, for example, everyone will suck up to the hot babe and avoid the homeless guy.  But since popularity is an emergent property, it can change based on game events.  So if the homeless guy finds buried treasure or the hot girl commits some awful faux pas, they could potentially switch places.


I thought about having "house rules" for certain events.  Like, no two women can show up with the same dress, or you need a yacht to get into the yacht club.  Since friendships are based on observation, you could also spoof your way into a meeting by, for example, using someone else's yacht.


I haven't yet decide whether to make other characters' conceptions visible to the player.  On one hand, it makes the game less confusing; on the other hand, it removes that level of mystery that you mention.  I've implemented it now for debugging purposes, but I might remove it later.

The previous screenshot was taken quite a while ago - these are some features I've added since then.

• Programmer art for actors, items & fonts.  Might want to replace my ghetto-fabulous font with a better monospaced font if I can find one.
• Items spawn periodically in random locations.  Players can collect these and give them to others to bootstrap their way into the social hierarchy.
• Menu system that lets you see information on other characters.
• Refactored the entity and event system.  Previously I had multiple images for each entity and a complicated system of flags to determine whether an entity was an item or a spawn point.  Now each item that spawns has its own corresponding spawner.  Corn has cornstalks, apples have apple trees, etc.