June 2026: Should you kiss your best friend?

Hello, idle DevLog reader.

If you missed this year’s Run for the Border, fret not. Here is a little snippet of the event - my speech ‘Should you kiss your best friend? - The agony and the ecstasy of making a 10-dimensional relationship system for a romance-mystery visual novel’ (with pictures).

If you’d like to see other speakers’ presentations - the lineup and contacts are all listed here.

With that being said...

I am Irina of Sharp Glass Games, a video game company less than one year old.

At this stage, I can't teach anyone how to game dev.

But I can invite you to ponder an all-important question:

Should you kiss your best friend?

This question popped up when I was working on concepts for my first game, Deathwish Bloom, a post-apocalyptic romance adventure visual novel.

I sent the ‘best friend’ character design to my team and asked what they think.

On the left: male best friend, Gabriel.

They said… ‘Can we kiss him?’

As an artist, I was pleased. As a game designer, I was worried.

'Best friend' was not designed as a romanceable character. But... should they be?

To my mind, a question about kissing a character should never pop up easily.

And there are so many games where it just... does.

Imagine you start an action, an adventure, or a puzzle game… Out of nowhere, you get this screen:

You can press Y to ‘win’, but would it feel satisfying?

Where is the elation of a good guess, the despair brought on by a wrong move? There is no finesse to this dance.

In a romance game, a kiss is a win.

And when - and if! - you can make a choice to kiss, it should feel a little scary. A little dangerous, a little unpredictable.

And thus I started thinking - what makes for an exciting romance at all? How can I make this choice hard to make? ...and came up with…

3 pillars of romance

Unpredictability

The usual dating sim has ‘character routes’. You choose a character you want to date and that’s pretty much it - you are guaranteed a romance with them (even if there is a tragic ending option thrown in for variety). In Deathwish Bloom there will be no clear-cut ‘routes’. You can pursue a full-on romance with one character, try to date a few characters at a time (causing mayhem - some characters don’t like sharing!) or switch whom you date mid-game (possibly causing a heartbreak or ...not). A multi-variable relationship system that tracks your interactions will determine the flavour of the bonds, whether you chose to weave or snap them.

Mystery

No visible stats. Neither ‘they liked your answer! + 1’ nor ‘they didn’t like that! - 2’. You just make your choices and live with whatever people thought you meant, while the hidden relationship system does its job without breaking immersion by popping up numbers. You will still get your dopamine hit when you spot characters changing expressions, get a rare Steam Achievement or get a scene your friends never got (and had to go on Reddit for a walkthrough).

Irreversibility

A roll-back is a standard visual novel feature. The philosophy of Deathwish Bloom is that the story can only be fully experienced if the player lives through the consequences of their choices. Therefore, no rollback. All choices are irreversible.

With these 3 pillars implemented, we get a game where the choice to kiss feels a bit more risky.

Yeah, but, should you or should you not?..

The answer consists of two parts: your best friend’s reaction and your MC’s reaction.

Female best friend here for gender equality! This is Alice.

Your best friend’s reaction depends on their current perception of you. Each choice you made while interacting with them secretly affected their view of you, which brings you to 3 states:

You match their ‘easy to love’ blueprint…

…or they like you, but there are points of friction. Some characters call you right out on those, and some suffer quietly, but there are aways hints.

If your behaviour is way outside of your friend’s liking, they will still keep you around... be it out of sense of duty or because they see you as an entertaining red flag. But they won’t see a romantic relationship with you as a good idea.

You can expect your friend to be very into the kiss, into it with an array of reservations, or push you away.

Your (your MC’s) reaction depends on two tracked states:

- your attraction to your friend. Throughout the game, I will check whether you are into them ‘that way’. Maybe you are but you’re suppressing it to keep the friendship. Maybe you never thought of them that way at all. In which case, your MC will be as surprised by your choice to go for a kiss as all of us are (she can rationalise and back the choice by some medical data, her being a scientist’n’all).

- your habitual emotion. You’d think I’m just checking on you by asking how your MC feels about a place or a situation. But I am collecting data (like Google), to see what your MC’s most common emotion is. The aftertaste of the kiss will feel like whatever you habituated your MC to.

Meet our MC (Main Character) Sky (bottom left corner) who has to go through whatever the writer throws her way...

Writing this part of the game could be absolute agony: at first glance, the possibilities are endless. But as we’ve just seen, the outcome of the kiss scene is modular. Plus, there are only so many best friends to kiss (one). And, most importantly, this is my best shot to make players happy by giving them a peak romance moment which is both logical yet reasonably unpredictable. ‘Should you kiss your best friend?’ is no longer a Y/N question. ‘Are you easy to love?’, ‘are you attracted to them?’ and ‘how will you feel after?’ make it a multi-faceted choice, connected to all that came before and what will come after.

This is all I have for you today. If I made you even a little bit more scared of pressing that 'Yes' button compared to when you started reading this speech, my job here is done!

Have a great July, everyone 🫶🏻🌸🐁