The legacy of Princess Maker 2

 As someone who helped write a game about parenting, I have opinions about parenting games. It's difficult to combine fiddly statistics with a narrative that gives a good simulation of both the day-to-day parenting decisions and an occasional event that feels like a pivotal moment, like how much dessert to give your child vs, deciding if you're going to force your child to take piano lessons. I'm on a quest to find and review all the parenting games that I can! I want to find the best parenting games and learn from their game design.

The first parenting game I ever played was Princess Maker 2 (1996). It's set in a medieval fantasy world where you become guardian of an 11-year-old orphan. You decide her schedule, where you can pay for her to attend expensive classes or she can make money by working. She can learn etiquette so she can properly greet the king's concubine, or she can work on a farm improving her stamina and earning money. She can study art and enter the yearly art contest, or hone her spiritual sensitivity while work in the graveyard. She can go to church and be pious, or work in a sleazy bar! Your daughter can also go out adventuring and either talk to or beat monsters she encounters in four different areas. I remember trying out lots of different ways of raising my child. Essentially, this game is a stat-cruncher and it's hard to feel connected to your daughter in the game. She seems more like a collection of numbers than a real person. Your choices for her schedule definitely affect her ending occupation and role in society, and there are many, many different endings. I would say that it's a classic that introduced parenting as a worthy game narrative to a western audience. The sequels were only recently localized and made available in the United States, although fans agree that Princess Maker 2 is the best of the series. You can play the original localization that wasn't sold in the US, or you can buy the remake on Steam.

Ciel Fledge: A Daughter Raising Simulator is a direct descendent of the Princess Maker games, but there is a science-fiction setting and more things to fiddle with. You decide what classes your daughter should take and they raise various stats that she needs, and I think they affect the endings. Your daughter can make a lot of friends, and there is a mood system where your daughter will get depressed if she's too stressed out. Unfortunately, I didn't really like this game. Learning about how to battle felt like reading a textbook, and the writing was not compelling. If you've played a lot of Princess Maker 2 and want to see a different take on the stat-raising simulation, you might want to try it. It's on Steam. 

If you prefer an interactive narrative, The Parenting Simulator is a text-based game that allows you to make a few key decisions for each year of your child's life. Instead of just saying you're a permissive parent, like in Ciel, you have to actually role-play being permissive, which in the above scenario would entail letting your child have as much screen time as they want! The writing in this game is good, and if I have any complaints, it's that their pandemic year event was a bit TOO lifelike and brought me out of my games-as-escape reverie. At the same time, I had a hard time believing that letting my child stay up all night at her sleepover made her that unpopular. There are still stats in the background, although some reviewers complained that it's difficult to get different endings. As a game designer, I wonder if it's because you have the option of playing an abbreviated version of the game with only a few random events per year vs. playing every event each playthrough--having fewer events would be less opportunity to affect end-determining stats.

Of course, I'm not going to end a post about parenting without mentioning my own game that I made with my sister and sister-in-law, Space to Grow. Like The Parenting Simulator, we tried to focus on a few key parenting events each year. You also choose how much your daughter should help you with your farm. Your daughter has a definite personality! My family was speculating about how much she was based on my nephews and nieces. The game is set on a foreign planet, and you make decisions that affect your community as well as your family. I think we reached a good balance of realism vs. cool science fiction stuff. Let me know how you like the game if you decide to play it! It's available on Steam, itch.io, and Google Play.

I love parenting games! I'm hoping to make another post that includes Growing Up, Cute Bite, and My Child Lebensborn. 

Princess Maker 2 screenshot by Donald Love 87 on GameFAQs

Our Personal Space is live!

I'm happy to announce that Our Personal Space is now live! Download it here for Windows, Mac, Linux, or Android. We're giving it away for free!

My sister Andrea and I started on this game when we realized we wanted to see more games that explored a married relationship, and my sister-in-law Clarissa did all the character art. I had been playing around with Ren'Py a little, and it was a great way to get something working right away. 

I'm always hesitant to experiment with coding. It's one difference I've noticed between me and experienced coders like my sister and my husband--I'm always worried I'll mess stuff up, but they're quick to experiment and see how everything works. My "coding" was limited to things like changing variables and "if-then"-type clauses. But I did feel pretty cool when something I wrote worked!

Our Personal Space is like a dating sim in that you have a romantic relationship with a fictional character. But you're married, so it's more about the little choices you make from day-to-day than the excitement of "will we kiss?" at the end of a date. Like in real long-term-relationship, you have other things you're worried about too, like how stressed you are and, in this case, if your colony on another planet will survive. When I look back on the games with dating elements I've enjoyed, many of them have other elements to worry about. Since Persona 4 is part time-management game, when you choose to spend time with someone, it feels more like you're indicating you like them somehow (although if you're playing strategically, wanting to level up a relationship has other motivations). Each month in Our Personal Space you can choose to spend time alone, which decreases your stress more, or spend time with your husband, which increases your relationship (but doesn't decrease stress as much). 

One part of Our Personal Space that we might have gone a little overboard on is on choices. The above screenshot is from a New Game+, and the options in italics are only available if you have a certain skill at a certain level. So, on a first playthrough, you might only see one of these options in italics. We wanted to make the game fun to replay, not just to get different endings, but also to see what other options are available (like if you choose to have a baby or not). It's kind of a slow build-up, but I think it's pretty fun! Please try it out, and if you do, I'd love to hear what you thought of the experience--good and bad! There's some discussion going on over on the Lemmasoft forum. Here's the trailer:

Note: Content-wise, I think this game would have a T rating. There are some parts where it's heavily implied that you and your husband are having sex, but it's not explicit. If you were reading it I'd call it a "clean" romance. So feel free to let your teenager play!

Tiny Wings Clones

My husband has an iphone; I have an Android phone. My phone can run Google's Navigate app, which could take the place of a GPS if it didn't take so much battery life, but he gets the shiny games. Most games get an Android port, like Angry Birds or GameDevStory. But Tiny Wings is still only for iphone.



I've looked at four imitators, and while they do recreate that wonderful tension-and-release feeling of setting to flight a weighty object, they just aren't Tiny Wings. I'll do a quick rundown of my initial reactions.

Dillo Hills made me install Adobe Air, and has a lot of visual distractions (birds, sunset background, and textured hills). I have no idea why the armadillo makes dog noises, but I'm interested in the gliding mechanic they've added.

Moon Chaser is pretty well-made, but it makes this annoying sound whenever you crash--something that is bound to happen. After a crash, it feels bulkier, maybe since you're a ninja walking up a hill instead of gliding. It's free though, so you don't have much to lose by trying it. Here's a video showing some of the play:



Tiny Bee looked promising, but it uses Feint for objectives, which slows startup down. Stupid objectives. It gets the flying-thrill thing right, except for when it has to slow down for some reason mid-game (maybe it's because I recently updated my Android OS?). Any slowing down during play basically ruins the experience.

Dragon, Fly has an excellent tutorial, and manages the thrilling thing, but has very minimal graphics. Still, it's  probably my favorite of the three, as it doesn't have the weird bells-and-whistles of Tiny Bee and Dillo Hills, yet gives the thrilling flying sensation that Moon Chaser doesn't do as well.

Finally, none of the imitators had anywhere near as good of music as the original Tiny Wings. For a game about flying, I think it's essential to have music that feels like flying.

In other news, I can now call myself a published journalist with this article about gaming trends. Other trends I think might be in the gaming future: ways to find cooler mobile games.