Love and Deepspace director Lizi Cheng says Infold Games upped the fidelity of its hit Otome game after discovering a big problem with its love interests: “They just weren’t hot enough”.
Cheng is game director at Papergames-owned developer Infold Games, and in front of a buzzing crowd at GDC last week she chronicled how Love and Deepspace was developed over six years to expand the Otome genre and reach a broader audience.
Two years after launch, the game now has over 80m players, said Cheng. Speaking through a translator, she began by saying that the game’s development was far from easy, with many moments of trial and error.
“Just a year before launch, when our company members were sharing our wishes for the new year, the Love and Deepspace team’s wish was simply that everyone makes it through alive,” she said.
Cheng then backed up a little to introduce the idea of Otome games and how the genre had not been treated all that seriously until Infold Games launched sleeper hit Mr Love: Queen’s Choice in 2017. This spurred the company on to create a broader, more ambitious title in the same genre, which became Love and Deepspace.
To appeal to a wider set of players, Infold said it deliberately mixed “unexpected” and “counter-intuitive” gameplay types into the core Otome gameplay, eventually landing on the idea that combat and everyday life can be seen through the lens of romance.
On the idea of ‘combat as romance’, Cheng explained how Infold layered romance into Love and Deepspace’s “classic real time combat system,” and referenced inspirations like Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Chinese classic The Return of the Condor Heroes – other media centred upon couples fighting as a team.
“During battles, players enjoy the thrill of progressing together with their love interest and the satisfaction of defeating enemies side by side,” she said. “These elements subtly enhance positive emotional feedback felt by the players, fostering greater love for themselves and for the love interest. We believe that this blend of intimacy and action is a very compelling contrast.”
But executing all of this in a coherent way was not easy, Cheng said, and that became clear in 2020 when Infold conducted some player research on the work-in-progress title. Back then, players were overwhelmingly negative toward the combat and the game overall, with some describing it as “cringe”.
The first problem was with the love interests. “They just weren’t hot enough,” explained Cheng. “If they failed to create that immediate sense of attraction and emotional spark, nothing else would live.”
Until that point, the development team had kept production values in line with “typical mobile game standards”, explained Cheng, but this was not exciting enough for early players. “We pushed character quality to the highest possible standard before worrying about how we’re going to recreate this on mobile devices,” she said.
Players still demanded deep connection with the love interests, though. Or as Cheng put it: “We realised that making them hotter was not enough”. So Infold made sure Love and Deepspace’s combat options grow in line with the player’s relationship with their love interest, said Cheng – meaning the player’s first fights with their partner are more “restrained and formal” but later battles involve more “varied and intimate combat interactions”.
The team also made a big decision midway through development to have story and romance interactions play out in portrait, but use landscape orientation for combat sequences. This later became a trademark feature, said Cheng: “Later, a friend told me that she could easily tell who is playing Love and Deepspace in her office or on the metro…basically, if you see someone switching their phones between portrait and landscape mode frequently, they are probably playing this game.”
Cheng also talked through Infold’s concept of ‘everyday life as romance’, or how players can use the game in ways that bring it closer to a lifestyle app, with journaling, diary and period tracking features added since launch. “This extension into everyday life has brought players a strong sense of emotional connection and meaningfully increased the love interest presence in their life,” said Cheng.
The love interests each have highly personalised, date-like playable activities and large behaviour tree systems that branch out based on the characters’ personality and player interactions. Or you can keep them ‘running in the background’, and use them as a more ambient companion. Infold is also exploring AR and VR extensions of these digital relationships, said Cheng.
Concluding the talk with a flourish, Cheng added: “Across all these real-life oriented features, we are guided by one core principle…we want our love interest to do everything a real life boyfriend can’t do and more.”
“We want them to be better, to be hotter, to be there for you, and for those things a real boyfriend struggles with, he will try to do better.”
