Sylvie Hsieh
Sylvie loves classical Chinese culture. During her studying days at Dept. of Chinese Literature, National Taiwan University, she and 2 other close friends co-developed the demo version of Philosophic Love (東周列萌志), starting with zero knowledge in game development, to more than 250K downloads of the demo version.
After graduation, she joined SoftStar and participated in the development of Xuan-Yuan Sword 6 and Xuan-Yuan Sword: The Gate of Firmament, learning a great deal of the creative process of standalone PC games. Shortly after she departed from SoftStar, she started a crowdfunding campaign so as to finishing Philosophic Love, breaking the record for video game development crowdfunding in Taiwan at the time, and ended up with a NTD 1.34 million funded project. Now she’s totally devoted to the completion of the game.
She believes the core concept of making games is “bringing happiness, new thoughts and moving moments to the players”. Her writings usually consist of light-hearted elements and philosophical ideas, and she hopes the world can be full of love and peace.
Introduction to Otome Game Design
“Otome games” are a Japanese term (literally mean “maiden games”) describing games that have a female protagonist that has the options of engaging with various potential male characters in romantic relationships as its main feature. The genre has always been considered a small niche, but actually has a long history, and many great games emerged from this niche with commercial successes in the past.
In this talk, we will talk about how to design otome games in a nutshell. From background concepts, to character design, storytelling, dialogue and branching options. How do you actually serve the female audience?
The speaker will share her insights about the quirks and secrets in designing otome games, based on her gaming and creative experience, in the hope of helping more developers who are interested in this genre.