If you've made your way to the Dates & Wires project page, chances are that you're already familiar with the webcomic that birthed our cyberpunk not-quite-dating sim. If not? This post's for you. 

Set in a skewed alternate vision of 1995 where man never went to the Moon but memories can be saved to floppy, Drugs & Wires chronicles the non-adventures of Dan, former VR operator turned living embodiment of "hot mess." Though it pulls extensively from the cyberpunk canon of the '80s and '90s, D&W also makes a point of taking all those things people love about the genre - cool cityscapes, edgy outcasts, shiny technology - and tossing them out the window. What's left is a world that's beige, busted, and glaringly unglamorous, navigated by a man who'd rather get blitzed than answer any Call to Action.

Nowhere does this shine through more than in the comic's setting: Stradania, an ex-Soviet republic that didn't so much proclaim freedom as wake up in the geopolitical equivalent of an Unclaimed Property bin after the USSR collapsed a few years prior. Following a failed attempt to westernize, Stradania has fallen into the hands of anti-technology hardliners rabid enoúgh to ban CD-ROM discs as "the Devil's Silver" - which helpfully distracts from all the rampant poverty, unemployment, and continuous food shortages.  

As one early reader memorably put it: "I love the world you've crafted, and I know that I love it because I would never want to live there in a milion years."

SO, WHERE DOES THE DATING COME IN?

Since launching D&W back in 2015, we've always been playing with other ways to extend our glum little universe - and nowhere more consistently than with D&W's April Fool's jokes. From fake in-character websites to an entire album of harsh noise, we approach April 1st as an opportunity to build on the comic's lore in new and unconventional ways... usually by spending entirely too much of our time engineering something that could only charitably be considered a "prank."

For 2021, we stepped things up a notch by deciding to build a full-blown otome-style dating sim. Not a parody of a dating sim - we weren't interested in taking cheap shots at the genre, or half-assing a game for a quick, lazy laugh. Rather, the laughs were baked into the concept itself: who'd even want to date the men of D&W, damaged and self-absorbed as they are? If we wrote our cast true to their in-fiction personalities, bad times were effectively guaranteed from the get-go - but anybody who'd spent time reading our comic would expect nothing less.

That said, scraping together enough eligible Stradanians to populate an otome title was already a challenge. Some regulars - like Nate, a popular, gadget-obsessed hacker who also happened to be a grade schooler - were out on principle. Others... well, there's only so much a bishounen makeover can be expected to do, as Dan's colleague Nagy demonstrates: 

To create that mix of distinctive personalities a proper otome game needs, we wound up leaning on a mixture of established stalwarts and deeper cuts, including NoK00l - a minor but memorable antagonist with a handful of appearances to his name - and Jack the bartender, who'd essentially been nothing but background color until now... but had a big curveball of a backstory we'd been itching for an excuse to unleash. That turned out to be a win-win in the grand scheme of things, as the dating framework gave us an opportunity to unload a lot of little bits of backstory and characterization that the main comic would never have the room - or justification - for. 

The next hurdle was figuring out how to strike an appropriate balance between reader-friendly fan service and a story players unfamiliar with the comic wouldn't completely bounce off of. While our immediate audience was the Drugs & Wires community, we also wanted something that could act as an entry point to newcomers who didn't want to plough through almost 250 pages of comic (not including various one-shots and spinoffs) to figure out what the hell was going on.

Choosing a viewpoint character who wasn't native to Stradania - or up to speed with the reams of drama our comic's cast had generated in the last five years - gave us an optimal "in" for newcomers, while existing fans could appreciate the opportunity to spend more time on some of the comic's more colorful locations, like the Icebox bar:

Unlike the characters, in fact, the game's locales were an all-but-straight shot. Each cast member had a few places they were intimately associated with in the comic, and in almost every case, the "date" was immediately obvious once we made the call to include that character. This streamlined visual development immensely, as existing designs could be re-used with minor tweaks to accommodate the needs of the story. The biggest changes were stylistic: while the comic's backgrounds were all drawn as line art, the game featured a cleaner, semi-rendered look leveraging 3D models - in part to bring environments more in line with the character art and general otome feel, in part to avoid crowding out characters with excessive levels of small detail. The general feel of each location, however, remained consistent across both incarnations:

Beyond that, things rolled into place quite quickly. After half a decade of writing these characters, figuring out how they'd behave when dropped into a club setting was practically second nature. The only challenge was to figure out a way for these screwballs to open up to a player - and find a little sliver of relatability in personalities usually focused on keeping everyone at arm's length. 

Did we succeed? You'll have to be the judge of that. But if you're intrigued enough by what you've seen in Dates & Wires to risk a deeper dive into the world of Stradania - or want to get more familiar with our characters before firing up the game - our entire archive is just a click away.