Regarding the lack of Marriage in SunnySide

[FemChefSR1]

Moving forward, this will be the only place in the discussion board where we will allow discussions about marriage, children, swimsuits, and bikinis, in SunnySide. All posts about these topics anywhere in the Steam Discussions outside of this thread will be locked/deleted in the future under the suspicion that they are coming from an alternate account of the one user, and the account will be banned immediately in the interest of protecting the community from continued harassment and spam.

We've made this decision as a result of the continued harassment from one user, across multiple accounts and platforms, since the end of our Kickstarter campaign. Even though we have answered these questions before, they continue to harass us (and other farming games, for various reasons), and we don't have the bandwidth to continue to investigate and differentiate legitimate concerns versus spam.

As game developers, it is our absolute pleasure to discuss our decisions for game design with our community and we highly encourage discussions (you can find them here in this discussion board, on Discord, Youtube comments, and via our podcast), but sadly we have no way to determine who is a troll and who has legitimate concerns. Continued harassment over the same topic has stressed our ability to maintain the clear communication and transparency that we strive for, and our number one priority will always be to protect the community. So if, as a player, you have a legitimate concern about marriage/children in SunnySide and would like to discuss it, we are more than happy to do so. You can email us at [e-mail]. All emails from the person who has been harassing us will be ignored, deleted, and blocked.

To be clear: negative reviews of SunnySide are welcome if they reflect the genuine perspective of the player posting them. You can and will find multiple instances of negative or critical feedback from the community, and we vow to never delete or hide negative perspectives. However, creating multiple alternate accounts with the goal of creating a false collective narrative is disingenuous and harms the entire community, and will be met with harsh moderation moving forward.


I've collected some of the various communications with our Kickstarter backers over the years regarding marriage and why we made the decision to change the system from "marriage" to "romance". I hope this helps the Steam community to understand why we made the decisions that we did. <3

Another note: If we were to decide to add marriage/kids to SunnySide, it would likely take about a year and a half of development, and would probably cost about $200,000 (if not more). Just so people get an idea. <3


From Discord Polls:

"We're pinging you guys, because as always we really value the input of the community. Y'all are the ones we are making this game for, so we want to get your perspective on things, specially when we struggle to make decisions that would impact you all the most.

1. How important is the marriage/children mechanic?
-Essentially, we want to know how badly you all want this. A lot of people have been asking and you've probably seen us respond with "we can't decide", and that's because we can't. Here's our perspective:
The story for SunnySide is being written so that it sort of covers 5 ish years within the game. Now, this doesn't mean you can't play for longer than that, as there are further opportunities to expand your farm and grow new items and become a farming mogul, but the actual stories, for now, are about that time. Additionally, the entire romancing system is much more complex than "give gift, get waifu.". You'll be going on dates, finding out about personality traits, love languages, and the social sim in general is going to be a lot more robust. So the question is: would removing the "goal" of marriage and family take away from the experience of romances?
On one hand, we know it's an established mechanic in the genre as a call back to the early Harvest Moon games. On the other hand, we fear that it may be too much work to program in a "life after marriage" when we can instead spend out time focusing on making the road to that marriage more interesting.
So here are your options:

A- Marriage and children are too important a mechanic to leave out. I will happily wait longer for the core game if it means having a life after marriage and seeing my family on my farm.
B- I want marriage and children, but I am willing to see that mechanic pushed to an expansion or even a sequel to the game (we already have a plan for something like this, it's one of the things being debated)
C- Marriage and children aren't necessary to the genre, and I would happily give them up if it means having more options for date locations, romance selections, and interesting story telling.
D - I'm not sure how I feel about this/my opinion isn't listed here. I will explain my perspective in the ⁠game-suggestions channel
E- I feel incredibly passionate that marriage and children need to be in the base game, and if they aren't, then I won't buy it/will ask for a refund

Please choose the letter that corresponds to your perspective on Marriage/children.
NOTE: In this case, marriage committed partner, etc all relate to the NPC moving in with you and then pursuing having a family. Whatever words you want to use to describe that whole situation is fine, we're just going with "marriage" here for simplicity.
We are open to everyone's opinion, but we can't promise that a majority selection will be what we go with. This stuff is complicated.
Thanks to everyone who has and continues to take the time to show us appreciation, love, patience, and kindness.

Only 2 people in this poll responded that they would want a refund if marriage was not included in SunnySide.


From our FAQ:

Will SunnySide have Marriage and/or Kids?
Short Answer: No.
Long Answer From Rainy:
"Back when SunnySide was a solo project, and before Kickstarter, I didn't have too many ideas about this part of the game. To me, back then SunnySide was a much smaller, shorter game and I didn't give marriage much thought outside of having the player be able to marry a selection of NPCs as it has always been done in classic farming sims.

Once I decided to put the project on Kickstarter, I started thinking about it a lot more seriously but was careful about my language as I myself am not a good narrative writer. I didn't want to give too many promises about how the social/narrative part of the game would work since even the success of the campaign was uncertain at that time. But since the project gained some traction, and we expanded the team and hired the much needed help, we sat down to finalise how we want to use the time we have left to make the best game we could.

As many of you know, one of the main aspects of the game is the social simulation, and we're taking every chance to innovate and take a much deeper look at how we could make the NPCs and story alive and memorable. One of the earliest points of discussion for us has been marriage, and very early on we were keen on taking a different route.
So with that in mind we had to think, what is it about the marriage that is most important to the player? The big answer that came back from our research was "a milestone to solidify the relationship". With that discovery now we had many many more options to take to convey the same feeling and pacing to the players.

With all of that in mind, SunnySide's story and social system is now built around having a "confession" moment in every dateable NPCs storyline. And I am happy to say, that's not all an NPC has to offer, you have friendship stories, town stories, NPC specific stories, and romance stories is an extension to all of that. Think of it more like Persona, you get to know the person, find out about their struggles in life, go out on dates and hangouts with them and then finally if you fit into their sexual preference, confess your love to them.

Now I like to also mention, since we made this decision we have taken every opportunity to communicate this to all of our followers, be it through Discord or our livestreams. I know not everyone has the opportunity to catch up with all of that so I'm more than happy to provide as much info as I can to our community. This was my personal answer but 1. I'm not the only director of the game and 2. I am not the narrative director so the person behind most of these awesome designs, FemChef (Sydney) will explain all of this further in the upcoming Let's Play Episode if you guys like to watch that!"


From Us (the Developers) in various Steam Discussions:

"SunnySide is designed very differently. There isn't a specific "house" on your farm in a pre-determined location. You can build whatever house you want, wherever you want and as many as you want. The game is designed as open as unless you have a bed you can sleep, it is up to you as the player to then decide for yourself what a house even means. Think of it like Minecraft.

With that in mind, the idea of moving in isn't something we can do easily and requires a lot of finesse."

"We never explicitly promised marriage in the Kickstarter. It was something we considered in the beginning, but we decided that our only option was to do it right or to not do it at all. Marriage is often one of the most complained about features in farming games, specifically how unsatisfying it is. We did not want to mess it up, so we asked the community on Discord for their opinion. That opinion, for the most part, was split on the topic. Many wanted it, but agreed that it wasn't worth it if it wasn't implemented well.

For this reason, we decided to emulate relationships in Persona, which is where a lot of the inspiration for SunnySide came from. In Persona, if you're not familiar with it, you have cutscenes with various NPCs where you learn more about them and their story and slowly grow closer to them, but there is no marriage involved.

Additionally, we wanted to modernize the genre a bit, and the truth is, marriage and kids isn't a reality for everyone. We wanted the story to be about YOU, the player, specifically, rather than having it be a game that was all about finding someone to marry.

We understand that this is a controversial decision, and some people will not want to play SunnySide because we did not include marriage, but we stand by our decision. Not including marriage left more time and word count to focus on deeper stories and more robust mechanics across the game, and we're proud of that.

To be clear, there IS romance. And there is a satisfying culmination to each of the romances, it just isn't a wedding.

Thanks for taking the time to share your feelings on the matter. We really do appreciate it, and we're actively looking at ways to create more satisfying romance mechanics for future games. We try to be as transparent with out community as possible, so I hope this alleviated at least some of your concerns. <3"

"We have addressed the question of marriage multiple times, across multiple platforms, and specifically with our backers. This particular user (using multiple names across multiple platforms) has been harassing us for years, and we simply don't have the time or bandwidth to continue to address the same question over and over.

But for clarity:

Marriage was never specifically promised in the KickStarter campaign. It was planned for awhile, and was definitely something that we wanted, but the moment we knew that we wanted to change the design of the system as a result of not being able to do it justice, we asked our backers for their opinions, and we've been communicating with them about their expectations ever since. Every Kickstarter and Backerkit backer has the opportunity to communicate their expectations with us, and many of them have and continue to do so. (This particular user does not have access to those communications, because even though they "pledged a dollar" they never actually paid it. I should also mention that a number of their accounts were banned on KickStarter, Steam, Twitter, and YouTube, across multiple farming campaigns, for harassment of all the developers.)

In short: We wanted marriage, but we realized very early in development that we would not be able to do the system the justice it deserves. We never marketed SunnySide as a marriage simulator, and everything that was oriented to marriage has been modified to fit a comprehensive romance system (romance is still a major part of the game). We have been open, honest, and transparent about this aspect of the game, but this particular user continues to ask us about it (and about swimsuits/bikinis for some reason).

Unfortunately, Kickstarter campaigns are put together during the very beginning stages of making a game (what we call pre-production) and a lot of things come up during development that require changes to be made. You simply never know what is actually possible or will look good, similar to film being left on the cutting room floor and scenes being dropped from movies) For instance, we were unable to include a "save any time" feature (even though we wanted one) due to programming limitations, but we've never tried to hide anything from the community.

As for why the posts are deleted: at this point, we feel that we have answered the question enough times to not justify spending any more time on answering it, especially when we know that it's always from the same person (if you check their comments on other games, you'll understand how we know it's the same person)

That said, for full transparency: I'll create a pinned post in the Steam Discussions with our responses about marriage, and any posts about the subject outside of that area will continue to be deleted (especially posts in unrelated threads) to prevent spamming of the message board/ continued harassment."

[Bloodhail*:.]

A is my answer - My favourite thing about Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, aside from the in depth farming and really immersive game play it offers is the fact that you could purchase items for your homestead, get married and have unique children that have their own personalities and you can influence them towards a career/lifestyle of your choice. I have played all sorts of simulation games, and nothing has come close to that game with how much depth it provides for family mechanics. Your game as some unique and interesting qualities, I like the farming aspect and the characters, but please consider making marriage and families a part of your game as it wins many of us simulation fans over.

[onizukaftw]

4 months, still no major update.
i wanna like the game and buy it...but it's so barebones

[Piperbird]

Първоначално публикувано от onizukaftw:

4 months, still no major update.
i wanna like the game and buy it...but it's so barebones

They're a tiny team and have been working on console updates. What were you expecting? Were you honestly expecting major updates every couple of months?

[Rinoxy]

Първоначално публикувано от onizukaftw:

4 months, still no major update.
i wanna like the game and buy it...but it's so barebones

The game has only been out since mid June, which is 3 months. Consoles dropped less than a month ago and the team has been tackling that to help the porting team. It has been almost exactly a month since the last PC update. If you are expecting large content updates, then yes those will be awhile as the team works on getting it into a state people find acceptable before adding in more major content. though Sandbox mode is being worked on for an update this month.

[Ajax]

At this point, I am much more comfortable saying I dont want any of this if it means continued work on fixing bugs. To me that should be a priority over some virtual family.

[TommoJameZ]

I have seen a video review of the game where they mention the lack of marriage and how it would be good for the game and they made some good points.

[baldurs365]

Ok so i have been reading the comments and so far you can have multiple relationships up till the point you commit to one relationship at which point you become locked in that relationship but you can`t live with them and you can`t marry them and you have to go look for them everyday Hmmm so what is the point of being locked into a relationship at all if nothing changes in that relationship and that relationship does not advance? you might aswell just become a serial dater

[TommoJameZ]

Първоначално публикувано от baldurs365:

Ok so i have been reading the comments and so far you can have multiple relationships up till the point you commit to one relationship at which point you become locked in that relationship but you can`t live with them and you can`t marry them and you have to go look for them everyday Hmmm so what is the point of being locked into a relationship at all if nothing changes in that relationship and that relationship does not advance? you might aswell just become a serial dater

You are so right it makes zero sense honestly I've stopped playing the game specifically of that reason I got so far in that honestly after a while it became repetitive the relationships i really enjoyed but building a house and decorating it and having several rooms that just remained empty honest got depressing ahha I would've really liked having a husband/wife and kids to fill the void ahha also I think putting the school on the map was a complete missed opportunity if the school had no use honestly would've been better for it not to be there, but if you were able to help fix the school up and send kids there would be amazing and honestly i've seen so many comments about people wishing for it and honestly I know The devs have acknowledge it but honestly I feel like they are ignoring it I even posted a mod Idea for the game to add marriage and was shot down immediately which left me feeling ignored.... Its sad honestly if they added kids and marriage i think they would be major competition but i fear it will be a game that is just forgotten about left to the wind.

[baldurs365]

Първоначално публикувано от TommoJameZ:

Първоначално публикувано от baldurs365:

Ok so i have been reading the comments and so far you can have multiple relationships up till the point you commit to one relationship at which point you become locked in that relationship but you can`t live with them and you can`t marry them and you have to go look for them everyday Hmmm so what is the point of being locked into a relationship at all if nothing changes in that relationship and that relationship does not advance? you might aswell just become a serial dater

You are so right it makes zero sense honestly I've stopped playing the game specifically of that reason I got so far in that honestly after a while it became repetitive the relationships i really enjoyed but building a house and decorating it and having several rooms that just remained empty honest got depressing ahha I would've really liked having a husband/wife and kids to fill the void ahha also I think putting the school on the map was a complete missed opportunity if the school had no use honestly would've been better for it not to be there, but if you were able to help fix the school up and send kids there would be amazing and honestly i've seen so many comments about people wishing for it and honestly I know The devs have acknowledge it but honestly I feel like they are ignoring it I even posted a mod Idea for the game to add marriage and was shot down immediately which left me feeling ignored.... Its sad honestly if they added kids and marriage i think they would be major competition but i fear it will be a game that is just forgotten about left to the wind.

Thankyou for your feedback on this you see i was thinking of buying this game mainly because of the relationship side of it. I play Farmers Dynasty and in that game I have a wife who is currently pregnant in this play through and in my previous game I had a baby boy, I believe you can have two children a boy and a girl there is even an achievement to have your first child go to school,. So i think i will pass this one by

[TommoJameZ]

Първоначално публикувано от baldurs365:

Първоначално публикувано от TommoJameZ:

You are so right it makes zero sense honestly I've stopped playing the game specifically of that reason I got so far in that honestly after a while it became repetitive the relationships i really enjoyed but building a house and decorating it and having several rooms that just remained empty honest got depressing ahha I would've really liked having a husband/wife and kids to fill the void ahha also I think putting the school on the map was a complete missed opportunity if the school had no use honestly would've been better for it not to be there, but if you were able to help fix the school up and send kids there would be amazing and honestly i've seen so many comments about people wishing for it and honestly I know The devs have acknowledge it but honestly I feel like they are ignoring it I even posted a mod Idea for the game to add marriage and was shot down immediately which left me feeling ignored.... Its sad honestly if they added kids and marriage i think they would be major competition but i fear it will be a game that is just forgotten about left to the wind.

Thankyou for your feedback on this you see i was thinking of buying this game mainly because of the relationship side of it. I play Farmers Dynasty and in that game I have a wife who is currently pregnant in this play through and in my previous game I had a baby boy, I believe you can have two children a boy and a girl there is even an achievement to have your first child go to school,. So i think i will pass this one by

Makes sense and I will have to give that game a look I would suggest if anyone is wanting a game that does kids and marriage well I would suggest my time at sandrock do your own research on the game I believe everyone should research a game before purchase. My Time as sandrock your able to have 2 kids they dont need to be from the same parent too and the kids actually grow up and have interactions so give that a look if you'd like and Look sunnyside is a nice game but does lack some things however if you like a simple country life game this game would be for you just be warned theres no marriage and kids and personally I think it lets the game down. But visually the game is great but yeah.

[ArtisanEwe]

For me personally I was really looking forward to marriage and children. It gives me a reason to grow my farm and really work hard at it. I would be happy to wait longer for this feature but would be dissapointed if it never came out.

[G-RED]

A is my answer.

Having a family (spouse and kids), and having them live in my house on my farm makes the social aspect of these types of games all the more meaningful, and impactful.

More so if there are nice quests, activities, and interactions (hugging, kissing, holding hands etc...) we can have with our spouse and kids post marriage.

[TommoJameZ]

You both make valid points and have excellent ideas if it was to be implemented I do believe many would wait for that update happily I just dont believe the devs see it that way honestly I would happily wait for a relationship update or even DLC compared to a sandbox update haha but yeah I just hope the devs are really thinking about this stuff and add relationship update at some point and not just say "Nope not happening" like they have. Like I said if a game with good romance and kids and storyline is what people like I would Suggest giving My Time at Sandrock a look do your own research regardless I am aware that there is an update coming that makes romance have more Romance/Relationship quests and that after marriage so yeah give that a look. But Yeah hoping for DLC or Update in regards to marriage and kids for sunnyside soon. I'd happily wait for it.

[TamanduaGirl]

Първоначално публикувано от TommoJameZ:

if the school had no use honestly would've been better for it not to be there

That would have been fine even realistically. We bussed from our small mountain town to a bigger mountain town for school. There was no old empty school, just no school, because small town.

[TommoJameZ]

Първоначално публикувано от TamanduaGirl:

Първоначално публикувано от TommoJameZ:

if the school had no use honestly would've been better for it not to be there

That would have been fine even realistically. We bussed from our small mountain town to a bigger mountain town for school. There was no old empty school, just no school, because small town.

Yeah that does make sense. Still think the game should've done something else and I Still think kids and marriage should be added.