Roll+Heart is dating sim meets tabletop gaming club

Putting the ‘novel’ back in ‘visual novel’.

Roll+Heart is a dating sim. But there’s a twist. Following the story of a group of strangers brought together by a love of tabletop roleplaying games, Roll+Heart not only encourages you to pursue friendships and romantic interests within the group – but also get involved in the tabletop gaming itself.

“The game is really inspired by tabletop RPGs, focusing on the real life setting, and the tabletop setting,” explains Zahra Winstanley, the writer of this new title, out today on Steam. “But you also play through a tabletop-inspired fantasy setting with them, tackling challenges together.”

At a time when tabletop RPGs were taking over the internet like wildfire, Zahra – along with the three other team members that make up Owl Sanctuary Studios- set about designing a project that sounded like fun. “We were big fans of TTRPGs podcasts like Critical Role and The Adventure Zone, we managed to get our closest friends into D&D, and it was all just a huge amount of fun,” says Zahra. But there was another intention at play too. “We noticed that there were a lot of people who wanted to get into the tabletop RPG scene, but found it incredibly intimidating. Quickly it became a love letter to the genre that we dedicated a whole day every fortnight to, while trying to reach out a hand to people who wanted to take that first tentative step into the world of TTRPGs.”

Zahra already had a campaign idea saved for a rainy day, so with this as the premise, Owl Sanctuary set about building the game – with Zahra on writing and art duties, Caroline Girdler on art and game design, and Thomas Hanley on development. “We thought it would be pretty easy,” recalls Zahra, “but things are rarely as easy as we hope. The main challenge was that I was trying to tell a robust story, giving each character the words they needed. Originally, there were going to be seven dates and seven tabletop sessions. Obviously that had to be reined in a tad to four dates and four tabletop sessions, but even then the overall word count managed to hit over 170,000. That was probably the most challenging aspect, and editing and implementing it was no small task. Afterall, it had to be 170,000 good words.

“Otherwise, this project allowed for a lot of room to scale up, and thanks to Thomas’ efforts, we were able to make it more dynamic, more engaging, and a lot more interesting. Everyone got a mini-game, and there were enough NPCs to make the worlds come alive.”

While Zahra hopes that players will enjoy plotting the course of this set of characters and engage with the tabletop RPG gameplay that’s embedded within the story, there’s another mission in mind too: to craft an experience with characters that will resonate to a wide variety of players, for a wide variety of reasons; and to tell a story whose protagonists players will continue to wonder about long after the end of the game.

“Roll+Heart is a visual novel dating sim inspired by tabletop RPGs,” says Zahra, “but really, it’s about a group of people coming together as strangers, trying something new and a tad intimidating, and the relationships you can form together. You meet this group who have signed up for tabletop for their own reasons, and you get to know them, their goals, obstacles and lives, and you can form friendships, or something more romantic, with them. Like in real life, the relationships you have with your tabletop group will affect how well you work together – so that, even if you start out as strangers, you become a party.”

Roll+Heart is out now via Steam, priced at $19.99 / £15.50 – and you can join its Discord server at https://discord.gg/FeE8rUx.