A Visual Novel conceived by a group of anime fans at UC Berkeley, Building Relationships is a Dating Sim in which most of the characters are moe anthropomorphizations of various buildings on the UC Berkeley campus. A demo was released at Anime Destiny (an annual anime convention held in October on the UC Berkeley campus) 2010, and a final release was scheduled for May 2012, but after most of the production team graduated, the project is on indefinite hiatus.
The player character is a first year student at a Japanese high school who becomes his homeroom's Class Representative and is charged with coming up for his class's project for the School Festival. Depending on which girl the player chooses, the project changes.
A sequel was in the planning stages, taking place one year after the events of the first game and centering around a new protagonist.
Building Relationships contains examples of:
- Ahoge: Sather has a fairly tall one.
- Bitch In Sheep's Clothing: Cheit
- Class Representative: The protagonist
- Cute Clumsy Girl: Dwinelle
- Decided by One Vote: The protagonist ends up choosing what to do for the School Festival when the voting keeps ending in a four-way tie.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Dwinelle's older sister is only ever known as "Dwinelle-aneki".
- First Girl Wins: Subverted. The first girl (Dwinelle) doesn't have a route. In other words, the first girl can't win.
- Gratuitous English: Pimentel's "My Darling!"
- Gratuitous Japanese: Evans's "senpai"
- The Idiot from Osaka: Goldman-sensei
- Known Only by Their Nickname: The protagonist...and everyone has a different nickname for him.
Word of God says he doesn't have a real name. - Loners Are Freaks: Evans
- Mad Scientist: Pimentel and Latimer
- Meaningful Name: Most characters' last names are all buildings on the UC Berkeley campus. Their first names are mostly puns.
- Meido: Cheit
- Moe Anthropomorphism: Some of the girls have traits of the buildings they're named after: Evans has orange eyes and green hair, Sather has a large ahoge, and Dwinelle is perpetually disorganized.
- Multiple Endings
- No Sense of Direction: Dwinelle
- The Ojou: Haas
- School Festival
- Shout-Out: Quite a few, the most obvious being Latimer, who is named Mikoto and has a crazy fangirl named Kuroko.
- Shrinking Violet: Evans
- Student Council President: Sproul
- Translation Convention: The setting is a Japanese high school, but everyone speaks English.
- TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life : One of the bad ends has the protagonist drop out of school after becoming addicted to tvtropes.
- Voice for the Voiceless: Cheit
- The Voiceless: Haas
- Yakuza: Dwinelle is thought to be one.
The as of yet unnamed sequel contains examples of:
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep"/Student Council President: The protagonist from the first game.
-
Ho Yay/Those Two Guys: Soda and Cory - Hot Librarian: Doe
- Meaningful Name: For the same reason as above.
