- Jul 29, 2023
- 747
- 544
I'm nagging you again! Know you're not a fan of QSP but your game is exactly the kind of game QSP excells at: sandbox, lots of stuff to do, grind... character development , events and quests that can pop up as a surprise you when you're not expecting. Not nagging you to swap engines, though. Your game has come a long way and is looking good, you've ironed your engine out and got more time to put in content, that's great. There's enough to do, now, to break that grind routine. It's a fun game to unravel. Two cents, though:
- you still lose to qsp on the amount of clicking A few shortcuts would help a lot, maybe a navigation pane with the most used destinations, or just let you pop out to the map from anywhere in any building would be cool;
- there's too much content on the weekend, feels very unbalanced. Many overlap in time and it feels frustrating to have quests you know will be queueing in your log for weeks. Father's job takes up every weekend morning in full and if you want to pursue it, you need to postpone everything else - sexy workout, grandma/aunt, mother, etc... One time I was unable to proceed with Riley's, Bailey's and Fox's quests, had to pick and choose, but in all of them, by reading the text, you're supposed to be meeting "next weekend". It's a choice and I understand choices and priorities, but you still feel like you're leaving someone hanging, and then, next day at school, they're all cool as if nothing happened. Maybe some of those weekend meetings could be on weekdays instead? Studying with Riley and Bailey could stick to weekdays. Seems like you wanted to pace them by alternating week days and weekends, rather than rushing through new events every day, but using that as a general rule on most quests seems risky, since week days are 2.5x more abundant than weekends, quests tend to clog down on weekends.
- there's still no good reason to sleep when you can read books, use your PC and grind some skills all night long.
Ok so let me address these in no order.
Sleep... a reason to sleep... no you got me thinking.. other than possible dream sequences (repeating wet dreams maybe).. I am not sure of a good reason to sleep, like you say.. Only thing I could do, but might be unpopular is to introduce energy levels or attractiveness into the game, and by sleeping this will restore a dwindling stat.. would that be popular?? its more RPG style which I do like..
Interesting highlight on the weekend events... this is not something I had picked up on, I guess its hard for the MC to do too much on the weekday as much of their day (and other npcs) are spent working or in school..
I have got some more in school activities / quests coming, so this might help with that a little.. So of the stat building is also there..
I would argue there is no point that I lose out to qsp, because if there is a feature in qsp that I want, I could build that.. so where I lack, is the thought to implement something that is a common feature in a qsp game... so the main one you mention is the ability to jump to locations.. so I think what I might be doing shortly, is to add the map to your MC phone as an app.. so you could use that to jump to a location. This in most cases might not reduce clicks, but in some of the locations like if you are in the swimming pool, and want to get to your bedroom, then I think it would be less clicks..
Any method of fast travel would eliminate the random events you could trigger on the way (see that a good or bad thing i guess)..
I should also say, your not nagging, you are giving good feedback... and also I am a fan of QSP games (except there are some minor tweaks it could improve), actually its html game I generally dont like.. I am less a fan of games where there is a massive page of text, with a link at the bottom to the next step.. or anything that means I got to scroll about looking for menus or like.. the more that is on a single page the more I like it.
100% wont be moving to a prebuilt engine for this game. Part of what keeps my passion for developing the game is the enjoyment of the coding.. And I would worry that if I lost that, I might stop wanting to continue building the game..
In time the engine will advance less and less each update, and there will be more content updates only.. but its a nice break being able to swap between features and content..
Thanks again for the comments