Hello friends! I realize many of you reading don't celebrate our silly American holidays, but if you do, I hope it was a good one!
I, for one, spent much of it frantically coding, but that's okay. Let's talk about what I've been up to this week.
First of all, our poll! It's looking about like this:
This comes from a spreadsheet where I've combined the votes from both platforms and then weighted them according to tier. As you can see, expanding sports, extending the amateur porn career, and extending the library basement setting come in as the top three. Below that are better texting, wrestling, and art and photography... and it declines from there.
So, seeing this, I thought back to my original design for sports and the most common suggestions, and I came up with these priorities:
- Cheerleading: Currently just an attachment to football. Which isn't necessarily inaccurate, depending on how well-developed a college's cheerleader program is, but many colleges have cheerleader squads that compete on their own terms, and that would be more rewarding to play.
- Progression: More of a sense of starting at the bottom and working your way to the top, including potentially supplanting the quarterback, the head cheerleader, or the equivalent in your sport. To me, it didn't make much sense to do this until year advancement was in, but 0.8 is in the works, so very soon that won't be a blocker.
- More interaction with storyline characters: Expand roles like The Religious Girl and The Quietly Determined Athlete who currently only have an event or two attached to them. Also, people have always really wanted to interact with The Star Quarterback and The Head Cheerleader as a couple... mostly to break them up.
- More playoff stuff: Playoffs and trophy games have always been a bit underwhelming. These are a huge deal in real life, but in the game they arrive with little fanfare and nothing much is made of the results. Some events and environmental changes around these can help fix that.
From there, I took it from the top and thought about what the cheerleading competition would actually look like, and how it might change practices. In real life, cheerleading competitions judge specific skills: jumping, tumbling, basket tosses, etc., and squads come up with routines that showcase each of these skills. Routines are scored based on the difficulty of what was attempted with each of these skills, and of course how well they were executed.
What this distills down to is: Routines are made up of segments that showcase specific skills. A segment might be easy or it might be hard, depending on how good the squad is and how confident they are they can execute. And each segment involves team members in specific roles, where different skills might be tested.
Cue the frantic coding I mentioned earlier. We've now got this:
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Sorry, I can't quite work out how to insert the correct image here]
The gist is that different routines are available, consisting of segments that vary in difficulty. More difficulty means more scoring potential, but then you need your squad to actually execute.
Currently, the head cheerleader decides which routine the squad will run, and there are a few premade routines of varying difficulty to enable this. I'd like to allow the player to get more input into routines over time, up to eventually designing the whole thing themselves.
Initially, the squad will be pretty bad at a new routine, but each practice increases their experience with the segments within a routine and improves their performance with the routine as a whole. This has the effect of basically adding a bunch of subskills to your sport: getting Physical skill to 10 isn't the end of the story, and you will need to practice your routine. I'd also like the squad to improve their secondary skills as they win so that the whole team gets better over time, and again, this is something that 0.8 will help to enable.
Seems like a lot of work just for cheerleading, I hear you say. Well, that's just where I'm starting. When I was just beginning to design this system earlier this week, I quickly realized the mechanics would translate pretty easily to football plays and esports plays, and could probably be nudged into creating subskills for the other sports as well. So instead of creating a cheerleading routine mechanic, I created a general sports skill practice/execution mechanic of which cheerleading routines are the first example. I think adding this mechanic to the other sports will add a bit more gameplay and experimentation potential to them.
So that's about where we can expect to be at for early access this weekend. I'll continue working on this update for another week up until public release. I won't get through all the stuff I outlined above, but I think I'll plan to extend this mechanic into football plays before maybe turning to some storyline or progression stuff. I don't want to simply go straight down the list, either; I'd like to mix in some work on other items that showed high interest in this poll, so that hopefully there's a bit of something for everyone.
Anyway, basically I'm just saying what I said last week: these poll results will inform what I work on for the next few monthly updates, even if an item doesn't all get done in one month or if I dip into several different priorities within a month. There's a lot still to be done in this game, and with a fresh idea of what you want to see most, I'll keep plugging away at it.
Okay, that's all for now! I have to post this and then actually test all this stuff so it's ready for early access day. Until then, thank you for reading, and thank you as always for your generous support!
