ideally grinding wouldn't be a repetitive and tiring process, so if you improve that the mechanic becomes unnecessary
I saw your message yesterday but somehow forgot to respond lol. To make a long story short i dont want to promise too much in this regard. I could be wrong but in my opinion the grinding aspects of the game (with exceptions as ill discuss in a second) isnt really a fault of the game but more so just one of the game mechanics/features. that is that you have to grind to unlock certain upgrades, clothes, routes, etc. And personally I kinda like the grinding of the game.
That being said, if i receive at some point (say after i give this version of the game its own page) a significant amount of people who absolutely cant stand just how grindy it is then i
could go back and make some adjustments.
Im not hesitant just because i like the grinding in the game or because i personally see it as more of a feature than a flaw, but rather its much more because of what a undertaking going through and fine tuning every aspect/interaction to reduce grinding as much as possible would be.
The game just was built with a certain level of grinding in mind from the get go. The main gameplay loop (ie do some stuff before you sleep -> buy transformations -> wake up and choose your first task of the day -> choose your second task of the day -> do some stuff before you sleep) is very short. You could go through a whole day in maybe two or three minutes depending on what options you choose (and that's by actually reading everything and not just clicking through). Is this by design or by some sort of fault? Well who's to say. But regardless at least in my opinion some degree of grinding with such a short gameplay loop is inevitable. Its like a mobile game almost.
Could it be done? Certainly. Would I be willing to do it if there was demand? Sure. But would it also be a long and tedious process? Most definitely lol.
Im personally approaching this project A) as a way to learn twine/sugarcube and B) to in the process try to finish (or maybe inspire someone else to try and finish) what vibecaster had started with this game.
Its 100% fair to maybe disagree with my approach but the way Im thinking about this game is to keep it as much in the spirit of the original as possible while eventually (i hope) producing a finished product that people can enjoy while also simultaneously modifying annoying parts to improve them where I could (for example
in the update I released today [shameless plug] i fucked around with the chances of you getting into one of those random encounters after school where you're either forced to do something or go back to your dads house, which some people here complained about and which annoyed me personally to no end lol).
Regardless of what ends up happening, Ill probably leave the keyboard controls in if for no other reason than since adding them they have made debugging/working on the game that much easier.
Additionally (and i mean this as genuinely as possible, as someone who really really enjoyed the originally game) if anyone out there has ideas about modifying the game/trying to take this project and make it into something different/new/their own,
please, please do so lol.
I legit will send you all the stuff ive been using and i can help you with figuring out your way around my code or vibecaster's original code whenever you need help. Hell, if Vibecaster themselves decided tomorrow that they wanted to finish the game now that it was in Twine SugarCube and not in Twine Snowman Id do the same thing for them lol.
Im just a fan of this game whos trying to learn sugarcube to eventually develop HTML games of my own who would also like to see this game reach some kind of some conclusive end. How it reaches that end doesnt really matter to me.