Fhoenix

I did not read the whole thread, so I apologise if this was mentioned before. But here are my suggestions/impressions. 1)Change the color of the text from white to black on save and load screens. White is really hard to read on yellow and gray. 2)Make save slots bigger in size. A ton of space is wasted on the splash screen. While the text in the save slots and the screenshot inside are ultra small. 3)Make it obvious in options, which option is chosen ("pressed") at the moment. Right now it's impossible to tell which is which. Just take a person from the street, who never played the game, and make him guess. See what he thinks about that. Is black the active one? Or is it white? Why is one of them gray? I am playing in window, but both windowed and fullscreen are same color. So... that must mean... black is fro "not pressed"... I guess. Aha, I feel like a detective alread! But white is so hard to read whithout squinting, I have no idea what is actually selected. And why is there no border around "display", "windowed" and "fullscreen" showing, that they are related, and it's one option? These are the things that jump at you in the first five minutes of starting the game. Before you even begin to play. They are small and you can get USED to them and OVERCOME them with DEDICATION and BURNING PASSION. But I would think you lose a lot of sales, just because the interface is hard to use even for the simplest things. After ten minutes 4)I think a quick save, quick load and mute sound buttons in the main window would do lovely. Inside those leafs at the corners of the textbox there is enough space for icons. After fifteen minutes. 5)An option in the options to make the music stop when the window is out of focus. Emphatically. And especially since there is no mute button. 6)Is there a backlog? I tried to scroll up. No backlog appeared. Am I doing something wrong? Is there really no backlog in this game? Black Chicken, why do you torture me so?! p.s. Sorry, for the snark. Bought the game, love what you are doing. But ah, I really wish the interface was thought out and play tested better.

How about you add something like "Cheat Matchmaking": 5 X "Increase the relationship between 2 students by 10" Basically what Clique Relationship does only between any students and for several pairs at a time. Also how can I open your mod? I tried downloading the mod tools, but when I click "Open mod" it wants an .amm file, while your mod is mdm. And how did you create your mod in the first place? I do not see an updated mod AMO anywhere in the forums.

I would like to ask for an option to turn random events off temporarily. The thing is, sometimes I play a day to test something. To see new abilities, to check if I have a chance of success at an adventure, or if a spell will work. To learn what I will get from this or that or what will happen if I use compete straight for several days. The bottom line is, I know that I will reload after an action whatever the result will be. All I want is to get to the end of day results as fast as possible. I think many people play like that, especially those filling the wiki. And then we get an event. You have two options in such a case: to click through it, which takes several seconds and really is a disservice to the writers or to read it, knowing that whatever you read won't actually happen to your character next time you play this day for real. Neither is pleasant, hence my request.

Another suggestion then. I wouldn't normally make this one, since I haven't seen the code and really have no idea what I am talking about. But there is a small chance that I am right, and if I am wrong, well, it will take very little of your time. Opening the history of a single day takes a lot of time. Closing it and opening calendar after that takes a lot of time. I see no reason why it takes so long, other then that every time it reads history using some complex query. Excuse me if I sound naive, but I really can't think of another explanation. Perhaps this query can not be optimized, but why can't the game cache the results? History of the day, as the user sees it, is basically a glorified string. You generate it once at the end of each day. If you just keep it in memory, showing it once more shouldn't be any slower than showing a lore entry. Calendar history is a sequence of choices. With the very limited amount of days in the year, it shouldn't take too much memory to hold it in an array. Then opening calendar should be much faster. So, am I wrong, or am I very wrong?

Another idea I had about reducing the amount of clicking for choosing actions. By the button that opens a dialog for choosing actions for the day there is enough space to place for two, maybe three buttons of the same size (although I don't know how hard it would be. but at least it is a very small change to the graphics). If it can be done, then by right clicking on these buttons the same menu for choosing an action could be opened. And that action could be "quick saved" into this button. By left clicking the button the saved action would be placed on the corresponding slot in the calendar. This way it would take exactly one click to place the three most used actions (usually train, study, gossip or some variants of them). Not a very elegant and less universal solution then a custom list, as some abilities such as libraries tend to disappear for a day, but it would be very efficient for some actions. I don't know, maybe there are some better ways to do this.

Well, one way would be to simply place Locations before Lores. Another is to make some kind of scrollbar. Scroll buttons are fine, but with a proper scrollbar you would be able to go almost anywhere on the list in one click. That would reduce the ammount of scrolling dramatically. And yes we need some hot-list of abilities and actions. Most of the time you only use a few and finding them in the list takes time. I think when choosing an action for a part the day, the dialog should open not on "Choose Action" as now, but on some custom list of actions and abilities chosen by the player.

Draigh, it's nothing really Befriending loses steam fast as the number of people in your clique grows, so I can't really add a lot of people. I've also been thinking that maybe at the moment we are doing it wrong. Creating separate pages for every character will make sense when/if we get permission and means to copy the whole text/picture and create a complete bio. As we concentrate on stats for now, it would more usefull to create tables as Mikka did. Location - General Area - Passive Ability - Active Ability Character - College - Clique Ability That way you would be able to compare different abilities and know what every place does without visiting a whole lot of pages. I wouldn't hold my breath for most things staying relevant in the second year. Sure lots of descriptions can stay the same (though I hope there will be a major update on character bios after year one), but numbers and even game mechanics will change. They can't just add 10 more levels to learn for the existing skills and be done with it. That wouldn't work for many reasons. But that's all in the future, I am sure we'll think what to do with the wiki then.

Mikka, Mad props to you. No, no, there isn't, it's just that looking at your post I began doubting that simple fact I was actually writing about this just now. Here are my thoughts. I think academ wiki is a wonderful thing. Sure some people like to explore. But other people like to get all the data right away and in one place to analyze it and devise useful strategies. And however you play, sooner or later you have a question about something that should be described in game but either is not, or it's buried somewhere and you do not know where to find it. On forums this leads to several people repeating the same questions in different threads (like how do you get befriend). But with a wiki you have a single place to add whatever information you find in the game and everybody can read it with ease. That being said, I have a question for Legate of Mineta. Is it technically possible to add the ability to copy text from the game? Specifically text from the left and right screens: spells, abilities, locations and all that. We obviously do not need text from the main screen where adventures take place. At the moment I am adding whatever characters I befriend to the wiki, but typing takes time (not so much for some of us, as I just discovered ) and entries for the students do not look pretty when the only thing there is the stats for a clique ability. Copying text directly from the game would really help us fill in the Wiki and in turn help a lot of players to understand the game better. Maybe this will even take some pressure from yourself, as there will be less trivial questions in the forums. There will obviously needs to be some agreement about how much text can be copied from the game into the wiki, if we can do it word by word, but I think some policy can be create. I think an argument can even be made that having a good wiki with lots of text and maybe some pictures from the game can alleviate some problems of the game's interface. People would be able to read the same text but in a much bigger, scalable window of the browser and it wouldn't cost you a dollar. As it is now, I gave up after reading maybe 30 student entries. I liked all the fluff, and really wanted to know more about my classmates, but the interface kills half the fun. Wiki can fix this. Perhaps even advertise the game a little, as seeing a good wiki full of lore would leave a good impression on people who like lore in their game. Maybe someone can even make a student roster. Maybe that someone will even be me. I LOVE the pictures of the students, but HATE clicking 166 times (and scrolling, oh the horror, scrolling) just to see all of them. Hm, I think I am getting little carried away. Anyway, Legate, can we please get a working copy & paste in game? Pretty please? Pretty please, with sugar on top? And what do you think about copying game lore (as opposed to game mechanics) into the wiki? Is it a good idea, a bad idea, a heaven-forbid-no idea?

Mikka, did you type all of that by hand?

I think saves should be sorted by date with the newest one at the top. Otherwise all kind of problems appear. Also the load game menu at the start of the game does not show dates (even though the one in game does) so there is no way to tell what is your most recent game from there.

As a suggestion, I think that maybe you should make the cat/dog/owl choices a free pick, Pamela a +1 pick and some strong exotic Familiars a -1 pick. The description clearly states that most wizards have an animal as a familiar, so it somewhat strange that a ghost is a default one. Shouldn't most students have a ghost following them then? Besides it's kind of cruel, taking a whole point for having a cat. Oh and as it is the choice is muddy at the moment. When you do not take a familiar at character creation, you kind of expect that you can bind one later, not that some ghost will attach to you on day one. As another thought, I wish most backgrounds were free and you could choose one place of birth, one family background, one aptitude and so on, with some exceptional backgrounds costing points. Given the amount of backgrounds it seems awfully limiting to have only 5 points for them. It's like the game saying: "You either know your place of birth or had a chance to explore the city before your arrival". Maybe someone will be able to mod it Oh, and after reading descriptions for most backgrounds I think that, whoever thought that placing all that text in a small box where very little text can fit while leaving half of the screen for a logo, this person must have had some grudge against my eyes.

I think that the interface of this game is its worst enemy. For basically a management game where you stay on the same couple of screens most of the time and click the same buttons a LOT, the ergonomics of these buttons and screens kind of sucks. They do look pretty, this I admit. But the font sizes, resolution, slow reaction time, proportions of parts of the screen to each other... Hawkey wrote a lot of good suggestions on the first page of this thread, and I can only support him and ask the developers to improve these things right after they finish with the game mechanic bugs. Additional content is good. Second year would be awesome. But interface is king. I am a programmer myself, so I know how hard and costly it is to change things at this point. Still in my honest opinion these things must be changed. If all else fails, maybe when you develop the second game and improve the game engine/interface you can re-release the first part under a new engine. Then again if you promise something like this now, I think it will have a negative effect on the sales of the first game. I disagree with Reibear about the ammount of text though. Yes it is jarring that the part of the screeen where most of the text appears is maybe one sixth of the size of my monitor. But the text is good. Having lots of different skills is good. Complexity is good. The last thing we need is rewriting everything so that a 9 year-old can understand the game with ease. And despite what I said above about the interface, you guys totally rock. I hope the game sells good, it is unique, interesting and has a soul. I will try recommending it to friends, maybe after some patching. Oh, and about the sales. Have you tried giving the game to Rocket Paper Shotgun for review? A lot of people read that blog. A lot of people playing a lot of indie games. I think it would be very good publicity.