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~ Suggestions & Improvement ~


Hawkey
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Have looked through the different suggestions and seen some that have touched the suggestion I'm looking for but not not entirely the same. (what I can find)

 

Since you have a lot of skills and they keep gowing in number I think it would make everything much easier if you could sort/list them in different ways. Which one are related to Insight or Strength. Another one could list them according to type, ex Social, Magic, School (different classes they teach at school), Love, Physical, Explore and of course as they are now......alphabetic.

 

If I want to improve my chances with my fellow student I sometimes start improving one skill to later find another one that could be useful under a different tab/folder.

Just a suggestion! :blink:

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Is there a way to add a feature where you (as the leader of your clique), are allowed to approve of a new recruit to your clique (if one of your clique members decides to befriend someone)? B/c it's really annoying when someone joins whos best friends with one person in your clique & hated by everyone else. :blink:

 

Ugh....looks like there's no way to save my clique now. :D:( :(

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Is there a way to add a feature where you (as the leader of your clique), are allowed to approve of a new recruit to your clique (if one of your clique members decides to befriend someone)? B/c it's really annoying when someone joins whos best friends with one person in your clique & hated by everyone else. :blink:

 

Ugh....looks like there's no way to save my clique now. :D:( :(

 

If you're taking the Rhetoric class, or have a high Gossip skill, you'll have good actions for taking care of this. You can make the person who loves that hated individual, also hate them. Or you can make the hated individual tolerated by the others. It tends to be faster to make people hate each other than to make them love each other, but it's up to you.

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If you're taking the Rhetoric class, or have a high Gossip skill, you'll have good actions for taking care of this. You can make the person who loves that hated individual, also hate them. Or you can make the hated individual tolerated by the others. It tends to be faster to make people hate each other than to make them love each other, but it's up to you.

 

He's my unintended 13th clique member - it's all too confusing right now - he's high relations with one and decent relations with a few others - I tried several times to prevent clique breakups using many different methods.

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Here is an imperfect idea where I combine the "Free Social Action" and making student feel more "alive" as the folks at "Lengthy Critique of Academagia Year One" wished and also a modified rest action, but these probably only workable for year two.

 

First of all, is unrealistic that a single normal non-magical rest can restore all your stress and heal all your vitality wound in one night, so let's make the rest action only heal 1 stress and 1 vitality per action, which make other place that heal 2 stress or 2 vitality much more important. Infirmary still fully heals you when you become sick.

 

Now, let's create a new "Socialize phase" right after random event and daily plans or a forth slot in the daily planning menu, where you can choose to rest or socialize.

 

Socialize will work like so:

 

-Randomly or player pick a student to socialize but they have to be currently +3 relationship with player (<=0 if in clique)

-Add 1 rank "lore" of a student with a quote from that certain student that help display his personality

-Randomly +1 or -1 stress and maybe -1 vitality from the argument and fight from socializing.

-Once a player get rank 10 student lore, it will work like the research student background that unlock the student information and +2 relationship.

-Subsequent socialization with a rank 10 student will always relieve 1 stress and a random "minor" information about the school, rumor, useless info, or a lore rank increase with a random student from his/her collage but limit to rank 3.

 

There will be more advance social action that can be unlocked somewhere where it will appear in the socialize list. Action like "group hang out" where you can invite one or more clique or student of the same collage with an increasing a difficult invitation roll as you invite more student and a group contributed maintain-fun roll , "group shopping" where you invite one or more student from any collage to shop with a difficult invitation roll and a group contributed maintain-fun roll. Etc.

 

This idea is probably tough for programmer and writers, so disregard it or whip them harder. :P

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Some comments from playing Patch 14 updated to Patch 17, but after starting the game, up to the point of Midterms.

 

Overall opinion

  • I want to like the game, and it is charming. However at times, it the game makes it very difficult to like it. There is too much disorganized information. People can't process more than a couple of things at a time. Having a menu of 30+ skills to manage is craziness. You'll want to nest and tab everything out to a much greater detail. The mechanics are both painfully visible, and tragically invisible. You have a 5 study and 8 trained Invocation skill, and if you use it to cast a fireball your chance of success is red. The game doesn't provide you with a good overview of your character's status, nor does it provide an easy way to extract that information. Menus are difficult to read, cramped, and contain very little information.
  • Given your Indie status, I'm guessing you guys don't have a good working knowledge of Human Factors and Interface Design. You should consider getting a someone to do this, or picking it up yourself.
  • Other than that though, I still like it.

 

  • Reviews were a mixed bag for the game. I sampled the top 4 from google.
    • DIY gamer - These guys were completely out of their depth. They had no idea what was going on.
    • Electronic Theatre - They were interpreting the game as a children's game, which one of the developers agreed with. This isn't a children's game. It is probably a young adult game. The amount of planning and analysis that goes into playing this game isn't available with preteen level of development. Sure kids can push the buttons, but they won't be able to grasp what's going on.
    • Gamezebo & Swiftworld were pretty fair in their reviews.

    [*]My thoughts - This game isn't completely new. It takes the basic character development gameplay from Princess Maker and countless dating simulations and adds a wizard flavor to it. It is new in that regard, but comes in the footsteps of many similar games. Your biggest advantage is Harry Potter & Lord of the Rings. People want to be wizards, and here is a game that let's them be a wizard. The majority of the reviews also made parallels to Harry Potter. I would suggest going farther. Make more similarities between the two ideas, although you'd obviously want to avoid any sort of copyright infringements. Add in getting a wand as a "big" event. Add in getting sorted into a house as an event. Etc

 

Gameplay Complaints

  • The Music was defaulted to off
  • The installed from Impulse automatically installed .NET and then rebooted without asking permission.
  • Lacking sound effects.
  • The engine is horribly slow, more code optimization is necessary.
  • Saving is horribly slow, more code optimization is necessary.
  • Color codes for success rates are confusing to deal with, and under defined.
  • ColorBlind people really dislike your choices for choice difficulty.
  • Why does it keep activating my print spooler?
  • Character Creation is to convoluted and confusing. Switching to a larger format with all choices visible simultaneously (i.e., MOO2) would be better.
  • Allow importing or additional character portraits.
  • Give more math and odds on successfully performing an action.
  • Give the success ranges for skills on the skill window (i.e., rand(2x)+Y: so 1 to 2x+Y)
  • There are no screen resolution options.
  • Menus need to be more manageable.
  • Add scroll bars to menus.
  • Increase the size of display area for menus.
  • Item collection is unnecessarily divided into 1 tab per activity per day, why not combine them?
  • On the end of day feedback, add tabs. 1 for yourself, 1 for your clique, 1 for merit.
  • Color Code Houses and Give them Crests. Perhaps even keep a visible representation of the Houses progress on screen. You go into a multipage description of merit and its benefits, but the only manifestation is a simple text update.
  • Milk the Harry Potter similarities for better immersion and sales.
  • Familiar system is confusing. Also, I picked exotic, got a fish?!? and then in the basic Mentor adventure got a description of how my fish was trying to hide scrabbling along the ground.
  • The fluff text needs to be separated from the game mechanics text. Perhaps have separate tabs for each?
  • The text boxes are too small, enlarge them and reduce the amount of time players have to hit next page.
  • If there is an appropriate location for an action, have it selected by default. If I study math I shouldn't have to specify the math class room each time.
  • Check the detention or visitation permission code. I have the math class, I go to study math in the math room, and then attend class for the other two activities in the day. I then get detention. Either someone is using a special ability on me, or I'm getting detention for using the math room. I don't think that should happen.

 

Why the developers should care about this post?

  • I'm member of your target audience. I've played many games like this. I understand the game mechanics and concepts. I should be one of your largest supporters, but I can not in good faith suggest this game to a more casual player at this stage of development.

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