The Happiest Days of your Life

Hi everyone. Today's post is a day late, sorry about that. However, as I'm trying to get back into 2-3 posts per week now, I figured better late than never. A saying which is almost never true of today's topic: The Saint Alancia's school day.

The school day forms the game's primary loop and is what you'll spend most of your time doing while playing Missy. When I first began development, I had this notion in my head of a proc-gen'd school day that would always be fresh. In its current form, however, there are too few events to hold interest and it remains one of the most consistently complained-about things. While I've tried to mitigate this by having events able to play out in multiple ways so players can try different choices the next time they come up, the fact is that I'm not where I'd like to be at this point. So I'm opening up the floor to suggestions as to how best to proceed until I am.

First, the plan as it currently stands. Once the fifth Prefects scene is complete, it will unlock the prefect lounge, which will work as follows: You can use it to skip any lesson event, but each time you do so, the game will roll to see if Miss Paris's patience with you doing this runs out. So the more often you do it, the quicker you'll piss her off. She will gradually cool down as days go by.

If she snaps, you will be punished. Maybe in the usual way, maybe in one of a few new ones that are coming down the pipe. So for the average player, it is, of course, win-win.

The other part of the plan is to create a much greater variety in the school day. I plan to have many more events for each period and break by the time the game is in a completed state. Furthermore, there will be different kinds of events, most of which you have already seen:

Standard school day events come up with a normal probability in the generator. Examples of these are Uniform Inspection, Group Project, Volleyball and Biology Lessons. Most of these have multiple choices and some, such as the sports events, are even influenced by things that happen earlier in the day, (such as whether or not Jessica was kept in at lunch.)

Minor events also have a normal distribution and are intended to be quick and easy to make thus allowing them to be rapidly added. Examples include Stupid Question and Panty Flash. The idea is to use these to rapidly increase the number of available events, and while it fell by the wayside a bit as we concentrated on outside school content, more will be coming soon.

Unique events are usually part of a story, such as the "Moment of Madness" event in Avenging Angel, (in which you expose the teacher) and the Hockey game in Queen of the Ring.

Later, we'll be seeing the emergence of Rare events, which are events intended to come up less often in the generator. The health inspection event will later be becoming one of these (currently it's unique) once I figure out whether I want to modify subsequent versions of it to decouple it from the progression arc that it's started. If this doesn't make sense, don't worry. The idea is only half-formed in my head anyway. I will also be moving some other events, such as the play to rare slots, or perhaps even making them unique.

One thing that I'm hoping to implement for 0.10 is making already-seen events skippable. For the time being, I'll probably do this with them all, though it may end up being more limited in the future, because if you're able to just skip all school events, as well as now being able to skip break and the walk to school... there's not actually that much of a game left outside of the unique events and quests!

I'm therefore canvassing opinion on how you'd like to see this handled in the short term while I work out exactly what I want to do to streamline the school day and cut down on repetition. I can't guarantee it'll be perfect, and I am of course completely open to comments and suggestions.

Trinian