One of the things that emerged from recent playtesting was that the actual value of ‘kudos’ in Kudos 2 was a tad irrelevant. In some ways, it was an unoffical ‘score’ in the first game. getting more kudos was good, because thats what the game was about. it enabled a very few things to be unlocked, and it would slowly degrade (and have a static element based on friendships).
This sucked a bit, and needed re-jigging. I did part of that today. Kudos is n longer a seperate score, next to the current cash, and it’s now an attribute like health, IQ or Culture. You build up your kudos just like any other attribute, and its the games shorthand for ‘cool’. So buying trendy sunglasses, going to nightclubs and hanging out with trendy people raises your kudos. You need kudos to become a TV presenter or other cool udde, but if your character becomes a C++ programmer or lawyer, it’s pretty irrelevant.
I think this (currently) works better than the previous approach. Kudos is just another thing you can concentrate on, like IQ, money, happiness or whatever, depending on how you choose to prioritize for your character. The good news is the game seems to have a lot of potential right now to enable you to play in lots of different ways, whilst still providing a challenge, and lots to do. it’s already so much better a game than the original. There are of course, lots of bugs to fix, improvements to make, and content to add, but this will be the most complex, polished and feature rich game I’ve ever developed, once it’s finally done :D