Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Some changes to Kudos 2 (for the better)

cliffski

I’m really pleased with some of the last minute improvements and additions to Kudos 2. For one, there is an NPC drawn from a portrait of everyone who worked on the game, which is kinda funny and cool. Another thing I’m pleased with is a new system when someone asks you out for the evening. If you can’t afford it, you can say so, and they aren’t *that* snubbed. But better than that, you can just lie and pretend you can’t afford it. This reduces your honesty :D (BTW A friend of mine reckons honesty should be a pre-requisite to a science job, what do you think?)

I’m also putting a system in where once you have customised and selected your avatar, it’s saved out as a random pre-set, so you might see your old creations come back as defaults (inspired by spore, clearly :D).

The biggest difference in working methods between Kudos 1, and 2, has been getting family members and friends to try the game at an earlier stage. It’s amazing how many issues other people can identify in just five minutes that you will never think of. An example is “why don’t people thank me if I pay for their evening?”.

Good point :D

5 thoughts on Some changes to Kudos 2 (for the better)

  1. Perhaps instead of being a pre-requisite, maybe having really low honesty creates the chance of random events where you lie about something at your job, and it backfires. Some jobs (like science) being less tolerable to lies than an acting job. Perhaps maybe some jobs (like sales) where having low honesty and high charisma (or whatever the people skill is called) makes you very good at the job. You could even go one step further and have “deception” as a skill, and the higher the skill, the better you are at lying.

    I like the idea of bumping into one of your own previously created characters, that will be cool to see.

    I know one of the changes I’ve wanted to see has been to be able to see a list of possible activities, instead of having to click through them all. Perhaps clicking the name at the top of the box, and it generating a list (like an HTML drop-down select box). Where I work, I’m legendary for being able to come up with ideas to improve stuff above and beyond what anyone actually has the time to implement :)

  2. indeed, honesty already is a problem for the new sales career :D High dishonesty helps in sales.
    Like the drop down idea, may think about giving it a go.

  3. Hahaha, honesty is certainly not a prerequisite for being a scientist. Remember Hwang Woo-Suk?

    It seems to me that a low honesty would eventually kill off a scientist’s career, but it’s hardly a prerequisite in the same way that, say, you’d need to know how to use a computer to be a programmer.

  4. Scientists aren’t any more honest than the rest of us. Just look at the Scientists (who are paid by the oil companies) who try to make out that there is no such thing as global warming, despite the fact that there is a vast amount of Scientific evidence to prove it is happening.

  5. While honesty probably shouldn’t be a requirement for low level science careers, advancement in the field should, perhaps, require some level of it. After all, good advancement in science often involves peer reviewed journals, and if you lie about your research it’s much more likely to come out in in circumstances like that than in, say, business or media or most other non-science related fields.

    As CountVlad pointed out, there are certainly scientists who deny things despite evidence, but I think you’ll find they are a distinct MINORITY. While being a scientist doesn’t make one more honest, dishonesty within their particular field of science itself IS more likely to prevent advancement in that field than such dishonesty would be in many other job categories.

    My 2c, for what it’s worth, speaking as a university educated biologist by training who has held a few relatively low grade laboratory jobs in his day.

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