Category: game design

I’ve been working on the balance of the game today. Stuff like how easily you put on weight, how much money you earn etc. I’ve made some big changes and hopefully tomorrows playthroughs will show an improvement in the long term balance.

The problem with testing a simulation game is it gets too easy to just play it the way *you* play those games. I have quite a specific style of management game playing. I tend to eventually gravitate to a single variable (like population size in sim city, or profits in Vegas:MIB, and almost ignore other aspects of the game as I zone out on trying to maximise that variable. When I play kudos, I tend to be very career-focused, so I need to ensure I don’t polish and tweak that area of the game to the exclusion of other areas. I also tend to never finish games, but keep restarting with different tactics, so the middle and late games can get a bit repetitive. I’m aware of this tendency, and keen to fix it this time around.

One of the ways I hope to do this is by unlocking content as the game plays. The mechanic for this is social events organised by you, the more you do, the more options you unlock. If you play the game naturally, this means you are still unlocking some new options after an hour or more of play, so the game stays fresh all that time at least. By the time the game is finished I hope there to be enough content and variety that the game stays fresh throughout all ten years.

I thought it might be worth summing up what to expect in the next game, so here is a rough description of the differences:

Kudos 2 will have proper music, composed to fit the game, not just stock music that I thought I could fit around the game, like the original did.

Kudos 2 will have much better avatars, with some degree of chopping and changing, rather than just selecting preset images. They will be hand drawn art, not computer generated poser stuff

Kudos 2 has more depth to the careers. You don’t have a generic bad day at work, but a bunch of stroppy customers as a waiter, or an exciting new experiment as a physicist. It just adds some colour to the jobs

Kudos 2 will not have that confusing social networks screen. Nobody understood it anyway :D

Kudos 2 will have a revamped GUI that looks 100 times brighter, cleaner and generally more pleasing than the down-beat murky look of the original. Goodbye greys and dark blue!

Kudos 2 will have a far more efficient and stable graphics engine, meaning the system requirements may even be lower than before, and its compatibiltiy with video and sound card combinations should be much higher

Kudos 2 has some greater depth to a variety of the existing components, like restaurants, reading books etc.

Plus there will be more items to buy, more social and solo options, a different video game to play, totally revamped GUIs for a lot of the game. etc etc.

In other words, it’s the same concept and approach as the first game, done with a massively higher level of polish, effort, time and consideration. I can’t imagine anyone who liked K1 not liking K2, and the plan is that some people who didn’t even try the K1 demo (or didn’t enjoy it) will look at K2 with fresh eyes.

That’s the plan…

“bad wolf”

Here is what got improved / changed / fixed on Kudos 2 today:

• FIXED *** re-jig when romantic offers are made so they come after a social event

• FIXED *** only highlight npcs for romantic invites if they are your partner

• FIXED *** heart icon not drawing on NPC window or icon.

• FIXED *** Activities should be unlocked based on how many social events you host

• FIXED *** Gender not right in job title

• FIXED *** Charisma should be reduced by irritating people

• FIXED *** its too easy to boost relationships at the start

• FIXED *** post mortem relationship change meter needs visible midpoint

• FIXED *** people shouldnt say they had nothing in common with other people if its just you and them.

• FIXED *** locked activities are still shown in the list.

• FIXED *** expanded skills interface is screwed up.

• FIXED *** tv subscription cancellation dialog doesn’t trigger

• FIXED *** correct avatar name not saved properly

• FIXED *** first day of new job doesnt seem to raise stress

• FIXED *** short bus journeys are too cheap

• FIXED *** after work screen title is in wrong place

• FIXED *** staying in reading a book should boost loneliness and its not.

• FIXED *** commute distance should be shown on job instance details.

• FIXED *** need to show the controlling attribute as well as the displayed one when viewing debug windows

• FIXED *** make extraverts more likely to meet new people doing solo activities and vice versa.

Plus a long palythrough gave me mroe stuff for my todo list. This game is HUGE, there is just too much to do…

I’ve done two one-hour play-throughs of Kudos 2 today, fixing bugs and tweaks as I have encountered them. I still need some more artwork, and tons and tons of bug-testing, plus some game play redesigning to make the actual value of kudos in the game more relevant. here’s my fix list for today:

FIXED *** shrink mind-state button doesn’t work
FIXED *** takes forever to build muscles
FIXED *** movie eat popcorn button needs to shuffle up 4 pixels
FIXED *** fitness maybe degrades a bit quick, esp from weightlifting
FIXED *** if some social event costs 0 and we have negative funds we still cant do it :(
FIXED *** calendar “time for two activities” doesn’t update
FIXED *** soccer needs higher max invitees
FIXED *** food item tooltips are wrong
FIXED *** more police days should be fit ones.
FIXED *** police workers should be immune to muggings surely?
FIXED *** tooltip for job search needs to indicate it shows current job details too
FIXED *** if you keep repeating the same activity again and again, you should get bored
FIXED *** maybe a police sound for when you do the police job?
FIXED *** do sunglasses have any effect?
FIXED *** golf should boost fitness a little bit

This is basically the way I work these days, keep playing the game with textpad open to make a list of stuff that’s broken. then when the game gets unplayable due to one of them, go through and fix them all, then repeat. The game already feels pretty addictive, and filled with stuff, which is good. It’s so much better than the original game.

In other news I see that a major games portal have cloned Kudos : Rock Legend. Meh. Mine has more personality. mine is FROM THE HEART. :D