 of finishing one Adventure and exiting to the Calender; you instead finish the Adventure and go strait into the next Adventure in the chain, with no loss of time. You should only exit to the Calender when you fail an Adventure or finish the entire chain.
This creates a check-point system in combination with the current implementation; so if you fail half-way through a chain, you can pick up where you left off at another time.
As for balance, I think you already decrease a skill if you fail a skill check, if not then throw that in and your done.
Finally, is it possible to implement this in year one or do I have to wait for year two?
There's nothing technically which would prevent us from doing so- the reason we did not is so that you had time to adequately train, cast your spells, etc. so that there's a more reasonable explanation as to why you can pick the Adventure up again. We might experiment in creating a similar Adventure to what you describe in one of the DLC- and, once the Tools have been released, you can easily create (or adapt) adventures to suit your tastes.
We're glad to hear you enjoyed the game, and thank you!
And if we can only adventure once a day, getting one skill up (assuming one pass), wouldn't the player be better off training?
And wouldn't starting and failing each adventure just to find which skills we need waste both actions and result in no net change in stats?
By the way, can you make adventures that take up all the actions in a day?
You are correct, although shortly you will be able to tell the Difficulty (if not the Skills) required by the Adventure.
Mechanically, you cannot create an Action which costs more than 1 Phase.
Ok, just a few random questions and I'll call it a night.
I notice that there's no nested drop-down lists in the menus, is this an engine limitation?
Is the Emperor Sphinx action working properly? The lore says it should increase a skill I select, a random skill, and a skill I don't know, but I only get feedback for one random skill and I don't think my selected skill is increased at all.
Can Random Events be linked into a chain? And can different options create different branches of Events? Oh, and can Events be linked to actions?
When are the modding tools coming out?
Will we be able to modify the in-game music?
And pretty please can we have a volume control?
Thank-you so much for all your fast replies and patience.
As it is right now (Patch 2) any place that gives 2 or more skillpoint training by visiting it is much stronger than actions/abilitys that gives 3 Skillpoint Training but forces you to 1 place because you can chose if you study, train or using a other action in the first.
1) Actions/Abilitys like the liberarys that gives 3 Skills right now changes to visitng places that gives 2 Skillpoint training. Only Places that gives 2+X, is it Money a other skill, study ect., changes to a acction/ability with fixed place.
My personal tendency is toward the first because else the difficultys of many rolls especial toward the end of Adventures have to reduce.
I also have 2 things about for the End of the game. When the games sould be imported for year 2 then one sould be able to make a save after the last day or else the last 3 timeslots are wasted. Also I got a strange resoult in my last game my Int was Improved the most in this game so I sayed it but at the start it was at 1 so one cant say that this char was smart at the start but the text just did this ^^, perhaps linking the answaer to oans quest at the start with the end.
Congratulations on putting out a detailed, fun life sim that is only like one other I've ever seen in its conceptual design and mechanics: King of Dragon Pass. I've just purchased Academagia, though I played it for a while, earlier today--because I discovered a relative of mine (who shall remain anonymous) downloaded it from a pirate site. We've had words about this. I then got interested, watched her for a couple of hours, left for a while, then came back and bought it. Not for her. (Her mother now knows what's happened.) For me.
Reading a few threads here, I observed that you're genuinely helpful, and seeking courteous input.
With that in mind, I've got a few suggestions of my own to offer. Just some first impressions, but I hope they'll contain one or two bits of advice that could count in handy.
First: $25 is simply too much to ask people to pay without a demo. $10? Even there, most casual sites allow limited play demos. $25 is not a lot of money to ask for a game--but for buying a game whose gameplay you've only seen on a few intstructional videos, I'd think it is. Ironically, I would never have bought Academagia if I didn't have an opportunity to see it closeup, first. If you can make and distribute a demo, I think you'd really up your sales, but that's just my take on it. It's entirely up to you, of course.
Some lack of easy access to important information. When I'm casting a spell and can add phemes, I've no idea what most of them do. It would be nice if hovering the mouse over one, or clicking on a part of it, brought up a brief description. Similarly, when I'm choosing a location I'm aware of to perform an action because of its aura, it would be nice to know right away what benefits that location offers, as well as the likelihood of getting caught. Instead of having to bring up all my known locations under my character, first.
Which reminds me: could you put the different categories of info about each character under separate tabs for that person? Having to scroll through seemingly endless lists of every spell, action, etc that they know just to get one piece of information near the bottom can get a bit tedious.
The small text font is a real issue on our 1600 x 900 widescreen resolution. It's tiny, and I hope this can be fixed. Lowering the overall Windows resolution didn't help--on the contrary, it made it impossible to select places to train, study, etc, as they move off the right side of the screen.
The graphics, in general, I really like. They convey the storybook "Once upon a tale" atmosphere well, and I could wish there were more of them to head up your events and rooms. The portrait graphics, though, seem a bit too stylized for their own good. Nearly everybody seems to have a familial resemblance to everybody else. There's little real...expressiveness to each face, if you follow me. And I don't mean evil stereotypes, but any means. But genuinely different seeming characters. The kinds of portraits that stay with you.
Gameplay is smooth. I liked the lore fluff: it really added atmosphere! Several skills do not appear active, however, such as bonding with familiars. It might be best to strip those from your code, or color them differently and make them unselectable. Nobody should have to discover that they've been wasting valuable sessions on things that don't work.
I'm confused about Explore. I'm seemingly allowed to choose where I want to go twice, when I choose it as an activity. One gives me all the action locations I know. The other gives me only five much larger, generic locations. Invariably, whatever I place in the first choice affects nothing. Only the second does, but it's still a bit confusing. And later: I'm told by my guide that I can compete to receive instructors' favor in classes, but I've never seen a point of favor awarded for this. If it's broken, that should probably be said up front. Otherwise, players are wasting useful classtime having their avatars compete, instead of actually learn.
Concerning your classmates: a great selection of characters, with good descriptions. I just wish I had a better sense why one would befriend a character when his sympatico level was 5, while another wouldn't do so with a level of 10. If there's a hidden mechanic, it needs to be stated up front, because this is pretty frustrating.
I really like the way your skills can make a difference in events, and how some of these differ in the different colleges. (You might want to add short info about each college to the lore, by the way.) Color coding is an excellent way of helping the player to realize they're best options during those events. The game flows smoothly, and has that appeal of a strong title: you always think there's time for one more round of gameplay.
I"m looking forward to your content patch, and your DLC. It's really nice to see such a distinctive title, and one that displays such a lot of imagination. Good job!
1) No, but it's not coded that way at the moment.
2) Yes, it is working correctly- you only raise your Choice of Skill if you succeed at the Wit Roll.
3) Random Events cannot be linked in a chain, only Adventures.
4) We aren't sure you- end of September or early October, I would guess.
5) Yes, once you have the Tools.
6) It's a good suggestion, we'll see what we can do.
Thanks for the comments. The vast majority of these have been suggested by other Academagians,