Re: [SLG] Jack-o-nine-tails
Maybe its just me but this game is surprisingly difficult to learn
That's a perfectly valid complaint, and you should
never hesitate to say so! Game developers often have trouble recognizing the strangeness of their own creations because they've grown accustomed to it. In fact, if you had somehow brought up your concern during the game's early development stages then the final product might have been much more playable.
In this case, the game's simulation (the set of statistics, how they interrelate, and how they change over time) is pretty reasonable. It's complex, but it gives new players a basic path (buy slave, train slave, sell slave) while presenting the experienced player with a lot of depth *. For example, it's possible to employ a gentle training strategy which focuses on "winning hearts and minds", or to be a "harsh but fair" disciplinarian, or to go all-out "reign of terror." The player can focus on cultivating a single perfect waifu, or they can treat women as disposable objects. You can build up an awesome mansion with sexy maids to tend to your whims, or explore the city's subcultures and try to climb its social ranks, or live alone in a shack while you train to be the world's greatest gladiator. **
The main problem is that the UI does a lousy job of telegraphing; the full
consequences of pushing a button are often obscure and non-obvious. This isn't a complaint about the translation - many of the translators have actually
added contextual information (such as the +1, +2, etc markers on the various Reward and Punishment options, and the description of nutrition mechanics on the Status page).
Consider the grand strategy games by
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. These games are
infamous for being incredibly complex, having confusing GUIs, and being very difficult to learn. Even so, when the player is asked to make a decision they'll be presented with clear options (e.g. "Legitimize your bastard" vs "Exile him from court") and a tooltip which explains the direct effects of each option.
OldHuntsman has some neat ideas and an
amazing work-ethic but ultimately he's still an amateur game developer. His effort is focused on a few aspects of the game (e.g. world-building, simulation, sandbox RP) but other aspects are neglected because he doesn't have the interest (e.g. GUI) or the resources (e.g. artwork, sound).
The "artwork" point is especially important. Imagine that you removed all of the anime images from the game, and replaced them with a very simple "stick figure" status image which is procedurally generated and which shows a few properties or statistics (e.g. dirtiness, weight, scars, bruising, breast size, branding, pregnancy, perhaps a smilie-face indicator for mood). Players would then recognize that the artwork is an incomplete representation of the actual underlying data, and they'd dig into the details -- for instance, by clicking the "How do you feel?" button and reading through the responses.
By contrast, the current artwork tends to
mislead the player. The girl shown on-screen is consistently slim, clean, well-manicured, and happy (even if the simulation data says "obese, filthy, filled with parasites, and miserable"). In sex scenes your partner will usually be shown as enthusiastic, or sometimes a bit shy, but rarely upset (even if the simulation says "in pain, terrified, and suicidal"). When she cooks a meal you see a bubbling stewpot (even if you've run out of ingredients and the resulting meal will be F-rank garbage). When the artwork clashes with the simulation data, players will tend to conclude that the game is just buggy (or that the text has been mistranslated) rather than realizing that the artwork is inadequate. And that's assuming that players even
notice the text instead of just skipping it all.
The simulation relies heavily on hidden patterns and trends: if a girl remains unhappy for several days then she can fall into despair; if she's consistenly underfed then her health will suffer. This isn't just statistics, either: the game includes a great deal of variation in the girl's possible dialog responses (and the "flavor text" which accompanies the interation scenes) based on her attributes and her status. Unfortunately the artwork isn't granular enough to convey such nuances, so new players may not even realize that that the trends
exist until they see a girl suffer mindbreak or get killed by a chestburster. Perversely, the UI devotes much more screen space to the pretty pictures than it does to the informative text content (which get crammed into a tiny bar at the bottom).
If you treat the artwork as simple
fanservice then you'll be fine. But if you
trust it to deliver information about the state of the game (which most of us do because video gaming is a visual medium), then you'll tend to get blindsided by a sudden catastrophe and you may be forced to start over. Worst of all, the game doesn't use such moments to explain its mechanics or suggest alternatives***; the player may be forced to start over
without an actual plan for "okay, here's how I'll avoid that problem in the future." If the same pattern repeats, then the player will eventually say "this game sucks. I quit." That's not the fault of lazy players, it's just bad design.
* Compare/contrast with SlaveMaker, which uses a simple simulation with visible relationship (e.g. training Refinement will always reduce Athletics). Players can easily understand SlaveMaker's mechanics and figure out an optimal training strategy, which limits replay value. To keep players engaged, SlaveMaker throws in random events, an ever-expanding roster of characters, and special victory conditions. SlaveMaker is much easier for a new player to pick up, but its mechanics alone won't sustain the player's interest. And much of its content can be accessed only through "gimmick" gameplay (e.g. repeatedly visiting the same place in order to trigger a random event, or minmaxing certain attributes in order to trigger a certain ending scene).
** The one caveat here is that the game isn't very well balanced, presumably due to a lack of traditional playtesting and the fact that most players opt for sandbox play. Several posters in the thread have complained about the difficulty of earning a consistent revenue and the need to rapidly train D-grade slaves in order to turn a profit. One of the main reasons that I wrote the trainer was to allow for more flexibility in gameplay styles.
*** For example, the text for the chestburster scene could include the following postscript: "You've heard that there are some clever doctors in the Serpentine Quarter. Perhaps they could do something about these fiendish parasites." It hints at the fact that this was event was preventable (rather than a random "fuck you") and it encourages the players to investigate a game mechanic which they may have been neglecting. Of course, it undermines verisimitude and RP (because the player character might not actually know such things) but a well-designed game will include such help/tutorial elements regardless. Roguelike trial-and-error gameplay is acceptable only if players are given the means to learn from their mistakes.
