Hello, glad you could make it. Do you know, why I called you here?

First of all, the work you’ve done here is amazing, and I’m really happy that you’re attending this school. But unfortunately there is one thing. I’m really sorry but today is the time for another post about the progress for Mind the School. I know it will be challenging… for both of us, but together we can get through it and come out stronger and better informed than before.

So let’s get through it in a structured manner and start with…

0.1.3 Release résumé

I would say the release of version 0.1.3 went rather good. I got a lot of good feedback.

Of course there was a lot of negative feedback as well. Most of the criticism was about the lack of content and the current stat progression. Those are points that are absolutely understandable, the only thing I can say about that is, I’m working on it.

The lack of content is just due to the fact that the game is just not that long out yet. I started work on the game back in April 2023. Most of the time I spent on creating the framework of the game and all of the mechanisms to make the game as easily expandable as possible and to make it really easy to populate the game with content. Something that definitely pays off now. When creating an event, 10-20% of the work goes into integrating the event in the game and the rest goes into rendering the images. That just shows the power of the framework. Still I decided to release the game in September with only the framework and the game introduction in place. Something I received a lot of criticism for but something I don’t regret doing. Since then I implemented a lot of changes in the game. Changes I was only able to implement thanks to your feedback. Since I’m working on this project all by myself, I’m just missing the different perspectives. A developer is always a bit biased when it comes to it’s project. That’s why in a team there are other people testing your project. Since I don’t have a team, I’m misusing you peeps as my lab rats.

Now creating events takes a lot of time. Not necessarily the texts themselves, when I got an idea, I pretty much finish them in a short time. The most time goes into rendering the images. I’m still very inexperienced with it and just can’t throw them out in a matter of minutes. For that reason I’m limited in the amount of content I can create each update, since I don’t want to make you peeps wait too long for each update.

Now the problem with the stats. The stat problem is based on two factors. 1. The lack of game progression and 2. the lack of content.

First, the game being in it’s early state does not have a lot of in-game progress yet. The current version progresses only up to level 1 of the planned 10 levels. So there currently is no real use for the stats right now. Something that will change once more progress and more options are availble.

Second, the game just lacks diversity. There just aren’t enough events, so that creates a sense of repetition. I try to make it less repetitive by adding different variants to most events, so they don’t feel as repetitive, but of course that has limited success.

So my proposal to you is, don’t focus that much on the stats, play the game, enjoy the events already added. There just is no need for stat grinding. Not yet, even though I want to prevent the stats from being too grindy.

I know this might sound like me making excuses, but I am really not. I just want to make clear, I am aware of all the issues and all the shortcomings of my game. I’m often reminded of them in the time after each release. Especially since I take my time to go through all the messages and to answer most of them. It’s always mentally exhausting, depressing and anxiety inducing every time I get a notification, but I think at this time of the development such feedback is crucial and will benefit the game. So I keep struggling my way through it.

Now the good part of the release. This time there were almost no bugs to fix. At least no bugs I have been made aware of (￢з￢). There was a small amount of bugs, but only 2 or 3, so huge success!

Plans for 0.1.4

Now for version 0.1.4 I planned a few things.

The biggest change will be the introduction of composite events. I already talked about them in an earlier post but again a small overview of what composite events are.

A composite event is a different kind of event. The difference is that a composite events is put together by multiple smaller event fragments. This allows for longer random events with the events being more divers, flexible and less repetitive. Imagine a class teaching event. In the composite event it would consist of 3 event parts. One running at the beginning of the class, one during the learning phase and on at the end of the class. Now for each part there are multiple fragments which are chosen randomly. I think you understand where I’m going with this.

Now fortunately with the event system being as well built as it is (pats myself on the back), it was really easy implementing the new event type. With that said, it is almost fully implemented. Just needs some testing and then I need to integrate the new event type into the gallery system, which takes the most work.

For that I ask all of the peeps who already made use of the gallery to give me their feedback, whether good or bad, ideas or improvements. The gallery system while being extremely flexible and absolutely simple when using, it is very complicated and extremely sensible in the inner works, so I’d rather touch it as rarely as possible, so if you have improvements or ideas, I’d fancy putting them in now, while I have to work on it anyways.

Now for other changes in 0.1.4, I want to add more events to the office building, mostly covering the organisational stuff, like earning money, providing counselling sessions, looking at papers etc.

Also some fun time with Emiko. Or some happy accidents during counselling:

Now that is all for today. Thanks for reading through all that stuff.

If you have feedback or just want to talk to me join my Discord! I try to answer on all platforms I’m on but discord just works best for me and enables me to answer as fast as possible. For the Patreon DMs, I only get the notification hours later, even for all the follow-ups. But on discord I’m always able to answer, except for when I’m sleeping :P

Now that’s all! Thanks. Smell ya later!