Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Theme

  A Game Development simulator…a pretty good one and stressful one at that.

  Gameplay

  The gameplay is really solid and pretty self-explanatory for the most part. It is however surprising that it’s hard to reduce stress in a decent way. There’s also no clear indication when objects in Rin’s shop restock, putting a wrench on time management plans.

  Presentation

  The game is short and sweet. The maps that do exist are polished and I’m pretty happy with this. If I have some qualms, it’s basically the menus. There are some things that are unclear and should’ve been presented better:

  • Where to increase specific stats. Like I didn’t know that I can increase Creativity/Writing/Intellect in the tiny bookshelf. Or reduce stress on the couch. In real life, I would’ve taken a nap in my bed since it’s more comfortable.
  • When I accidentally select the wrong option, I have to go back all the way to the first choice and it’s annoying.

  Engagement 

  I wanted Ending 5/5 so bad and got it.

  Total – 70/80

• 47/80

  Writing can break the game giving you no need to sleep and until you hit around 45 writing, infinite time. Flavor text is inaccurate, making it harder to judge what to do. Blog is broken and can only be done once. Art Contest auto fails if you finish the game early (it gets stuck)? Pre-run campaign shows not enough money when at 3/3.
  

  The shop never seems to restock, only gains new items later on. At least one sprite doesn't feel like it quite matches with the image provided. It also feels like the couch is one of the worst ways to use time. I was honestly expecting more of a princess maker type schedule system. While the current system isn't bad, it feels really slow and eventually a bit tedious.

  Also, the motivation stat doesn't feel like it does anything important.  I got what is likely the perfect ending, but that was with abusing the system to the maximum.

• PRESENTATION
  Graphics are a mix of different packs and free resources with the RTP files. It all fit quite well together, except for the portraits who looked a lot like they would fit better in a romance visual novel. They were a little jarring, especially the mother's portrait who looked very... young and sexy. The mapping was alright for what was there. You only had two maps to see, so there wasn't really a showcase of ability. It was fine.

  Sound was okay. There wasn't really much atmospheric going on but what was there wasn't jarring and worked well. The same with music - there weren't many tunes but they didn't get old over time and they fit the scenario well enough.

  Writing was quite good. No issues with spelling, grammar and punctuation that I could see. The dialogue was alright. It didn't really enhance the characterisation of the character too much but that wasn't really a big point of the game anyway.

  The story is basically more suited to a simulation so there really wasn't much more than framework. That said, it made sense and worked for the scenario.

  GAMEPLAY
  Gameplay consisted of interacting with events and managing time in order to reach a goal.

  The general aim of the game was to complete a game. And to aim for $10,000 to be made from sales from it. This was a difficult task first time around as you weren't sure how things interacted and what you'd need to do in order to get your skills up. In fact, I didn't find a way to make money until past midway through the time (60 days).

  The game gave you three options of difficulty, which was nice.

  You basically had a set amount of things you needed to do in order to complete the game, and each took an amount of time to do. However, to get a good game created you need to have the skills to enhance your game so you need to devote some time to skill building as well as popularity and advertising.

  So you could choose to build up your overall skills in an area, or devote time and money to one particular skill. And you had to fight stress levels, so you needed to make sure you rested or engaged in stress relieving activities as well.

  There was an autosave feature (as well as manual saving) that activated at the start of each day.

  There was a bug when it came to blog creation, in that it only let you make one and then it bugged out for the rest of the game.

  ENGAGEMENT
  It was a bit frustrating at times when you wanted to do one thing but didn't have enough time or you were too stressed, especially as there was no way to know what level of stress was too much for certain activities. It was also a bit annoying that certain activities didn't remove stress when they could have - for example, playing an instrument or watching youtube videos and the like. It would have been nice to have some extra stress-relief that also helped build up some aspect instead of continually deplete, even if it unlocked at a later date.

  Overall, though, it was an interesting simulation and I was looking forward to seeing how I went when I finally released my game. ...Not well, apparently. But them's the breaks. Knowing how to play, I'd probably do better a second time around.

  THEME
  The theme of the game basically focussed around creation, and it did well to convey that. It also touched on time management and following your dreams, which were also well conveyed in both mechanics and story.

  63/80
  

• This was a cute idea and started out as a lot of fun. The music was nice and the interface was well laid out. What got me sour on this one, however, was the stress level. I constantly had to put aside work on the game to manage stress and it didn’t help that you can apparently only buy the anti-stress tonic once. Maybe it made sense since his mom was breathing down his neck, but I still felt like I was spending an inordinate amount of time managing stress instead of doing the game making, which wasn’t what I expected when I booted this up. It’s got a lot of potential but I think it needs some more fine-tuning.
  

  Score: 46/80