Update for July

Hi all!

For the end of last month I was mostly working on game two, unfortunately still on the UI which isn't exactly enjoyable work. I've made some significant improvements but it'll be a long time yet before there's anything to show people.

I've now shifted onto Newlife again, and for the next release I'm doing one of the main improvements for this major update: consequences for poor performance.

Specifically, I'm working on a scene where the PC can be fired or demoted if her performance dips below a satisfactory level. There will, of course, be sexual ways to avoid such consequences. This, like the promotion scenes, is a general career scene that'll apply in both sales and in the office-work career that I'll be adding soon.

I'm also going to have to do some significant rework on how performance is handled. Right now performance is mainly based on skills, but skills are also what determine promotions so if you've been promoted to a job then you can usually do it well. This means that as it stands the "poor performance" event would almost never fire.

It is possible for performance to temporarily dip based on events (e.g. annoying the important client) but that will need some re-balancing to make it more impactful. I also want some way for players to be promoted "out of their depth" more easily.

One idea is to have an alternative work approach (along side "work hard", "slack off" etc) where the PC plays office-politics instead of actually learning to do her job better. This would increase a counter that would count towards performance and promotions, but wouldn't increase the underlying skills. I could then add events that suppress this counter for a week (e.g. scrutiny from higher ups, or the PC making a mistake that's too obvious to deny). This would let players who want to live dangerously get faster promotions than through normal play, but at the cost of getting in trouble when they're found out.

As a final note, I've enabled the temporary-trait-effects mechanic for custom scenes, so people wanting mad-science accidents can write them from this point.

To make this really good, I'd like at some point to add a bunch of small special events for the various bad traits so players couldn't easily ignore them. For example, a character with the "baby-crazy" trait might have an event if she goes too long without unprotected sex where she gets a lot of stress unless she goes out and sleeps with the first guy who hits on her.

I won't be adding this for the next release though, as it has nothing to do with work or careers. Besides, temp-traits are still only applied in one place. Still, those are my aspirations for how this game-mechanic should work in the long-term.

Well, that's what's going on with me. I hope you're all doing well and having a good summer!