Making it Better: Improvements to Needs, Emotions and Social Interactions

Hello everyone! Jérémie here, hoping you’re having a delightful Friday! In the last weeks, I’ve been working with Alex on tweaks and improvements to our live mode systems following feedback from our internal playtests. It’s really cool to have people on the team play the live mode and take notes on what they think works well (and doesn’t work as well), and then take the time to iterate and improve! 

In this post, I’ll guide you through some of these changes and improvements, as usual, this is for Patrons only, so please do not share this info! Thank you!

Emotion Changes

Overall, the emotion system was well received by our testers, so there weren’t a ton of things we needed to change or tweak on that front. The main thing people said is that it wasn’t really clear which emotion was the ‘main’ emotion our character was feeling. In our old interface, you had all the emotions in a grid which made it much harder to parse without taking the time to mouse over everything, but now it’s much clearer which one is impacting your Para the most.

When your Para is Happy, things are probably going well for them.

Alex made this cool tooltip that we’ll probably use everywhere in the game now for detailed numerical breakdowns of things. Emotions are a perfect candidate for this because multiple things in the game change how your character feels and you’ll be able to see them all listed like that. I’ve also added that same tooltip for the skill learning speed breakdown, it’s very versatile!

You can see all the reasons your Para has an emotion if you mouse over it, which will help you work on fixing unpleasant situations or focus on things that make them happy.

Together Card Changes

Together Cards had another good pass of tweaks, mainly on the ways things are displayed and organized on-screen, but some new features were added as well. One of the things our playtesters (and some people in the Patreon post where we explained our changes) pointed out  is that it wasn’t clear who was using which card, something we’re trying to fix by adding some spacing between the characters when you’re choosing a card and adding that little arrow like if the cards were speech bubbles.

 Now it’s clearer that Marvin is the Overjoyed Para who can do a special Overjoyed Introduction while Maggie is the Serious Para with a more Formal one. Eagle-eyed viewers can also notice that our Para’s main emotion is also shown here now, making it easy to know the general mood of the group!

We also improved how the card results are shown, animating the whole thing and making this screen disappear automatically after a while so the player doesn’t have to click the OK button that was present before. (This is a setting that can be enabled back in the options menu if you want).

 In this gif, you can see how the results are popping out for each character, the speed that these appear depends on the number of characters in the group.

One last big thing we changed was figuring out more ways to let characters choose the direction they want the conversation to go without overloading the list of options with unwanted choices. If you wanted to romance another Para, for instance, you would either need to get your Para in a flirty mood through various interactions; have a specific want to flirt with someone, or use a personality ability to set the mood, as it were. We’ve added another way to change the tone of the conversation; card variants. Specific cards will have multiple ‘versions’ that you can cycle through and decide if that compliment is just friendly or flirty.

 In this gif, you can see one card with multiple potential uses. This gives you more options and you won’t need to wait to get other cards to get what you want.

Wants and Needs

I’ve added more Wants to the game in the past few weeks as well, making sure that we have a good foundation of goals for our characters to strive towards related to their Talents, Social Skills and Vibes, alongside more Wants related to their emotions.

Needs were also slightly tweaked too, with a few more gameplay effects added, like being able to replenish your Bathroom and Hunger Need at work. This was pretty easy to do with the way our live mode mechanics work together and it totally made sense to us.

Here, my Para is automatically filling up their Hunger need because it's lunch time at work.

Besides all of this, there were other tweaks and additions we’ve made to the game, so it’s not an entirely exhaustive list, but that’s what I got for you this week! Hope you enjoyed it and don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions or comments! As usual, have a great weekend, and I’ll see you in my next post!

Jérémie