Hello everyone!!
Studio 94.4 has been hard at work on Don't Kill the College Student (DKTCS) and we have some exciting things to share with all five of you out there reading this.
WHAT'S NEW?
- Have you ever wanted to playtest our game and just not quite had three other friends? Suffer no longer - DKTCS is now 2-4 player, so you can play with all your friend groups of various sizes.
- Have you ever wanted to take a break while playtesting our game? Suffer no longer - DKTCS can now pause, too! Excellent news for your bladder.
- The process of getting hungry and using food has had a makeover...
- ...and general feelings like hunger, pain, and sleepiness have gotten a lot louder and clearer. You can take better care of yourself when you know what you're feeling.
- Sleep had some mysterious buffs that made no sense, so those are gone. Sleep easy.
- Sleep now has a new, much more transparent effect: health is built up by the body players on the right, and given to the social player all at once when they sleep. So be sure to get your beauty rest - you need it to survive!
- Liver and muscles are now collidable, so dropping resources off with them has been improved.
- The stats bars in the UI have officially split up. Now you only see what you need to see (read: what we want you to see).
- A flood of new assets have arrived, making the maps less Weirdly Three Dimensional.
- The body map now has a background that shows where it is: the surroundings of the student! For that sweet, sweet immersion.
- The number one thing Overcooked 2 had over Overcooked is throwing. We now have throwing.
...WHY?
Re:pause and Re:multiplayer: We're in the process of making our game more robust and natural to navigate - title screens, pausing, tutorial-skip buttons, etc. It's an important courtesy to our players that we take seriously.
Re:hunger: Many playtesters expressed confusion that food spawned right in the stomach. Which... was certainly very valid. What was originally conceived as a convenience ended up mostly being a confusing anomaly. In reaction to this, we have revamped the hunger process: food follows a more predictable lifetime of spawning in the mouth, traveling down to the stomach, becoming energy, and (maybe) going out the other end.
In fact, many playtesters didn't quite get the memo of why certain effects were occurring: namely, why were they dying so much? Many of our ideas were just not coming across clearly. This update sees us trying to bring out what needs to be seen by each type of player: the student knows that they are under some type of debuff due to their actions (not sleeping, not eating, not not drinking), while the body players understand how to relieve these effects.
Re:sleep: Fun fact: sleeping used to give the body players a speed buff, denoted by a trailrenderer. Another fun fact: No one noticed or understood. So that's been iterated upon! Now, to encourage sleeping and cooperation, sleep is like a baton pass: the body players' work will build up a payload of health, but it only takes effect on the student when they go to sleep. At that time, they get it all like a windfall! Wow, sleep really is amazing! Eight hours a night, people!
Re:organs: Our inputs got a lot of feedback, prime among them that dropping resources into the organs was difficult and annoying. Given that they had no colliders and you just had to very precisely drop things on the floor, this made sense. Now players can run into them and the organs will receive with open arms, so to speak.
Re:stats: We reconsidered what each player had to know, and given how we want the student to focus on external success and the body players to really hone in on keeping them alive, we decided to split the bars: grades and social on the left, health on the right. This will hopefully also reduce some confusion, because players don't have much context for understanding the other bars.
COMING UP!
- Student Life We're adding some flavor! You'll have to plan around our upcoming schedule system, as well as special events that put certain stats in the hot seat.
- Rad New Maps Four buildings are not enough to live out an intellectually stimulating, socially fulfilled, healthy life.
- Better Tutorial Player guidance will be getting a spotlight.
Thanks for tuning in!
