Update 11/12 - School Test Time!

I am currently working on the mechanics and presentation for school tests and Track Meets!  This means drawing new scene backgrounds, new animated sprites, and writing a new music theme that plays during these scenes.

In the current demo, Chiyoko can spend time studying and exercising.  This increases her grades, but currently has no effect since no tests take place during the demo!  Originally, there was going to be a Track Meet at the end of the week, but for multiple reasons I decided it got rained out.  This was because the last two days of the demo were very crowded (Meeting Haruko and fighting the Emerald Knight) and I was running out of time to finish in time for the Game Jam's end.

Now that I have more time, I have decided to extend the demo by one day, making previous ending take place on Sunday instead.  Saturday is reserved specifically for the Track Meet, as an introduction to the game's testing mechanics.  These events are pretty straightforward so far - the more time Chiyoko has spend studying or training, the better she will do!  But studying takes time away from her Magical Girl Training, AND drains her SPIRIT (which slows her EXP gain, and can lead to bad events if it gets too low.)  Failing a test or bombing a Track Meet will lower her SPIRIT even more, but doing well will give her a small spirit boost.

I want this mechanic to give the player things to consider when deciding how Chiyoko spends her free time!  I am also considering adding some extra bits to the testing mechanic, which may include "Cramming" for tests (expending a large amount of SPIRIT the night before to do better on a test) or allowing Chiyoko to push herself harder during Track Meets, spending SPIRIT to get a better result.  I'm also considering adding a very small randomness element to the result, but nothing that's going to penalize the player for the work they've put in.

The tricky part is balancing the effort vs reward in this mechanic, as I want the penalty for failure to outweigh the bonus for success, so that the player has to let Chiyoko relax and have fun once in a while, instead of just acing tests and coasting off the SPIRIT bonus from that.  So the numbers will probably be changing a lot before I release this new version of the demo.

The Track Meet scene can be viewed in the video above.  The scene is a work in progress, but all test scenes will most likely look something like this.

As always, thanks for reading, and have a great day!