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First game demo

  • calunio
  • 03/22/2020 05:53 PM
  • 1361 views
My original intent was to not release a demo for THERAPIST: Mind Manager. I felt that it's the kind of game that either you get the full experience, or you don't quite get it. But with everything that's going on, thinking long term became something of an issue for me. Not knowing when and how I'm going to finish it, I decided to release a demo with what I have.

DOWNLOAD DEMO

I think of this as not just a demo, but also a testing version of the game. The fact that all game systems are custom and event-based opens to a lot of bug possibilities. I have tested it myself extensively, but there is always one thing or another that escapes my screening. So I appreciate bug reports. Not being a native speaker, I’m also open to reports on issues with spelling, grammar and overall smoothness of the dialog. Feedbacks on everything game-experience related are also welcome.

Demo x Final version
This is a fairly robust demo, and it contains much of what you should expect from the final version. In addition to the demo version, the final version of the game will include:
  • More NPCs

  • More story events

  • Twice the duration (the demo is 15 days long, the final version will be 30).

  • A possibly different and more varied soundtrack.

  • An extra minigame.

  • 3 endings


I'll keep working on it. Hopefully fueled by some motivating feedback.
Estimated finish date is June 2020.

Posts

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I played a little and I'm interested in the therapy sessions, however I did not enjoy the management segments, to the point that I lost interest in playing past the third day.

I think that the biggest hurdle is the lack of modern sensibilities in those segments and in the interface. I feel like I'm playing an early 90s strategy game where the conditions and results of my choices are difficult to understand and keep track of, and sometimes difficult to even notice.

I'd suggest watching some gameplay footage of a game like Persona 4 Golden to see how it handles and presents the relationship building, social stats raising, the teachers' questions during class, the informative prompts when an important choice or situation is about to be presented, etc.
Maybe you could be inspired by this game or another and think of some ways to improve the gameplay experience.

I'm sorry I don't have many positive things to say about the game at the moment, especially when you haven't received any other feedback yet.
Thanks for the feedback! I don't mind negative feedback at all, and that's one of the reasons I released a demo!
But I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "lack of modern sensibilities in the interface". You mean you can't understand the effects of the activities (like eating or watching TV) on your stats? What's not clear?
I have watched people playing persona, but I'm not sure I understand the suggestion.
It might be difficult for me to explain this in English but, as I understand it, modern sensibilities refer to every little thing that makes the game more user-friendly or that avoid frustration or boredom.

A simple example of that would be the speed at which text shows up. In any game, text that moves slower than the speed at which the player can read tends to be frustrating and after some time affects motivation to keep playing.
Other examples include: the ability to skip cutscenes, the ability to save the game anywhere, the ability to reload a saved game anytime, having a quest tab in the menu that lets you review undergoing quests' objectives, etc.

In this game's case, the most frustration I felt came from the interface:

Even on full screen, a few things are very small and hard to look at, especially the calendar, the hour and schedule.
I would prefer if I had a menu I could bring up on screen that shows me all of that information large and clear. Every useful bit of information such as which patient do I meet everyday, what was the core theme of every therapy session (like patient file notes), areas' business hours, all ongoing appointments, etc. could be viewable in that menu.

The stats are small and far from the textbox or onscreen action. This might sound silly but it's true: when I focus on one corner of the screen I cannot see what's going on at the other end. The monochromatic palette also doesn't help in making the important objects catch the eye.

When my stats or money change, it doesn't tell me by how much: I have to remember what my stat was a second ago and do the math.
I have to write down the effects of eating each food and every action if I want to keep track of them because it doesn't tell me on screen.
How about adding a message that says something like "You ate the cupcake. Your Mood went up by X. Your Anxiety when down by Y."

The posture loss event was also impossible to notice before it was too late. I'd appreciate that the warning about that would be a message that pops up when the first case of posture loss happens, letting me know at that very moment how to recompose myself. Kind of like a tutorial, in fact. That would have eased me into that specific mechanic.

More transparency would be nice too, such as telling me how much time will pass if I pick this or that option, or telling me when my Mood or Stamina is too low to be reading or exercising at the moment, etc.
That would avoid the frustration of wasting time, stamina and money on actions that lead nowhere, plus I wouldn't have to write down the requirements of every action to keep track of them either.

One time I wanted to go to the office from the library at 12:15. The taxi driver told me the office was closed so I had to do something else. I knew I couldn't spend too much time elsewhere before my patient arrived, so I tried entering the library again. Fifteen minutes passed, so I went in and out of the library two more times to wait for the clock to reach 13:00.
I would suggest adding convenient options such as going to a location that is closed right now and choose to "Wait until it opens".

I'm also curious about the choice to assign keyboard keys to actions instead of using a conventional, easy to follow "dialogue choices" menu.

I think that it might also be more fun if reading at the library gave me hints as to the right answers I should pick during therapy sessions.
The first session about intrusive thoughts for instance, I don't think that it's common knowledge that those are tied to OCD. If players could learn about that in the game and then use what they learned in an upcoming therapy session, it could be an opportunity to feel rewarded for having paid attention earlier.

Well, that was a lot of suggestions... I should say that I tried to make games about therapy work before, being a former therapist myself, so this might come off as "This is what I would do". But that's only my personal experience of a very short segment of the game so far, and I know that the little I've played might not be a faithful representation of the entire game.

I should also mention that I like the art style, and the choice of blue shades does help set an interesting mood.

In any case, I'm interested in following this game's development and hopeful that it can be improved. I'd like to know your thoughts on all this.
Thanks a bunch for the elaborate suggestions!

You gave me a lot of useful tipsthat I will implement in the game, like signaling lose of posture, adding numbers next to stat change, making interface more visible, being able to wait in cab.

The ones I will not are either because they would be incredibly complicated to pull off, or because there's a deliberate design choice behind keeping things as they are. For instance, you suggested a forewarning of each action requirement for stamina/mood/anxiety, but if I had that, there would be no point in penalizing the player for trying to do something he can't (which is an explicit game feature). I think some suggestions you gave would make life/time management choices seem obvious and easy, and that could ruin the actual management part.

In any case, the game is designed to have a progressively harder difficulty, so even if the player makes some failed choices at the beginning, it shouldn't be much of a problem. I expect the learning curve not to be too punishing.

Regarding giving hints to specific intervetions at the library studies, that would be very complicated to make it work, because I'd either have to give an actual psychology course inside the game, or I'd make therapy choices obvious by mentioning the themes in the library. I expect players to enjoy learning a bit about psychology as they play the game, either through the library text fragments or through the therapy sessions, but you don't need to actually know psychology to play the game. Making good choices during therapy sessions is mostly a matter of logic and intuition.

All in all, I think you had some very valid suggestions I will implement, but some of your frustration is probably because you were expecting something from the game which it's not. You said you thought of a therapy game before, so I guess you were probably expecting something similar to had you had in mind. In truth, I wouldn't even call this a game about therapy. It's a story about a guy facing some tough psychological dilemmas, and he happens to be a therapist. If you only played 3 days, you probably didn't get a good glimpse of the actual plot yet. And I don't blame you don't feel motivated to keep playing. But the suggestions you gave me seem to amount to a game that's conceptually pretty different from what I'm aiming for. Hopefully, despite some of the game's frustrating mechanisms (some of them intentional), it will be internally coherent and sufficiently appealing to get people to play it through.
author=calunio
...there's a deliberate design choice behind keeping things as they are.


That doesn't surprise me: Being familiar with your other projects, I had a feeling that some things were as they are for a very good reason.

I'll definitely give the next update a try :)

And you are certainly right about me having expected a different kind of game, which would probably be best described as a "Therapist Tycoon" rather than a character-centered story that just happens to take place within a therapist's daily life.
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