A bit of gameplay...

Hello everyone!

Time for a post presenting you the main gameplay mechanic in Slice of School.

You know me, I just can't bring myself to make a game without at least a bit of gameplay. Otherwise I'd have made SoS a VN :x

That being said, since I'm keeping the heavy things for Slice of Venture 3, I've always claimed that SoS would fall on the "easy" part of things. And I won't ramble again about how difficulty is such a subjective value (no matter how easy something will be you'll always find someone for whom it's hard.)

The big difference with the past is that I have more experience handling what "works" and what "doesn't work" for players (or should I say, H-games players, cause they sure aren't the same than "normal" players :x) VP, SoV2... Games I'm still insulted for from time to time because of their difficulty, are actually a good thing to keep in mind to try to stray from their paths.

Anyway, enough self-introspection. I think (at least I hope so) I found something that is bearable for the majority of players and that still represents something interesting enough for players to keep progressing and not feeling like asking for a guide after 2 minutes (even if I'm PERFECTLY aware that roughly 2 hours after v0.1, some people will request a guide -_-)

Things are really simple.

Days are going to be cut in 3 specific times: Morning, Noon and After School. At each time, the characters will be on different spots, doing different things depending on the moment of the day.

The game will just rely on the concept of actions/consequences. To take an easy-to-picture situation (that won't be in the game, of course), imagine that in the morning you sneak inside a girl's room and find a zoo doujin in her library, then you can confront her at noon and ask her a little favour to avoid leaking the secret after school. But if you check her room after school, she'll be inside her own room so you won't be as free to check her shelves. So timing is important.

And I can already hear the screams: "WHAT? ANOTHER TIME-LIMITED GAME? IS HE FUCKING KIDDING US??? SOV2 WAS PURE SHIT BECAUSE OF THAT!!!"

I'll just answer one thing: 8D

I'm not that dumb. There's a trick to it. Ever saw "Groundhog Day"? :x Old people like me probably did and got the reference. Otherwise, it's simple: until you've managed to unlock all the things a day has to offer, the day will loop endlessly. So feel free to fail as much as you want, there won't be any punishment.

In exchange, yeah, I'll ask people to use their brain a bit. But even that could be tricky for lazy people (yeah I prefer saying "lazy" because when 95% of the possible actions are just clicking around, I refuse to believe it's a question of intelligence -_-). So you'll be assisted.

You'll be given an item that will unlock a new submenu. In that submenu, you'll find all the informations you'll need to unlock stuff.

Key items will show the items you need to find (there's none here cause the pics aren't ready yet.) Key places are the places to look the most (doesn't mean they're the only ones, just the most important, as the "key" word suggests.) And finally, probably the most important: key people. That list contains all the people you'll have to interact with to unlock H content. It doesn't mean the scenes will picture them all. But if you want to create situations leading to a H scene, it will often happen that other people get involved. And as an extra help, you even have little clocks telling you at which time they're the most likely to be interesting to talk to.

Of course, there are subtle elements not pictured. For instance, having two clocks on a single character can mean either "You have to talk to them at those two times" or "You have to talk to them during either of those time." But at some point, if it's too evident there's no games anymore, right? The fact that some people included there are not leading to H scenes will also help easing a bit the spoils since you won't know who's going to be featured.

Now, the great thing about that submenu is that it's JUST information. You can spend the whole game without checking it at all. This way, if people want to discover the game the way I originally intended it, they can just not look at it and try to find the situations by themselves. Or you can find a middle ground by starting a first day searching on your own and then use that menu to help you for following loops.

I hope that'll be enough for the majority of people to enjoy the game without a guide (that feature being more or less of a guide itself, like the quest menu in The Hunter 2.)

I don't plan on making the game different than that though. It will revolve around that single concept of doing things have consequences later in the day. You won't have to unlock H scenes all over again in a single loop to move on to the next day. It can be done in different loops. Once all scenes are unlocked, the current cycle is over (I call those looping days "cycles") and it closes with a cutscene.

Each update of Slice of School will contain a complete cycle with both its opening and closing cutscene. It helps making very definite intervals in terms of content :)

That's all for today. I hope you'll enjoy the idea and are looking forward to the update.

Meanwhile I'll see you later this month with probably a future sneak at one of the future H scene :p

See ya o/