It’s time for another weekly update. I am currently sitting at 54 hours into the game. The screenshot above is my current date in the game. Yes, I am still in year 4. This is not because year 4 is dense, actually, it’s one of the least dense years, especially compared to the next ones. It’s just the testing process must be comprehensive.
I not only have to make sure everything flows correctly, I also have to catch the bugs that only show up during specific circumstances. And boy do they show up! I am also constantly monitoring the game balance.
Pretty much everything I was worried about in the beginning of the game has been thrown out the window. Are the battles too easy? Is the daughter raising not challenging enough? Am I giving the player too much money??
Now I’m starting to question if the overall game is too hard. 😂
Check out the video below. This is a mid boss battle by the way.
The actual boss battle ended up being way too difficult. It was so hard that I had to remove two of the enemies from the battle and I still lost. Even though the battle gives you an additional party member, resulting in a 5 against 2 battle, I still lost. I had all the strongest gear, I buffed my entire party before I entered the battle, and I STILL lost.
So it’s time to re-balance my balance changes. 😂
Besides that, the daughter raising aspect has actually been pretty solid so far. I’ve made some minor changes to my earlier changes in order to reduce repetition. The Pray, Check Up, and Walk City feature has been reduced from every 1 week to every 4 weeks. To compensate, I’ve doubled the increase of stats you receive when you use them. I mainly wanted to reduce the dependency of those features. I fount myself checking them every week and after the 50th time in a row, it just became too repetitive for my taste.
As far as the money managing goes, this has surprised me the most. I was convinced I would be giving the player too much money. But nope! It is very easy to make yourself poor in this game. If you play the game with the intention of keeping your daughter’s Mood and Condition high, you will be struggling with money pretty bad at times. But it has never got to the point where I had no options to recover. That has probably been the most surprising result of all this game testing so far. The careful balance in this aspect of the game has been keeping the 50+ hours of gameplay pretty engaging.
This is the final map of the 4th year. Of course it had bugs that required me to stop the game multiple times to fix. Thank goodness I made the changes to my project I mentioned in the previous update. Getting in and out of the game is soooooo much faster now. I love it.
For next week I’ll be going into the 5th year. The start of the last 3 story years. The big guys.
I’m just hoping for no more bugs, no more balance issues, no additional need for me to stop my testing.
A man can dream, can’t he?
