Some things to fix

Kudos Kudos 2
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Some things to fix

This got to be a bit long. Please keep in mind that while some of things sounds like criticism I made this because I think the game has a lot of potential. If I didn’t think it had the potential, I wouldn’t have bothered and plus I also spent a very long time on this list.

Note: All idea suggestions I add here are considered non-proprietary (that means free for all to use). (I’m putting this here as some companies are afraid to take suggestions unless it’s explicitly stated the suggestions are given away for free aka. non-proprietary.)

Here are some bugs:

  1. When you buy the robot cleaner and click on it, it should say how much per day it costs, not just resale value (other things like cars need to say this too). And the major bug is that if you run out of money for one single day, the robot cleaner just simply vanishes with money from the resale of it. The robot should of course just not clean for that day since I guess parts for it are so very expensive. As for the car, if you own it and run out of money, then the car just won’t run. Dishwasher has the same issue. In real life, if you lease or are making payments on the car, then you get late fees but you get at least a month before they reposses your car.
  2. Sticky notes block menus. For a lot of menus, the sticky notes then block the back menu buttons, such as the one for classes. Combine that with how there’s no way to drop a class or to hide a sticky note. The no dropping of a class does make sense as it takes a whole turn to join a class and you can only join one per turn, though it’d be nice to hide sticky notes that block menus.
  3. Get a phonecall, save your game, then quit the program and reload your game. The phone call is gone!
  4. Try making a new game, saving it, and quitting the game, relaunching the app, and then loading the file. Same for saving anytime right before going to work. Weird bug when saving at that time. What it does it that it skips your entire day at work. Very big bug and I don’t know why nobody noticed this as it’s natural to save immediately after designing all the colors and look of your character as a template for appearance (the game really needs a system to save the template of appearance for a character, too.)
  5. If the dentist calls on the weekened, it rings twice, calling you each turn with the annoying ringer.
  6. The patches are bugged. They aren’t clear on the install directory so patches often can’t find the game and just says “patch failed” until lots of work done by trial and error and then they leave this uninstall thing in your “add/remove programs” menu when they should merely go and make a subdirectory off your main game containing a backup of all changed files. I’m rather doubtful that the patches could ever be uninstalled in the first place. I also don’t know why a patch needs an install program when this uninstall program can’t locate the game on its own as patches would make more sense as a single file to simply copy to the main kudos directory and run.
  7. I make a game and then I go and get a new job (it’s Wednesday). I completely start a new game. The phone rings and I get a friend congradulating me on the new job. I check and it’s Monday like when it’s a new game so the game isn’t clearing the old game data. I then start a new game and apply again and suddenly I’m rejected for “assistant physisist” when I applied for car washer. Okay this is very repeatable, if you get a job and then reload a different game, characters will congradulate you on getting a job. So before loading a game, I need to quit Kudos 2 each time to clear the old game data.
  8. The stats (e.g. extrovert, cleanliness, etc.) jump around all the time.
  9. When your stats change and you get the notes saying which changed, if you then click to expand your stats and the noted changes dissapear. They shouldn’t.
  10. In the game loading menu, if you have more than 6 savegames, then the scrollbar works. I the game saving menu, if you have more then 5 savegames, the scrollbar doesn’t work and you can’t see them.
  11. Go and buy fashionable clothes. You then can sell them for $8. Buy more of the clothes. You then still have only one to sell and it’s for $8. Then go and sell it and it’s all gone! I’m sure a similar thing might happen if you own two cars but I have not gotten the money to try it.
  12. I buy a car. I’m unable to use it in a commute and the game won’t explain why. I various text searches of the game files and find the only way to learn to drive is there’s a solo activity called “learn to drive” but nothing will make it come up ever.
  13. Unlocking solo activities doesn’t work and it’s random. It happened once to me with church and that was it. I thought maybe it’s the kudos score so I edited the game file till it was over 90% and still nothing. Whatever is up with it is who knows, but editing solo_activities.csv and setting it all to zero works except swimming doesn’t always come up, mysteriously. Plus this unlocking to do normal activities would never happen in real life and even if it’s ice-skating and you don’t own skates, a lot of places let you rent them for a day so it just costs a small bit more to do the activity.
  14. In assets.csv, there’s a section called ownedscript. These appear to be things that will apply each turn and help increase stuff, like pets keep you from being lonely, stressed, etc. However I bought the smart suit and the sunglasses and their effects were immediate and they degraded over time.
  15. If you make a new friend, don’t like them, and never once hang out with them, it should not affect your stats or any of that stuff when they ditch you since you didn’t care about them. I mean if your character always refuses a specific person’s invitations, then it should mean your character could care less when the person leaves you. It shouldn’t make your character get all sad.
  16. A friend leaves you for not spending time with them and then you open and close the phone to silence the irritating ringer. And then you’re looking at something and suddenly the phone rings with the ex-friend calling you for an activity with “accept” grayed out. This should not come up at all.
  17. If you save a game, then job search, then reload, then job search again, and repeat several times, then apply for a job, then for unknown reasons the next day you get weird job offers for things you’d never qualify, like day 2 in the game a job offer for a sales manager. Other times you get a job offer and a rejection both at the same time and then the game crashes. This is part of that phone bug.
  18. The laptop costs a bunch of money per day, which I assume is for internet access, though it seems pricy compared to other things. Still, however, to surf the web it costs $1, which is totally unrealistic! Compare that to online shopping, which is free from the laptop.
  19. Basic IT skills description says “where would be without computers”, missing the word “we”.
  20. Save a game with one of those sticky notes eg “evening class tonight” and then reload. Sometimes the sticky notes are gone upon reloading.
  21. Chess skill mysteriously degrades despite playing it a lot. There is one single book that boosts chess skill and once it’s read, that’s it. Chess skill only increases when you win, despite that people would more likely learn from mistakes (losing) than winning. Plus, the chess skill of your friends you play chess with seemingly never degrades and only goes up. Plus, it appears that your friends gain chess skill even if they lose, unlike you. The same problem exists for about all games.
  22. Excercise bikes cost almost as much as a car!
  23. Reloading the game over and over makes the game crash fast. One way guaranteed to crash is on the game right after an event before you get to the main screen, quit and then load the game.
  24. It’ll be snowing. Save the game. Then reload the game. Then the snowing is gone! However snowball fight option does appear. Sometimes the snow remains, but when quitting the program and restarting the program, it’s always gone.
  25. Magazines randomly appear buyable in some games (very rarely) and not buyable in most others.
  26. When you’re in IT tech support, it relies on people skills and they go up. But for policing jobs, it says relies on people skills but those don’t go up or are even started. Oddly when people skills are started by IT stuff, sometimes people skills go up when you do things like soccer with a bunch of people. It isn’t until Police Sargeant that the people skills start.

Other things to fix:

  1. In the CSV, compare homegym to weights. Homegym is basically just the little excercise bike. Excercise bikes only work out a single musucle in each of the legs. However the CSV shows the bike actually gets you more muscular then lifting weights with your arms. Makes no sense. If the homegym was some detailed home gym system with a bench press and all, it might make sense but for an excercise bike, it does not.
  2. In the main game screen like the view of your home: Game should not do an irritating prompt every time you go to the main menu to save. In fact, saving should be less clicks away.
  3. In the loading menu: Game should do a warning prompt before deleting games.
  4. Phone ringing sound is really irritating. It’d be nice to turn the ringer off (as the phone still lights up) when there’s a call. That phone just rings and rings nonstop.
  5. Books and all the items you buy need to say what stats they change. The only way to really find some of the things out is by studying the csv files, and this is not user friendly. One example of unclarity is dishwasher makes it sounds like it would reduce the stat “dirt” and well it doesn’t, only tiredness and stress.
  6. There needs to be a tech tree document for what solo and group activities get unlocked for what.
  7. The player character or friend characters need to be able to hold parties in their own home all the time? (not birthdays) Or just invite people other to watch TV, watch a movie rented, to just chat, or to get drunk. There’s also doing what teenagers do, which is loitering in some commercial area and rarely spending any money there.
  8. Although not stated in the game, it is clear the player character lives in an apartment on his/her own. When you live in an apartment, there’s always noise. It depends on neighbors’ electronics devices, people shouting outside, neighbors thumping around, the apartment parking lot, how close you are to roads and how noisy they are, noisy birds, noisy crickets, if you live by people (not necessarily people in the apartment complex itself) with dogs as the dogs will bark near 24 hours a day nonstop and bark all night. So the player character tries to read and that’s no good due to noise and then tries to watch TV but the noise ruins their TV enjoyment. By the way, the character never pays rent, utilities, or groceries and yet when the character gets his pay for working, it only says it took out taxes and not things like rent.
  9. The minigame for video games is some 1970s style arcade game and really annoying to deal with so my character doesn’t play video games. It would be nice to be able to disable and then select a choice of game genre (RPG, MMORPG, action, FPS, RTS, etc.) There’s an XKCD comic that explains it well http:// [stupid forum blocks more than one URL] xkcd.com/244/
  10. The game does romance by you becoming friends with someone and then doing a romance. Then the other person asks you out eventually. If you tell the other person “I only think of you as a friend” they aren’t upset by this when many times IRL people are. IRL romance do not necessarily start by people being in the friend zone and then leaving it, but by the romance starting right away and the people never being friends.
  11. People buy excercise machines (including the video game wii fit stuff) and then get bored with them quickly. If this isn’t coded in, it should be.
  12. When changing the color like of people’s hair, there needs to be some kind of bullseye on where the current color is of each thing so it’s not a mystery where it is to find brown and it’s easier to simply lighten or darken a color while keeping it the same.
  13. The crossword puzzle minigame is really irritating. It’d be better to have the player character do them based on his/her own knowledge than the player.
  14. I’ve noticed that in the game, meditation basically has the same effects as taking a bath except slightly more relaxation, you don’t get clean, and you don’t get any energy. This sounds strange. See http:// [stupid forum blocks more than one URL] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_applications_and_clinical_studies_of_meditation
  15. The game misses the reality of books. The game presents itself that once you buy and read a small number of books, there’s no more left. But in reality, there’s tons of books churned out. So you can constantly be reading any genre of fiction and any type of nonfiction books.

The game misses the reality of transportation methods. First, if you walk, then it takes about 30 minutes per mile. So, if you walk 5 miles, your commute time of mornings and evenings is a total of 5 hours. You can reduce the time to 60% of what it would by by a running and then speedwalking when you’re fatigued from running, but you suffer embarrassment from it, particularly if you’re running in a business suit. Biking is fast for short distances. Skateboarding is not as fast as biking.

Now the bus is really slow. The speed of bus transportation depends on the size of the city. In a big city you must walk about 0.2 miles from home to the bus stop, a town is about the same, but a very small town will make it a mile. This then doubles from the bus stop to work and quadruples for the total commute. Next is the time you wait for the bus. A big city makes this 15-30 minutes. A town makes it 30-45 miles. A very small town makes it an hour.

Then the smaller the city/town, the more the bus winds around taking the most indirect route possible so it visits all the bus stops. Combine this with all the stops the bus makes and then unless your trip is very long and the bus will go on the freeway during much of the trip, then biking usually takes the same amount or less time to get to a destination than the bus.

By the way, unless you’re taking the bus to a different city, bus faire is a flat rate, not variable.

Okay now then, so if your commute takes a long time, then you obviously have a lot less free time after work and a slow commute means you have no time after work. This, of course, is not factored into the game. It’s also unrealistic to never have a high paying job that’s near home. It would be less likely, but would still be possible. It’s very likely in large cities.

Now as for cars. When you grocery shop (not in the game but it should be assumed the character does this), unless you have a car to put lots of groceries in, then grocery shopping has two options. Option one is that you grocery shop carrying two bags at once that aren’t so heavy a grocery will tear through the bag. If you don’t live near a major supermarket, then this means you must go to some small market where the prices are double and selection is bad. Option two is that you fill the shopping cart and walk it home, but a lot of supermarkets now will put magnetic locks on the wheels so you can’t take it outside of the parking lot. This same shopping issue affects buying all products and is why people with motorcycles usually have a large truck as their second vehicle.

Commute also would factor into solo activities. Going to the shopping mall takes an extra hour if you down own your own car, motorcycle, or bike. Likewise, if you take a walk in the park, there may not be a park very close by. Likewise, if you go on an event with friends, then even for $0 things like snowball fight and soccer in the park, well who’s to say your friend lives near you and therefore you might have to travel 30 miles for the activity, and thus the cost of the commute would be applied to the activity in reality in the same way that the cost of the commute applies for going to work. By the way, depending on the city size busses services may not run after 7pm, may not run before 7am, or in the case of large cities will run from early in the morning till late at night but not run Sunday evenings. When you go to a social activity, you could save time by having a friend drive you, provided the friend has a car, though you would have to supply money to the friend for the gas and time spent.

By the way, I don’t know about England, but in the USA, people learn to drive around the age of 16 and everyone knows how to drive long before age 20. One thing though, driving a motorcycle is a different skill and different driving license than a car so people would have to learn that as it’s not the same as riding a bicycle. By the way, as for skateboards, a lot of people don’t know how to ride those and if you’re over 20 (especially over 25) and riding a skateboard as your commute there is an embarrassment factor that should affect your stats. Learning to drive also is nowhere near as expensive in real life as it is in the game and once you get your license, even if your driving skill is not 100%, you can then practice on your own for only the cost of using your own car. Plus the costs to buy and own a car are way out of whack. A bed costs more than the cheap car! The luxury car costs onl $1200. Is the character leasing the car? The expense of learning to drive costs as much as buying a luxury car, which is extremely unrealistic!

Additionally, if you take the bus, other things like a laptop would in real life substitute or an mp3 player to get rid of boredom, however with a laptop, you’re more likely to have someone try to steal it and if they do it’s very bad as all your personal info and your weird porn you got off the internet is on there which you never want anyone to see, plus you’d likely have lots of paperwork only on the computer and god help you if you were conned into paperless billing and your computer is stolen. Chatting up random strangers on the bus would also do it.

Now if there was a subway all over the place then it would be a fast commute. Mass transit quality depends on the size of the city.
17) For realism: If you have a friend with a weak relationship, them ditching you for not spending time with them makes sense. If you have a good relationship, then they shouldn’t ditch you for at least a year.
18) Honesty doesn’t make sense as a job requirement. Employers aren’t teleapathic. Few jobs do polygraphs and you can beat them by increasing your heartrate on the control questions so the your answers to the real questions appear honest even if you’re lying. Plus friends can’t be certain how much money you have and if you say “not enough money”, you might technically say that when you have the money but need to save or it you’ll run out (e.g. it’s friday night and you must save money or your car and robot cleaner dissapear), so saying “not enough money” should not make your honest drop 25 points like it does (which in contrast going to church raises honesty 1 point or so each time). Oh and people don’t need to go to church when they can watch preachers on TV, read the bible in their spare time (though reading the bible might not make one honest as the old testament has various cases where the ancient Israelites lied for purposes of military strategy), etc.
19) The price for cable TV doesn’t make sense as even with satellite TV, you usually get free installation. Plus the monthly fee is much larger, too, and usually more expensive than gym membership.
20) The prices for food at restaurants are highly accurate, representing pretty much the way restaurants gouge on food and drink.
21) The weight gain from some restaurant food seems too high, like 15 pounds for one think of food. People do not get fat from a single high calorie meal, but from long term stuff. Gaining weight from gluttony is slow and losing weight from exercise also is slow – but the game just makes this stuff change too fast.
22) IQ just goes up and down way too fast, which is very unrealistic. It should take much longer to raise and lower it.
23) In real life, while most acting jobs want good looking people, on rare occasions they’ll want a fat person instead. The game ignores this and only does maximum weight instead of minimum.
24) If you have friends over to play video games, it makes no snese why the host has to pay $5. It costs $0 for chess. And you’re less likely to eat food during chess than when busily playing video games, so that’s not it. For inviting people over it would basically make more sense if simply the house got dirty, which the game already does when you invite people over. For inviting people over to watch football, each person already pays $4 already so why’s the host have to pay $10–and if it’s all the cost of food, then well there’s no weight gain from it in the CSV? Does the game assume you can’t make friends that don’t trash your home when they come over?
25) If you each own your own tennis racket or someone owns one and bring spares and you play at a public area, then tennis is free. I don’t know why the game says it’s $8. Football can be like that, too, if everyone owns all their own gear; they just need to find a free open space to play in. Of course oddly soccer is free.
26) You know swimming and jogging have the exact same effects (same csv numbers) except swimming costs $2 instead of being free.
27) Per the CSV, is going on a bike ride outside one’s home really more healthy than jogging?
28) Dishwasher costs $200 (very cheap) to get and $1 a day (insane). Is the character leasing it?
29) In the game, nearly everyone is allergic to one type of pet or another, whereas in real life, it’s rare.
30) It’s unrealistic how skills in games (e.g. chess) quickly degrade (I read it used to be worse before it was patched but still it’s pretty crazy how fast it degrades) whereas things you take classes for in education you never forget when in reality you do. It would make more sense for skills in games to almost never degrade, but go up very, very slowly.
31) commute.csv says walking miles to work gets you the same amount of fitness as walking to a busstop and sitting on the bus. And riding a motorcycle where yu must do things like balance your weight gets no fitness change.

Just some ideas:

  1. The game only has romance in the sense of monogamous relationships. Cheating might be nice. The game also would be good if it allowed one night stands with strangers as well as blind dates with strangers.
  2. Caffeine, not just alcohol
  3. A lot of people hate the foul odor of tobacco smoke (not about health issues, just the fact that it smells awful and people can take tobacco in many smokeless forms) and so this presents problems socializing where someone would avoid places with the stank.
  4. The player character never commits crime either for profit and for other reasons, even when they’re around friends in which the friend description says the friend always is doing crime and encouraging you to commit crime, which is odd.
  5. In real life, excercising is boring and unpleasant and it’s hard for people who don’t work out to do much, so people will often watch TV while excersing and the game doesn’t allow this combination.
  6. A large TV with good sound system makes TV watching more enjoyable.
  7. The activity “stareatwalls” would make more sense if it were more about thinking over problems and worrying instead of starring at the walls with a blank mind.
  8. A larger variety of jobs would be nice.
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This is an impressive and detailed critique. Well done, sir. I hope Cliffski takes some time to tackle at least a few of these for a future patch.