I just tried the demo of Spirited Heart. My, what an UNfun game.
It reminded me a lot of Cute Knight, except that it was a lot less fun. I think part of it was that job performance felt completely unfair. In Cute Knight, job performance is based on your skills, so it makes sense and feels fair. In Spirited Heart, job performance is random, so it feels completely unfair.
I like supporting indie game developers, so I’ve bought games from Cliff and from Jeff Vogel and from Todd Gillissie and from a few other folks. But they have to actually be fun!
My characters tried all of the baseline jobs, but the morale hit for doing a poor job was huge. That meant a lot of time wandering around taking weeks off, which meant no $$$ was coming in. It was not a good combination, especially with the sudden 41% tax rate increase!
Any ideas if the dice rolling is completely random, or is that based on your skill level? For example, if you have a skill of 40 for a job that only requires a 10, do you get rolls that are more likely to lead you to get a perfect day because your character is so much better than minimum? Or is it just as likely to roll any number, regardless of what your skill is? Des your character’s morale have anything to do with the rolls? (Better rolls happen when you’re in a good mood, and worse rolls happen when your morale is low?)
A few times I “busted” the rolls, I went ahead and just clicked on all of the dice, figuring what else could go wrong? Fairly often, there was no possible combination of dice that would allow the character to do a perfect job that day.
Hello there, game developer here and friend of Cliff
Hey no! It is not random at all. It IS based on the skill, just isn’t so easy as most casual games. By the way, did you play at the “Normal” or “Easy” mode?
Maybe you were confused because in the beginning, you will fail often. Until you reach skill of 50-60 you won’t always get the “good” job result.
tip: in the beginning is good to use the option “Train” to quickly increase by paying a job-specific skill so you have an easier start.
sambrookjm: no the dice is random, but your suggestion indeed would make much sense. I am currently busy finishing a RPG, but I think I should implement your suggestion in a update to the game!
I just noticed this too - the minimum requirement is really what you need to just be able to do the job. But the scale is still 0 -poor and 99 - excellent for any job. With jobs that have 2 skill requirements (Advanced Jobs) the 1st one influences 75% of the outcome, while the second 25%.
If you reach skill of over 70 for one of the basic jobs you’ll see that you always get excellent result (and makes sense to use the automatic job option only ).
Glad to help. I always enjoy trying to figure out the mechanics behind the game. A little bit of talent or morale boost to your die rolls would be quite nice. I’d make the talent far more important than the morale, though. Bad rolls caused by bad morale would lead to bad work days, which would lead to bad morale, which would lead to bad days on the job…
Maybe something like a 2% chance of hitting the exact number you need for perfect day for each point above the minimum required stat?
Let’s say you only need a 10 dex to be a waitress, and your character has a 45 dex.
To get a perfect day, she needs a score of 12. The first die was a 5. Since you can’t get a 7 on the die for your perfect day, the first roll is random. You get a 4, so your total is now 9.
The difference between your actual ability and the minimum ability is 35 (45 dex - 10 required), so your next die roll would have a 70% chance of being a 3. Let’s say you fail, but get a 2, bringing your score to 11.
On our final die roll, you’ve got a 70% chance of rolling the 1 that is required to get your perfect day on the job.
Morale might add +/- 5% to this percentage, depending on how good/bad your character is feeling?
If training is important in the beginning, you may also want to put that tip into the tutorial.
I agree that the morale shouldn’t influence the rolls, only the skill.
I still want to keep “bad rolls” though (where you cannot get the perfect score anyway) even at high skill values to simulate what happens also in real life. I mean, even if you’re the best in the world at your job, there are still some days that might not be “perfect” (and I don’t mean “bad”, just “good” but not perfect). So I think is more realistic to keep the possibility to have days where you can’t get the max score no matter what your skill is.
Adding the training tip on tutorial: I thought about that, but was unsure if that would have been ok to the players (I mean, not sure if they like the game to tell them what to do step by step!)
Fair enough. Maybe cap the maximum possible chance of getting the perfect roll at 90%? Sometimes, you’re the windshield. Sometimes, you’re the bug…
In a tutorial, that’s exactly what should be done. Give us a hang for what we need to do, along with some hints on how to go about doing it. If training is that important early in the game, the tutorial should definitely mention it.
I’m not sure I follow this. Does this mean that if the minimum requirement for the job is 10, the scale should be 10-99? 0-89?
Yes, the scale is 10-99, but what I mean is that is an absolute scale: if the requirement is 10, 40 is not “4 times the minimum”, but 40 is near the average (exact average is 50 from scale 0-99). Hope I managed to express myself with my average english here
