Magical Academy (story idea)

Stat-building games are normally not my favourites. I’ve played a few with other aspects that caught my attention - art, story, writing, voice acting, and so forth - and enjoyed them.

That said, I didn’t mind the stat building of the aforementioned Magical Diary because it was simple and not time consuming. It took a matter of moments to click and choose my classes for the week, and then I’d occasionally get an interesting event or a little bit of fun information if I hit the right class at the right time. It also wasn’t a game where a few unwise stat-building decisions would sink my game’s entire ship, so to speak.

Another reason I don’t prefer stat-building games normally is because often there are several pages of information that I find myself shifting through just to make one or two decisions. I don’t mind that quite as much with actual physical papers that I can spread around a table, but on my laptop or tablet? No thanks. That’s one advantage of choicescript games, to my mind; most of the stats are usually on one or at most two pages and I can glance at them once or twice a chapter and still enjoy the game. (I know, that’s a terrible way to play stat building and strategy games. I do it anyway.)

I actually agree with @Shadou that LLTQ could have been just as good of a story if it had been done in choicescript - different, but still compelling.

With choicescript, I know it’s possible to stack several choices atop one another in a single page (discussed here), so that would provide a simple way to set a schedule. And yes, *gosub_scene and *gosub and so forth might provide a practical way to loop the routine codes between the narrative segments. Not that I’m an expert coder - I’m certainly not.

I don’t think there really are any stat-building style choicescript games currently, or at least none that I remember. I’d be very interested in seeing if one could be done well enough to function properly and be enjoyable. Building a story around choosing coursework, or something similar, might be really fun and still be a framework to tell a branching, engaging narrative.

It’s really hard to say, too, how well it might catch on without a working demo. I fancy we’re all picturing quite different things compared to how the actual game might play. I hope you do give it a go.

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