I think the art style is “European” as well, which has an attraction of all its own for many North American audiences. Think of the Pink Panther and its Euro aesthetic but still being attractive in North American audiences.
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Today's... something.
[R] claps [V]'s shoulder from behind, making him freeze, but either [R] doesn’t notice or he doesn’t care - given your previous interactions you’re inclined to think the latter - and leans forward, supporting his weight on [V]'s shoulder.
“I said -” [V] says, voice suddenly ice cold.
[R]'s substantial frame is blocking your view, so you can’t really see what’s happening, but there is the unmistakeable sound of knuckles connecting with a nose, and [R]'s head snaps back. [V] moves like a snake; what follows then you’re not sure, but it ends with [R] on his knees on the floor, [V] holding him in an armlock.
For a moment, nobody moves. Then [V] blinks, looking slightly confused as if he himself wasn’t quite sure what had happened, and lets go. " - leave me alone, [R]."
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Once in a Lifetime - Education Deep Dive #1
I hope you’re having a wonderful week!
I am working on Once in a Lifetime (OiaL) - a text-based life simulator built within ChoiceScript with plans to release on Steam, Web, and Mobile.
As part of development, I’ll occasionally engage the community with blog posts/dives into upcoming features. I’ll be focused on discussing how something major is planned to function, content planned, and much more.
For my first deep dive, I looked over my roadmap. The launch of my public work-in-progress alpha build will be known as Update Zero: Beginnings. You’ll be able to experience 120 months of gameplay as you grow through the first 10 years of your lifetime. While progressing through age, you’ll grow into the educational system of Once in a Lifetime, first debuted in Pre-School and Elementary!
In turn, my first deep dive is focused on the education system within the game.
Anyways, let’s delve in, shall we?
Aspirations for Education
Upon delving into development, my focus was to create richly deep gameplay that teemed with depth and content. As a result, I began to look at the broader picture of how education should be executed within OiaL.
I examined other titles such as Bitlife, The Sims, etc to gain an idea of where I wanted things to go. One of my largest gripes was that education felt like… smoke and mirrors. Sure, you were ‘enrolled’, you had classmates; heck with The Sims you worked on homework and the like!
Nonetheless, it felt very on the surface without any proper depth. Where was the true engagement? I never felt very connected with the peers I was introduced to, and I certainly didn’t feel like I was doing far more than merely rushing assignments (The Sims) and waiting for time to pass (both games).
Needless to say, I want what you experience to matter in the bigger picture. To truly engage, allow you to fail fast or rise above, and to ensure that you could properly feel connected with your lifetime. The benefit of text-based writing is that this can portray quite the level of detail, something I plan to weaponize.
This led me to three pillars of development.
- Dynamic Events.
- Classroom Interactions.
- Educational Growth and Diversity of Content.
Let’s break them down, one by one.
Dynamic Events
As you progress every month, Once in a Lifetime will dynamically sequence written events that involve friends, teachers, and faculty.
This system is powerful. Events will be sequenced based on the traits you hold (up to 4 develop throughout your lifetime with the first two in your first 12 years of life), traits of friends if they’re involved in the event, classroom performances/grades, personal mood, choices of prior events, and much more.
As a result, expect that I will write dozens if not outright hundreds of events for your education alone. These will be sequenced in a manner that accurately reflects past choices (to ensure we give actual consequences and not merely the illusion of them), the friendships you make, how you score on tests, and so much more that I’d struggle to describe. Expect fights, expect actual tests, have opportunities to earn the right to be the teacher’s pet and the benefits/consequences it brings, form cliques (this may not be present in Update Zero), engage in shady behavior, and much more!
Events will occur from a mixture of forcibly generated (Milestone Events) and outright dynamic (Events). An example is a small snippet shown from your first day of Pre-School event here (text pending!)
Classroom Interactions
To ensure that your time in school feels *alive*, I will be hand-designing many classroom interactions and events. These will be repeatable to some extent as they're drawn from a pool that's generated when you select an interaction (an example being 'Annoy Him/Her/Them'). This list of options is presented to you upon selecting a classmate. The game accurately interfaces and provides personal details on the classmate, details (through the text on the option choice menu) the impact on energy, health, mood, etc of each action, and sequences these together from a variety I'll write.
What you’ll also see is that I’ve utilized small, dynamic flavor text to change things up on these interactions. This could be something minor such as when eating out with a friend at an American restaurant or a Ronnie’s, you grabbed a Big Boi whereas the last time you experienced the event you ordered MickNuggies.
Or, it could be entire paragraphs of content that will dynamically change the entire flow of a conversation or event.
Classmates are dynamically generated, and whilst I’m working on better aligning my dynamic generation system and tightening it, it does work in an alpha state.
An example is the boys list of classmates (excuse closeness levels, those will be set soon when I tie them to interactions in the first day of pre-school event)
Another example is a small snippet of a work-in-progress interface for classmates. All information here was dynamically generated
Ultimately, my goal is to ensure that even if you’ve encountered the interaction content before (because you will, as you’re going to keep interacting with friends, family, etc) that I’ve produced enough of it with enough variations and differences that it stays relatively fresh.
Educational Growth and Diversity of Content
This is the big one.
I want school to feel fun, but I also want it to genuinely feel like you’re living out your educational experience. As a result, I’ve planned on a few key pieces.
Tests will be provided periodically throughout your educational experience. These will utilize quizzes or minigames of sorts, allow you to cheat (with the potential for grave consequences), and vary based on classes and the like. I want to stress that the test experience is optional, as I will allow players to opt-out and instead roll the dice with their total grade through a separate calculation based upon a mix of grade level, discipline, and choices in major events that’ve occurred.
Separately, you will have multiple different class options that only broaden outwards as you move onwards to more advanced types of schooling (High School versus Middle School for example). This could include some of the following:
- Physical Education
- Computer Labs/Science
- Music
- Art
- General Education
- And much more!
These classes will have unique events and interactions and will have a broader impact on your educational and personal development that will trickle outwards throughout your lifetime. Each will be carefully developed with the depth they require, and while there will be a minimum of at least two that you must be enrolled in, I’ll provide a large enough span of options to satisfy most players.
Will you engage in your dance recital? Perhaps the Spring orchestra? Maybe you’re set to engage in a SkillsUSA competition for networking and computer science. There’s going to be a wide variety of options and content to engage with as part of my diverse process of development.
My plan is two-pronged. As wide and as deep as an ocean. This will take time, I will not lie to you. As a result, I’ve structured development through a two-piece development cycle per major update.
Whereas Update Zero will focus on features and functionality, it’ll have lighter content. Update 0.5 will follow with a major drop of content that’ll flesh out everything introduced in Update Zero. Same goes for Update One with Update 1.5, and so on so forth.
While this is large in scope, I also am willing to go the distance and build the game across many, many years. At the end of the day, I’m looking to make the life simulator I wished Bitlife had been when I played it, so I’ve got no issue rolling out the carpet and letting the clock tick on.
Conclusion
I've got *a lot* of road to go. Key systems are forming that will allow me to produce this level of content. I've created deep dynamic generation that now extends to your classmates in Pre-School, the game is accurately determining interactions for those classmates and generating teachers, and I've begun work on the first key events that will occur.
I have now fully fleshed out internal design documents that laid out the depth and breadth of education, and while I have much more to share at a later date, this is the underlying foundation that I plan to roll with.
Have a fantastic evening and upcoming weekend.
~Zach
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I’d hardly put myself forward as representative of any audience, but I think it’s fine. And let’s face it, if you’re going for a blend of those 3, your art needs to stand out in intriguing ways (and it does).
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Yesterday it was @FayI and my 21st anniversary 
Here’s to many more years of this:
And:
Yesterday I also did a full playtest of Honor Bound which took a long time - I continue to have great respect and gratitude to the playtesters who have been so thoughtful and diligent 
and overcome with hubris of thinking I knew exactly how to get a wonderful outcome, ruined my very dutiful PC’s career and gave him some dreadful romantic drama.
So this morning I added some more responsiveness in the game to those particular drama branches (they were sad, but not sad enough), and this afternoon I’m off to the wedding of some lovely friends… which is funny whiplash!
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Congrats!
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Congratulations to my favorite power couple! We you!
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Wish you to many more years of crazyness and merriment. That your marriage will forever being full of grain and not full of roses.
It is a remote village blessing they still saying in the area of my grandmother to new weds.
For farmers roses are stuff that have thorns and are empty ,maybe pretty, but in lands where famine was a fear the best you can desire was grain and all the live it bring
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Happy belated anniversary Harris!
Quite the life accomplishment 
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I reopened my WIP thread today and posted an updated demo, including my second chapter today! I’m so nervous about it. My last update was January 2023, so I feel really pressured for this to be a really good update, and I know it isn’t perfect which is stressing me out a bit. I also think I’m at the point where I can only make it better after taking a break from it, so I’ve decided to release it and not think about this chapter until I finish the writing for the next one.
I want to thank you guys for being so supportive. I’m pretty sure this thread helped give me the encouragement and motivation I needed to continue pushing through my chapter 2, even when I was hating it. I think I’m going to take the day off, and maybe the weekend before looking at any feedback.
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…I just realized I have a habit of sounding like a computer. That wasn’t a fun realization.
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I have a habit of sounding like a computer too, sort of. Multiple people pointed out that, whenever I’m in a bad mood, I sound exactly like AM from I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream because I’m just that angry and misanthropic. Which is entirely fair.
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Ha
I sound more like a customer service chatbot. Or a parser engine. It happens in certain types of discussions, probably because my brain defaults to certain sentence formulas there.
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I sound as a bizarre harsh madwoman. Sound as a robot is far better if you ask me.
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I can do that, too, just not in the same coversation. 
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I’ve been writing this current project’s narrator voice the way I speak colloquially, and I can’t wait for my first “why is the narrator such an unlikeable asshole?” feedback.
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Look, if you people are just going to keep namedropping me like this, I expect you to pay image rights.
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Speaking of misanthropic
You offer your hand for a handshake. "Hello, I’m - "
[V] ignores your outstretched hand and gives you a glare instead. “Leave me alone,” he repeats, then storms off. Jingling. You’re still trying to wrap your head around that.
No, you decide. Despite the shoulder bag, he definitely looks gloomy.
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That’s awesome!! I’m one to talk lol but don’t let the internal pressure and stress get away from you. Writing takes time and it’s ok to take breaks when you need them; the project will still be there, so don’t be hard on yourself. It’s great that you’ve come back to it!
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I can’t write my jam entry the pressure is too much. I feel stupid. I am just too afraid of disappointing everyone.
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