Well, the lower social skill is not actually tied to being antisocial, which is a word with a very different meaning that isn’t really relevant to this story. It’s more about popularity. While I do understand your points about preschool, it was more to give an option to lower that stat for parents who wanted their kid to not be a social butterfly. As you said, realistically there wasn’t much in the way of options for a true nonsocial option given it’s a single parent household and that the grandparents aren’t around. Preschool might have a few more kids than daycare, but it also might not.
As for the homeschool, from a coding perspective it had to be this way. A true homeschooling experience without any sort of co-op group would be so drastically different that nearly every event would have to have dedicated paths for those kids separate from all the others. The amount of extra words and code needed for stuff only a small group of players would see made it not an ideal way to go. As for the popularity, it was just about there being less kids around than in the other school options. I can tell you take umbrage with the popularity stat, and not without cause; I’m not the best at using stats overall. Here there are those who are writers who code and those who are coders who write, and I am the former. To the extent that I am anything.
It’s a pandemic, not the specific 2020 pandemic. I try not to tie it to anything too directly like that. Still, it is clearly a very modern setting. I’ve been called out about the glasses before. Guess it’s my own childhood bleeding through even if it’s less relevant now.
I am glad you gave the story a chance. Hopefully there were some good parts for you as well.
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Wasn’t the game published in 2019? So it couldn’t specifically be referencing the 2020 pandemic.
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Actually, I added a pandemic segment in 2020 as a free update.
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While the 2009 swine flu pandemic wasn’t as catastrophic as COVID-19 (for a variety of reasons) it did cause school closures and social distancing in hot zones (albeit not to the “shut down everything” levels of the COVID-19 pandemic). I remember going to get vaccinated for that with my parents as a kid.
I actually really like your game and have played it at least ten times already. It’s definitely not a bad game whatsoever, though my criticism maybe made it sound like I didn’t like it. I tried everything from having a helicopter parent, a neglectful jerk, a Hippie parent, a parent who exploits their kid and lives vicariously through them, a Tiger parent (and somehow this parent’s kid did not make it into Ivy League) etc. etc. The only thing I REALLY dislike is having a pandemic in it. I cringe every time it comes up and quickly click though. I don’t want to be reminded of 2020.
Giving the option to hire a nanny for your child might have worked in the preschool scenario? It wouldn’t have required too much coding, and it would make sense why staying home with a nanny would lower social skills, whereas staying in daycare would then have no impact on those stats.
Hey, “true homeschoolers” use co-ops too ;). It’s just usually a once or twice a week thing in most cases. Maybe I missed something, but it seemed like the child does stay at the co-op all day five days a week. There being fewer kids/a smaller circle of more like-minded people, does make sense though. But maybe having it be an “alternative school” would have had the same effect but made more sense? I get that a true homeschool experience would have to be paid DLC if anything though.
I hope that you are still writing on the sequel, btw.
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It’s all right, I figured you had to have enjoyed it to some extent for parts to annoy you as much as they did; for stories one hates, you can’t say as much because you usually bail out quick.
Oh, I’m definitely aware about co-ops not meeting as much as they do in the story. The irony is my own children would not necessarily be able to replicate their childhood in their father’s game. The girls are off at their last day of Classical Conversations right now, which meets every Tuesday but will be off until January (it only goes like 26 weeks a year). My wife was a terrific teacher, and when it came time for our first to go to school, we just couldn’t do it. Both of us knew what it was like from our time working in public education, her as a kindergarten teacher and me as a Title I parapro. But CC gives them socialization and helps them get familiarity with a broad range of topics.
I felt I had to fudge it a bit with TPS, because what my girls do is sooooooo different than what kids in structured schools do. I mean, how would I account for the fact that while most kids are grinding out busywork, homeschoolers are off to the art museum or the Puppetry Arts center? Learning about animals at the zoo instead of in a marked-up textbook from 2004 or by zoning out on screens for hours on end? I have no doubt a better writer could have covered up the loose edges so they didn’t show as much. But I do expect that most anyone else would have fudged it at least a bit too, and if they didn’t, they’d likely have gotten so bogged down in the weeds it would have ended up just another overly complex abandoned WIP.
Grandparenting…I have written precious little the last year. And I want to say that I am resolved to do more once I get back from the cruise we’re taking in a couple days (another nice benefit of homeschooling; we aren’t trapped in the summer-only vacation timeframe. Heck, we were in Disney back in February). But I’ve said that before. Hopefully this time is different. I can focus up, resist the siren song of Gemp, and put some real words on the screen. But right now I don’t talk about what I’m doing with it much, because I prefer to limit the number of people I am actively disappointing with my work avoidance to just, well, myself.
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I should have figured that you had some sort of exposure to homeschooling to include it at all! You clearly didn’t meant to go with the “homeschoolers are unsocialized” stereotype, but my gut reaction was that you were when I read that it lowers social though the kid is at the co-op every day. Though Individuality and not going along with peer pressure is clearly not a NEGATIVE trait. But I DID notice that your friend’s child always transfers either from the public or private school. I wanted to see what reasons the friend would give for leaving the co-op, but then realized that the scenario doesn’t exist.
As far as co-ops go, CC does seem pretty intense. Not so much for little kid, but from what I gathered, teens that do CC often don’t have time for much else education wise even though the actual meeting are just weekly. But now that I think of it: there are “schools” run by parents where the kids are registered as homeschooled, as this allows the flexibility of not enforcing a minimum of six hour days five days a week 180 days a year among other things. So I’ll just think of it as such a school/co-op, which was probably your intention. I was just super thrilled to see that you could homeschool your kid and then a bit bummed that it was almost exactly like the public school option.
But I get that it would have required way too much rewriting to make it significantly different and still offer it at 5.99. And sadly, homeschooling is just not that popular. Even just finding a book or movie about a homeschooler is like finding a needle in a haystack. So as much as I’d love to play DLC where the homeschool path is more customizable, I get that that would be VERY niche. It would almost need to be an entire simulator game by itself!
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Well, the $5.99 is a new development, since until January of this year it was $3.99 (the price at launch). Well, except when it was on sale, then it was $2.99. Prices went up more or less across the board this year since they had not in ages.
Right, I knew I was not doing homeschool real justice, I just also knew I couldn’t without stapling on a large chunk of a separate game to this one. But I figured semi-realistic (at best) homeschool beat none at all. It’s a valid choice, and I think more people are starting to see it.
I can see that a bit now that my older one is in Essentials, doing papers and such. But we may not stick with CC the whole way. We kinda evaluate year by year. So far, though, it has been well worth it. And my wife organizes the field trips for the whole group, and they love doing all this fun stuff with their running crew. Be hard to take that from them. Even if I have my doubts about the value of all that Latin.
I do love me the timeline song, though.
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Hello,
I am struggling to get a lot of these achievements lol. I tried for the valedictorian one and In Recognition one but no matter how many times I replayed it, I can’t get it so I gave up on those. Now I tried for the Family in Film one and I still can’t achieve it?
My child had 60+ both education and popularity stats and he managed to get the main role in the play during year 9 I think it was? He also managed to get the role in the commercial, got the movie role, and I always picked the drama option whenever it popped up. Extracurricular was drama, job was local theater, applied for the drama scholarship, I followed the guide so I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong 
(In my ending it said my child went to some prestigious acting school but he started to stop doing movie roles and stuff like that, and focused more on theater and was only popular and known to a small group of elite theater fans or something and I didn’t get the achievement?) Am I supposed to have a high individuality stat?
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Hi! Beyond what it says in the guide, I’ll have to wait until I can look at the code to give specifics for this. I know the Valedictorian is pretty well detailed in the first post of this thread. As for the play one, there’s something that veers it off from film to theater, but I can’t remember offhand what it is. I will try to report on this later today or tomorrow.
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Did you take the role in the movie in year 15?
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Okay, the low trad is part of it. When you have the best university and max acting stat, your kid gets snooty and goes theater-only with Trad less than 47%. It’s still just a random chance on them getting an Oscar-worthy career though.
For In Recognition, you must get them in the nice university, then avoid having both Freedom and Trad below 45 (one can be, but not both, or they fail out of school), Education has to be at least 70, and they need to have more Sacrifice than Self. If they have more Self than Sacrifice in that instance, you receive one of the dreaded end states where they become a successful politician.
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Do you have any advice on raising the popularity stat?
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Don’t make most of the decisions I did when I was in school?
Joking aside, don’t do homeschool, have your kid pick the two others over his lifelong friend, push them to ride roller coasters at Plentiful Pennants (or make sure they swim if you go that route), make sure they don’t wait too long to drive, and a lot of it should go up as the acting route progresses anyhow.
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Fun fact: drama dweebs are well known for being very popular, and are never a 6AM annoyance at all…
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