Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
Working as intended.
Real Life Work Simulator 2018.
The mechanics support the gameplay. Work is an "annoyance". It's meant to be a little tedious.
A lot of people don't seem to understand this game. This game is brilliant. This game is art. The whole game is about uncovering the occult. That's why there is no manual or tutorial. You're meant to be lost in the beginning, and then you start to figure things out. This perfectly encapsulates what is going on with the character you play. As you figure out more an more mysteries, you are driven further. Obsessed with uncovering the secrets of the mansus.
That's why the game is called cultist simulator. You are the simulation. Fascination. Dread. Contentment. Restlessness. All of it mirrors what you feel in the game as you obsessively click and click.
Some people don't get it. Some people give up. Some people don't see the point. Others can't stop playing.
This game is great.
I agree the game's great, first of all!
I'm just playing through my first Artist run, and typically after completing a painting I have 10 - 15 cards to click on. This is happening every minute. I'm not sure from an RP perspective that my brilliant unhinged artist should be quite so bogged down in repetitive tedium.
Also, in the early part of the game, sure, the grind and oppression of your daily life is part of the simulated experience, but once you're a mighty wielder of eldritch powers, with thralls to do your bidding, the 'work' cycle should recede in prominance so you can focus on the new things that define your existence IMO.
Yeah, that. I concur.
Awesome game, but not everyone is going to agree.
In the painting example above, I would think it still appropriately simulationist if it were possible to automate pure Notoriety or Mystique painting (dialing it in, getting by on reputation) but not to automate the inclusion of Passion.
I strongly disagree that work should be boring or bothersome, I don't see that as the idea at all. Work is a type of pressure (much like the hunter, sanity and depression), initially because of money and, once you get more money than you know what to do with, later because of the time needed to generate other resources (like artifact paintings, glimmering, vitality, summons and such) and use them efficiently before their individual timers run out. Its presence should be felt but it should not be a chore or boring. If a mechanic in any game induces boredom and feels like a chore, that's not innovative nor is it art, that's bad game design.
Definitely loving the game, especially the lore, but there is much room for mechanic improvement.
TL;DR: Excessive micro-management is just a needless time sink, especially amidst a chaotic, non-customizable board.
At some point I even considered just cheating money. Just so I can save myself from this cycle and concentrate on what really makes this game good - atmosphere and lore
It would also entirely eliminate the risk of losing a job or getting demoted, and make the tactic of using painting to spam Mystique (tie up investigators indefinately so that any evidence they do produce times out before they can upgrade it) even more efficient than it already is. Not to mention the Glimmering spam potential of (again) art.
- Work is intended to feel like drudgery
- It would, as kaos points out, compromise some other design decisions I took in the context of it being possible to forget to go to work
- You think you're annoyed now? wait until your auto-loop puts you five seconds into a sixty-second stint at Glover & Glover just as you realise you really wanted to do some painting to deal with that looming Dread, and there's no way to cancel it.
['Why can't we cancel it?' because then I'd need to make every timer in the game cancellable, or only some of them cancellable, and I'd need to find a way to show the difference, and it would cause a dozen exploits, and what happens if you cancel a trip to Morland's, do you get your funds back? can you still cancel something 55 seconds in? and and and.]
The reason I want to address the issue of repetitive draggint in some way:
- carpal tunnel syndrome.
I'm serious; I had never expected this many people to buy the game or to play it for 19-hour stints, and I can see that dragging the card into the box over and over and over and over for ten hours is a different experience from doing it for 90-minute playtest sessions.
The main approaches I'm currently considering:
- double-click to assign to open slot
- more randomised events / outcomes / choices to make Glover more meaningful
- more ways to earn and spend money in the mid-game.
When I made Cultist Simulator, I was trying to Do a big old Art, and some people just don't think art belongs in games, and some other people it does belong in games but that fun or ease of play are always priorities. I don't mind you thinking that and I'm not offended, but I gave up quite a lucrative position as a studio head so I could go off and do this experimental nonsense, so I'm going to keep enjoying doing it. BUT you have my personal permission as the game designer to give yourself some Funds with the console. I absolve you of cheating.
This is unwise. You should never implement a game mechanic that is drudgery for drudgery's sake. This is Bad Game Design, in theory.
- I already mentioned it in some other tread - maybe have an option to upgrade your cult headquarters so you will be proper cult leader, doing cult stuff while either you will be living in the headquarters and all nesseseties would be provided by minions or just so they will give you 1 fund every 60 seconds. It would be logical step in developing a cult, I think.
As for the whole 'art in game' - that's a loooong a deep topic. In no way I'm trying to say that game should be only game. It's just most on these art games are not quite games, and yet Cultist Simulator is very much so - that's why I feel it's 70% game and 30% art and why I'm a bit bothered by what I see as a bad game desing (saying of course as a somewhat hardcore gamer, not a real game designer). Something along these lines at least
If I turn my head ninety degrees to the right I can see a Best Game Design Award that we god a few months back from a jury of French academics and game designers. We've been shortlisted for another three design awards, though we don't know if it's won them or not. So it's officially not Bad Game Design, right?
B*llocks to that. Of course the jury could be wrong. Juries get things wrong all the time, or at least I think they get things wrong. And the thing is, as a designer, I can't argue with the player's experience. If you're not having a good time with my game, you're not having a good time with my game, and no matter how many awards I might win, I can't tell you you're having a good time with my game. My design's failed you.
But the flip side of that if that if someone else is having a good time with the game - if they like the idea of work feeling like drudgery - it's damned hard for you to tell them they're wrong.
And more than that - and this is the thing it's hard to see until you've gone through the whole dev cycle on a couple of games - almost every bit of clever design has its dark twin in a game. Without work feeling tedious, the occult world would be less exciting. If the work bit of the game were as interesting and fun as the rest of the game, you'd just be playing Exciting Glover & Glover Simulator, and the game would be failing to do one of the core things I designed it to do.
I think this is a fair and quite an insightful point, and I think the fact we're currently at a 74% approval rating on Steam reflects that. We won an award for Best Emotional Game Design, not Best Strategy Game Design. CS is better at the first than the second. Almost all games are better at one thing than another. Civilisation has a dull endgame because its opening acts are so brilliant. Frostpunk has a great narrative design arc but dreadful longevity.
I don't think CS is remotely a perfect game, even judged as a 30% art game. There are a lot of things I'd like to improve, and it's a bit alarming to find 10x as many people playing it as I expected, even though I'm glad! But 70% game and 30% art is about where I want to be, and Lottie and I are making low-budget games so we can do that. I think it's okay for you folks not to prefer that, I think it's okay for other folks to prefer that, and I think if you consider that there are multiple kinds of game design with multiple goals, you'll open yourself to more experiences.
I'm going off to eat me tea and I want a weekend off CS, so I probably won't come back into this thread, so I probably won't come back in here unless I get reports of trolling. So if you reply, I'm not deliberately ignoring you. :)