Greetings, Principals!
Welcome back to our Dev Diary series. Today we’re going to talk about the school management system and how we’ve improved from the prequel HSS game. As we’ve mentioned in our earlier dev diary, there are two common issues back in the first HSS game, mainly the slow real time progression and the fact that some principals love their students a bit too much, thus sending other students to graduate in their place instead.
In VAHSS2 we wanted our players to have less waiting time in the academy, so we decided to change up the time system. Instead of your usual hourly progression, time is now divided into blocks. Currently, one block is the equivalent of one in-game month. Time won’t progress into the next month unless the player commands it by clicking on the “End Month” button. This lets players plan out their student activities accordingly and simply skip time to the next month once they’re ready to progress.
Student graduation times have also changed. Back in the prequel, principals can send students off to graduate whenever the graduation pop-up appears, regardless of their academic performance. As we’ve mentioned before, this has been altered so that students will always graduate after 3 years. No need to worry about student shortage though, as each year a list of new potential students will arrive. Out of a variety of enrolling students, principals get to select 3 students of their liking to teach and build into heroes. This creates a continues cycle of students entering and graduating the academy.
In order to graduate well and receive better jobs, students will require high exam grades. In VAHSS2 exams are done twice a year, in which each year consist of 4 seasons and each season consists of 4 months. So, students will have a total of 8 months to prepare for their exam. Principals can help their students by assigning their courses and schedules each month. Each course has their own skill gain and academic points rewards. They are key to raising exam grades and getting promoted to different majors. In order to complete a course, students need to finish objectives such as completing quests and gaining certain stats.
Stat gains can be done in various ways, but one of the main ways is by scheduling your students to learn in certain buildings such as the gym to raise their physical stats or the wizarding arena to gain magic stats. Some buildings also have passive stat gain effects, but we’ll explain more about that in a later date.
That completes the stat gain issue, but what about quests? Well, at the end of each season, principals can send out 3 students to embark on a quest. A quest is all about honing your students’ combat skills and letting them off on an adventure to face various enemies. Be careful though, if your students’ party is wiped out, then they’d fail and have to retry on another season. However, if even only one party member survives, then the quest objective is completed and they’ll pass their course. Remember, each student only has 3 years to graduate, and it’s your job to prepare them to the best of your abilities.
That’s it for the new school management system. We hope that these changes will encourage principals to take care of all their students, instead of just favoring that one godly built overachiever. A good principal should prepare their older students for graduation, while also not abandoning the teachings of their younger, less-experienced, students.
It may be a lot of hard work, but in the end it’s all worth it to see your once naïve students graduate into powerful heroes. Thanks for tuning in and hope to see you in the next dev diary, principals!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1453640/Valthirian_Arc_Hero_School_Story_2/