Hey everyone, we're back with an update at the end of the month! As I mentioned before this update will be a little less substantial since we're doing bugfixes on top of onboarding our new programmers, but hopefully it's enough to whet your appetites.
Prestige
The biggest addition this month is Prestige. Prestige is a new resource/score that you accumulate throughout the game. From the beginning of development we knew that prestige would be a huge part of the game, especially since many schools live and die based on how "prestigious" they
are. Prestige will be an integral part of the game and we will explore many different facets of prestige in the future. For example, your prestige and school ranking will eventually affect the number of student admissions each year. But as of now, here are some of the effects of prestige in the game.
School Evaluation and School Ranking
In addition to being graded at the end of the school year, you will also be given rewards or penalties in the form of prestige and money. These all add up, and should provide some more challenge to the game.
School ranking is a big new addition that we hope will challenge you guys. Right now this school ranking is static with only 20 ranks, but in the near future we will have the schools randomly generated and change their ranks at the end of the school year. We hope that this will challenge you to rise up
the school rankings. In the future we will explore other stuff like possibly making this part of the leaderboards, but this is our first attempt at fleshing it out.
Grants
You now also earn prestige from doing grants. Speaking of grants, we've made some changes to the grants like adding (and subtracting) grants and
changing the basic order. We hope to add some more grants next month.
Time
Time has been slowed down to give characters more time to travel between rooms. Note: because time has been slowed, this may have affected other
parts of the game which we can't foresee for now.
Notifications
Notifications now appear on the left side of the screen. Notifications and will disappear automatically after a few seconds.
New Buildable Stuff
We've added a few new buildable items for you guys to prettify your school.
New Floors and Wall
Versaille
Pinwheel
Herringbone
Checkerboard
Diagonal
Wood Panel
Big Bricks
Wood Wall
New (Mostly Decorative) Objects
Vending Machine now working.
Wooder Planter
Flower Planter
Wooden Flowe Planter
Big Window
College Degree
Motivational Poster
New Logos
We had some fun with the school logos this time, adding foodstuffs like Pizza, fries, and fruits!
Random School Mottos
When you click on Randomize it will now also generate random school motto!
Bug Fixes
- Fixed bug in which shadows were not in their correct places
- Fixed bug in which mod characters were not being loaded.
- Fixed a bug in which save files were not being loaded.
- Students should now respect staff doors (those darned kids!)
Known Bugs
Minor bugs that are still present and will be fixed soon:
-Black screen after 3 years of game-time. This should fix itself after reloading the game, so when you are nearing the end of 3 years of play, please quit the game and reload (or maybe take a nap).
-School name from previous save may be retained. If you load two different saves during one play session, your evaluation screen may show the name of the previous save game.
MORE IMPORTANT NOTES
Older saves will not work with this update because we added Prestige.
To make sure this build is safe, we will be uploading it to the Candidate build first. The Current build will still be build 0064, which was updated in December.
To access the Candidate Branch :
1) Go to your game library and right click on Academia School Simulator
2) In the pop up window, find and click on Properties.
3) In the properties window, click on the Betas Tab
4) Under Enter beta access code to unlock private betas type :
academiacandidate
5) Click on "check code"
6) Under "Select the beta you would like to opt into" click on the dropdown
menu and click on "candidate"
7) You should now have access to the latest candidate build