membrano wrote:I used to play HH 2 for a little wile, and really welcome such an ambitious successor. The game certainly has a lot of potential.
However, after playing a couple of hours, I think the game really needs to become more accessible. Currently many parts of the game, such as the lockpicking interface and especially the school management screen are ugly and lack information about your actions and their results. It took me several tries to even figure out how to assign teachers to their classes, and am still unsure wether me assigning certain school policies actually has any effect.
The game seriously needs some layout work, more in-game explanations and more respnsponses to your actions (like a list of currently active rules and occasionally some message about their effects or something).
The event editor, while an exciting concept is even worse. The dozends of widgets are cluttered all over the whole small window, with hardly any meaningful grouping or explanations. How are new potential content contributors even supposed to understand the connection between events and event chains (I assume that's what they are, even though the game only ever talks about events)?
I understand that the game is still only in a beta phase, but leaving the interface till last is a good way for it to never get finished. And since you are are already looking for people to contribute new events, you really need to take some steps towards them. Unless you want the game to be a specialist affair only for those who followed the development process closely enough or dedicated enough to spend hours figuring out that editor (and as complicated as the event mechanism may be, the editor makes it many times more complicated, and needlessly so).
Right, sorry for the rant;I really like what this game is trying to do, and would love to make my own events, if the game would only let me...
This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about, that and the fact that it seems you have to be in certain places at specific times. These are just coding tricks used to pad out otherwise simple games. There's no real skill involved, unless it consists of hacking the code or reading a walkthrough, it just comes down to dumb luck, so please just give it up.
As I've said before, more often it is a case of less is more. HHS has all the makings of a very good game but it would be even better if the developer spent less time fiddling with his variables and more on getting the interfaces right.
Totally agree with membrano's comments about the Editor too. The whole thing has the air of something that was done to show off the developers abilities. Yes. Well done. We've seen those - now can we have our game please?