#oneaday Day 550: How to Play Pocket Academy

After posting a lengthy comment on yesterday’s post, I figured that I’d share what I’ve discovered about playing Kairosoft’s Pocket Academy with a view to potentially making the start of the game a little easier for those of you who haven’t tried it yet. So here we go.

The First Few Months

You’ll start your new school with a few basic facilities, one teacher and a couple of students, one of whom you design and name yourself. Don’t be tempted to build facilities or level up your teacher to begin with, even if they come to you and very politely inform you that their friends get more training than they do. The reason for this is that facilities cost money each month for upkeep, and each level up for a teacher raises their salary by 20%.

Instead, your initial activities should focus around getting your students’ abilities up to snuff through special classes, and performing Challenges to raise tuition.

Special classes cost one of the three types of Research Points to perform, and each will raise students’ grades in one or two subjects. As you progress through the game, more classes (and more effective classes) will become available. To acquire Research Points, it’s just a case of waiting — they come either from teachers using facilities (tap on a facility to see which type of points it provides), from students talking to each other (randomly determined) or special events such as those which occur in the summer and the fall (each event is tied to a particular type of Research Points).

Challenges cost money to take on, but succeeding in them increases your tuition by $20-30 per student. You can perform up to two successful Challenges per month. Failing one doesn’t count as one of these two — and in fact, failing a challenge provides you with Research Points, so if you have an excess of cash, this can be a good way of quickly bumping up your stocks. Passing a Challenge is determined partly by random chance, partly by the participating student’s Intelligence and Attitude stats, and partly by their grades. Raise grades with special classes and keep an eye on their Int/Att scores as they use the facilities.

At the end of each semester, there’s a test. Student grades will be tallied and the school will be given a rating and a ranking. The higher the rating/ranking, the more money you get, so it’s in your interests to ensure each class’ grade average is as high as possible — tap on a classroom to see the whole class’ average as well as students’ individual grades.

Building Up

As you pass Challenges and pass other milestones, reports in the school newspaper will be published, increasing your potential catchment area. As this happens, a flow of Transfer Students will join your school. Each will bring an entrance fee with them, and some will also offer a monetary gift from their parents. The more students you have, the more tuition you get per month.

Once your classrooms are full or the flow of Transfer Students stops, that’s a signal that it’s time to hire a new teacher. Pick one with a reasonable salary but a good range of stats, particularly those which aren’t covered by your existing staff member. Teachers’ “grades” determine how much benefit students get from the classes they hold at the start of each semester as well as the special classes — each time you hold a special class, one of your teachers is picked randomly to hold it.

Levelling up a teacher requires Research Points — the exact type and amount depends on the individual teacher. Gaining a level gives the teacher a 20% pay rise and 30-90 Education Points to spend on their “grades”. Try and specialise each teacher one at a time — all grades carry equal weight, so there’s no need to get Eng/Ma/Sci up first, whatever the National Curriculum might tell you. Pick one and try and get it up to 100, then move on to another.

Budget carefully — at the end of each month, you’ll see a brief rundown of how much you spent on facility upkeep, how much you spent on teacher salaries and how much income you got from students. Ideally the latter figure should be higher than the former two combined. If you want to check your budget in detail, go into the menu, tap School > School Info then tap on the info window that pops up.

Creating Spots

Once you’re making a healthy profit each month, you can look at expanding your school. When building new facilities, the most efficient thing to do is combine groups of three facilities together into Popular Spots. These then get a bonus which they also provide to surrounding facilities, making them more effective. The more a facility is used, the better it gets, too — tap on a facility to see how many more times it has to be used before it will level up.

Known Spot combinations are listed under Lists > Spot Guide. Over time, you’ll unlock more “recipes” but not all are listed. Here’s a partial list:

Relaxing Spot: Azalea, Grass, Bench
Waiting Spot: Bulletin Board, Big Rock, Rest Room
Power Spot: Well, Woods, Grass
Garden Spot: Grass, Field, Water Fountain
Art Spot: Art Room, Music Room, Misc Room
Study Spot: Principal Room, Library, AV Room
Spooky Spot: Music Room, Lab, Incinerator
Friend Spot: Water Fountain, Nurse’s Room, Lounge
Date Spot: Tennis Court, Woods, Library
Exercise Spot: Running track, B-Ball Court, Vending Room
Jealousy Spot: Incinerator, Cafeteria, Home Ec Room
Election Spot: Principal’s Office, Teacher Room, Lounge
Homey Spot: Nurse’s Room, Home Ec Room, Rest Room
Shopping Spot: Snack Store, Tiny Mart, Cafeteria
Meat Spot: Pig Room, Cow Room, Cafeteria
Water Spot: Water tile, Rest Room, Well
Cooking Spot: Incinerator, Home Ec Room, Water Fountain

In order to create some of these Spots, you’ll need to research the relevant facilities. To do this, pop up the menu, go into Admin > Research. Each facility costs a certain amount of money and Research Points to unlock, then each will take a period of time to create. You can’t research everything initially — more facilities will unlock as time passes. You’ll know when you can research something new by a pop-up saying you’ve got a “new request”. When looking at the Spot Guide, “Can Build” means that you have the capability to research all the necessary facilities, whereas “Cannot Build” means that you won’t be able to research or build at least some of the facilities for a while yet.

Career Guidance and Graduation

When your students reach their third year, you need to start paying attention to their career paths, as this will determine how much money you get when they graduate in month 3 of their last year. Use Lists > Student List to view their grades, stats and success rate in their career. Anyone with a yellow success rate (80%+) is likely to succeed, so you can leave them be in most cases. For anyone else, you may want to consider giving them some career guidance.

Students with no career planned will become part-timers upon graduation. This has a 100% success rate but returns a poor amount of money, so if you have the time and resources, advise them on an appropriate career.

To give career guidance, you need to use Research Points to create a Career Change item from the Admin > Items menu. Then tap on a student either on the screen or in the Student List and choose Use Item to apply it to them. You’ll see a range of careers, success rates and salaries — pick one with a good chance of success and decent salary. You’ll get an award of 5% of the total salaries of all your graduating students when they leave, so it’s in your interests to get them into as highly-paid jobs as possible.

Other Ways of Making Money

Certain facilities, such as the Vending Room and Snack Store, gain you money whenever students or teachers use them. This will provide a small income.

Fields will provide a slow but steady income, too. Build fields where students and teachers can reach them, next to paths. They’ll plant and harvest crops automatically at regular intervals, providing money on harvest.

Animal rooms provide income in a similar manner to fields, but you can build fewer of them.

All facilities are made more effective and provide more money depending on the amount of Spirit they have — Spirit is raised by planting trees, flowers and other nice things around them.

Where Now?

It’s up to you after that. From hereon you’ll have a steady string of things vying for your attention — do you prioritise your third years’ grades? Research? Build? Up to you — but remember you’ve only got until your tenth year to record a high score.

If you find your supply of transfer students drying up and your income dwindling, hire more teachers. Four teachers can handle six full classes — you’ll need to build another Teachers’ Room if you want to hire more.

Hope that’s helped. I haven’t covered everything by any means, but that sums up everything I’ve figured out about the game so far.

#oneaday Day 549: Kairo! Kairo! Kairo!

I’ve been playing a couple of Kairosoft games on iPhone recently — specifically, Game Dev Story, which most gamers with an iPhone have probably heard of, and Pocket Academy which, as a recent release, may be a little more obscure.

These games, while initially seemingly slightly impenetrable, are great, and bring to mind strategy games of the past, complete with super-adorable pixel art. Specifically, stuff of the SimCity ilk, where there were no set goals, no Achievements, no “win conditions”, even, save the ones you set for yourself. Unlike SimCity, Game Dev Story and Pocket Academy do end after 20 years of in-game time (you can keep playing but your scores aren’t recorded after that) so you do have something to strive for, but other than that, you’re on your own.

I hadn’t realised how long it was since we’ve had a game like that until I started playing them in earnest. Do you remember the start of a game of Sim City? “Here’s a blank bit of land. Off you go.” No tutorial. No “you should probably build this first”, no initial setup. Blank canvas, palette of Stuff to Build. Begin building, build too much, lose all money, fail. Try again, pace self better, experiment with big thing, fail. Start again, pace self even better, don’t build big thing until you really need it, slowly start making money. Repeat until map full.

Contrast this with one of the modern equivalents of the genre, which is the Facebook/phone-based city-building game. I tried CityVille on iPhone for a little while just to see if there was any strategy or experimentation involved whatsoever. There wasn’t. It was an endless string of objectives which theoretically I could have been free to ignore were it not for the fact that you unlock things to build painfully slowly by levelling up like in an RPG — and the most efficient way to level up is to complete said objectives. This is, to misquote Aristotle, “balls”.

Now we come to Kairosoft’s titles. While they don’t quite give you the completely empty canvas to start with, the tutorial is rudimentary at best and barely explains the basics of gameplay — the rest of it is up to you to discover. Why should you level up your staff? Why should you pump money into advertising? What effect does having couples in your school have? Why does a combination of a tennis court, a tree and a library make my students happier?

I don’t know the answers to all of those questions… yet. And like in SimCity, my first attempt at Pocket Academy saw me hire too many teachers too quickly and send my school spiralling into debt that it wouldn’t be able to recover from because I didn’t have the capital to build the things that would make it more attractive to new students. So I had to swallow my pride and start again. Game Dev Story is a bit easier — there’s always a means of getting your team out of trouble with some contract work, for example — but still challenging if you want your company to reach the upper echelons of awesomeness.

The nature of these games puts them somewhat at odds with what appeals to a stereotypical iPhone gamer, who wants something that they can pick up and play without having to take time to learn it. The beauty of Kairosoft’s games is that they can be played for a few short minutes while waiting for a bus, but similarly they can be indulged in for hours at a time if you so please, too.

#oneaday Day 125: He’s Having an Episode

Episodic gaming is, for many publishers, the “holy grail” of digital distribution. If they can figure out a way to hook a player in and keep them interested in their piece of interactive entertainment, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t keep going and going and going until people lose interest — like a TV show.

But the trouble is, a lot of developers have great difficulty releasing episodic content in a timely manner. Valve are obviously right out with their years elapsed between Half-Life 2 episodes and the conspicuous lack of Episode Three. Telltale are closer, with their monthly episode, but it’s still not quite the same as a TV show.

Oddly enough, the games that have pretty much got it spot on are two games buried deep in the heart of the App Store that you’ll probably never pay any attention to. But I’m here to tell you that if you’re the slightest bit interested in exploring a bold experiment in episodic interactive content, then you really, really need to try out Cause of Death and Surviving High School, two games built around the same basic visual novel-style engine but which manage to be very different from one another.

Cause of Death is a full-on interactive detective show. It’s presented very simply with static backdrops, text narration and character portraits, but it works extremely well thanks to the attractive artwork, well-written (if overly-peppered with exclamation marks) dialogue, strong characters and excellent music. It’s also interesting in that you regularly switch between different characters — including the victims of crimes, which is an interesting approach. Gameplay is extremely simple, consisting of reading text and occasionally making choices, some of which are against a time limit (and for some of which the correct option is to not make a decision) and acquiring “Detective Score”. Acquiring enough points in each chapter unlocks bonus scenes, so there’s plenty of incentive to do your best.

Surviving High School, on the other hand, is very different, despite using the same game engine. It’s more of a social/dating sim, based around a character you name and choose the appearance of yourself. There’s a lot more “branching” to the story depending on who you talk to, who you choose to date and decisions you make. And there’s a lot more minigames which would be pretty cheesy in a computer-based adventure game (wordsearches, pop quizzes, that sort of thing) but work extremely well on the iPhone’s touchscreen. Again, it’s written with some very appealing (if stereotypical) characters who all have a story to tell. Plenty of replay value, too, as decisions you make mean that you’ll see certain scenes and not others.

But that’s the game you download. The really interesting thing comes in the episodic content. The app you download is “Season One” of the respective game, which tells a complete story and is a satisfying experience in itself. Beyond that, though, there’s a new episode that “airs” every week and can be downloaded for free while it’s available. And past episodes are available “on demand” for a fee — in the case of Cause of Death, you can buy the whole of Season Two for under two quid and it’s then 59p per pair of episodes after that. Haven’t checked Surviving High School yet but it’s probably something similar.

This, right here, is the correct way to do it. Weekly updates mean that people will stay engaged with the game, especially as they’re free while they’re “airing”. Episodes on demand allow the developers to make some money from the games, which can then be ploughed back into development of further episodes or new titles. And because the tech of the games is so simple, it probably doesn’t cost that much to make new episodes — meaning both games are probably nice little money-spinners for EA.

Regardless of how much money EA is making off them, though, they’re both excellent titles for fans of the visual novel style of gameplay, and I will certainly be exploring the further episodes in more detail. Both games have free, ad-supported versions available (and they’re only 59p each for ad-free versions, so they don’t exactly break the bank) so why not check them out?

#oneaday, Day 294: Filthy Rogue

The roguelike genre is one I only discovered relatively recently. In fact, I was a relative latecomer to the whole RPG genre, only getting to grips with it for the first time with Final Fantasy VII. As such, for a good few years, I felt that RPGs were all about strong stories, interesting (and sometimes clichéd) characters, a buildup to an epic final conflict and some of the best music you’ll ever hear.

As such, when I played an RPG that wasn’t so strong on the story and focused more on loot-whoring or level-grinding, I found myself losing interest quickly. It was long after its release that I finally beat Diablo II and, to this date, I’ve never beaten it on anything other than the normal difficulty level.

That changed when I came across Angband, though. Angband looks like the sort of game you used to play on Teletext. Sure, there are graphical tilesets you can customise it with. But at its heart, it’s a text-based game with about a bajillion keyboard commands.

But you know what? The kind of emergent narrative that came out of several intense Angband sessions rivalled any pre-scripted tales that Squeenix have ever come out with. Largely because it was so unpredictable, and that any screw-ups were inevitably your fault for failing to prepare adequately, rather than the fault of the game mechanics itself.

Take the time my oil lamp ran out on the fifth level of the dungeon. This meant, in gameplay terms, that I couldn’t “see” new passageways ahead of me—namely, they weren’t revealed on the map—unless I banged into a wall, which then helpfully revealed said wall on the map for me. My first reaction in this instant was, of course, to panic. Death in Angband doesn’t mean restoring a saved game. Oh no. Death in Angband means your save game getting deleted and you having to start all over again. This adds an enormous amount of pressure on you, the player, to get it right. And it also makes you kick yourself when you realise that you didn’t bring enough oil to fuel your lamp.

So off I went, slowly “feeling” my way along the walls of the corridors in an attempt to find the stairs up… for five floors. This sounds like an impossible task. But after a fairly lengthy period of methodical, careful searching (and a few terrifying combats in the pitch darkness) I finally managed to emerge victorious to town level, stock up on oil and provisions and jump back into the dungeon with renewed fervour.

Of course, I promptly got twatted by an Ogre, making all that work utterly meaningless. But it didn’t matter—it was a fun experience unlike anything I’d experienced in a game before. And I’ve struggled to repeat it with any game since then.

Not through lack of trying, though. There are some great roguelikes out there, many of which are a lot more accessible than Angband. I have three favourites I’d like to share with you right now, one of which is, of all things, a board game. The other two are iPhone games.

Sword of Fargoal is actually a remake of an old Commodore 64-era title which didn’t look like the picture above. No, it looked like this:

The best thing about Sword of Fargoal is its simplicity coupled with a surprising amount of hidden depth. While Angband is rather intimidating to get started with, with pretty much every key on the keyboard (shifted and non-shifted) mapped to something, Fargoal simply requires that you get to grips with moving and using a context-sensitive button in the top-right corner. And keeping an eye on the text display at the top of the screen for hints and cues, too. Combat is a case of running into an enemy—the player and monster will then take turns bashing each other until one or the other falls over or one runs away. Gold is collected to sacrifice at altars throughout the dungeon for experience point bonuses. And the rest is left to the player to discover. The more you play, the more you start to notice little graphical details and cues tipping you off to the location of traps or treasure.

And it’s challenging, too. There are 15 levels to explore, all of which are sprawling monstrosities with several areas. And when you make it to the bottom to recover the titular blade, you then have to escape again. I haven’t even made it to the bottom yet. It’s a lengthy, challenging quest. And despite the fact that death is permanent, it’s addictive and easy to return to.

Then we have 100 Rogues, which takes a slightly different approach to that of Sword of Fargoal. While Fargoal‘s quest is lengthy, 100 Rogues can potentially be beaten in one sitting. Key word here being “potentially”. 100 Rogues is particularly brutal, fond of surrounding the player and battering them to a pulp. Fortunately, the player also has a Diablo-style skill tree at their disposal, including a number of attacks that can beat back several enemies at the same time.

It’s very difficult, though, and the descriptions of the game on the App Store don’t even try and hide the fact that you will die. A lot. In fact, there’s even a Game Center Achievement for having sent the titular 100 rogues to their eventual demise.

I only picked this up recently, but it’s immensely appealing due to its 16-bit graphics and soundtrack. It looks and plays like a Genesis/Mega Drive game, in a good way. It’s a bit buggy in places but the author appears to be committed to regular updates.

Finally, one of my favourite roguelikes of all time is Warhammer Quest, a game that involves you having people you actually don’t mind being in the same room with. Featuring all the genre staples—a randomly generated dungeon, permadeath, brutal difficulty, vast amounts of phat lewt—it’s very much the board game equivalent of Rogue et al. Even better, everyone gets to join in on the fun—there’s no need for a Game Master player (unless you really want to use one) as the rules cater fully for monster “behaviour”.

Couple that with the game’s immense customisability (it’s a word) thanks to its use of Games Workshop Citadel Miniatures line of figures and you have a game with limitless potential. And hundreds—hundreds—of tiny pieces of card and plastic.

So there you go. A whistlestop tour of the roguelike genre. And I didn’t even mention Moria or NetHack once.