Good morning, afternoon, evening and night to all of you!
Today is the first of June and that means, it's time for another post about how little progress I've done in the last few weeks.

Again, most work went into making the gallery work with the new Composite Event System.
The Composite Events already works and now I finally got the gallery working. The data gets saved correctly and now it also gets displayed in the journal.

 Here you see my elegant test event I used to test the journal with the new system.

The first image shows the gallery almost the same as you peeps know and love. Now it has the "Fragments" tab. You click on it you get to the overview of the different parts the event is composed of. 3 parts in this case. When selecting one part you get a selection of different event fragments you already unlocked where you again can select different variants, just like the normal events.

Now all this has cost me a lot of sanity as I put the Ren'py Engine to its limits. So I had to tackle some really odd and inconsistent behaviour. But now I hope I got the culprit and and every works as far as I can see.

The gallery only need one thing until it's finished. It now only needs to transfer its data to the event it wants to replay. That one needs a bit of trickery as it now transfers data for multiple events at once but that is an easy problem to solve.

After the gallery I have 3 other things I want to finish before I go over to the event making phase of my development cycle.

For one I want to change the journal layout a little bit. Make it more streamlined. Change it so the bookmarks don't switch sides. I put that in to create some kind of immersion of a book, but that seemed to confuse a lot of people, so that's gotta go. Also I plan on adding some kind of icon or marking to make the bookmarks identifiable even without hovering over them.

The other thing I want to do is to add a new page to the journal that shows current goals and tasks. A lot of feedback I got from people is that they don't know what to do. Now here is the problem I have with that. The game was never supposed to have a clear path or have clear tasks. For those of you that played Ashford Academy Redux, I hope you get what I mean, as I based the mechanic off of that game. The aim for this game was to just play. Just play and with time more things come up, events accumulate, small event chains pop up, new stuff to unlock gets discovered. That's what I want for this game. No goal (except for the end goal, but you'll get there anyway), just playing. Just do stuff, walk the premises, enjoy the different events and I want to keep it that way. I know all that doesn't work very good when there just aren't enough events, like it is now, but the game is still being developed and will only get more events with time.
So to come back to the point I wanted to make: The Task Page.
Because of the nature of this game, there are no real goals. There are milestones to reach to elevate the school to the next level but by revealing the chain of tasks that have to be done to get there would greatly impact the feeling of the game. There would always be stuff missed when only working towards the goal and the sensation of discovering stuff would be lost, so I'm a bit lost here on what to do.

So I would really appreciate you feedback and give me ideas on giving the peeps some kind of guidance while still keeping the premise of the game alive. Feel free to talk to me on Discord about that. I read all messages and try to answer all of them.

Now the third addition I want to make in this update is an overhaul of the school map. I talked about it in the previous Private News. You can read about it here if you've missed it.

Now I put four maps I generated with AI for vote:

Now here is the result:

As you can see, Image 1 won with quite the lead.

A bit surprised at Image 2 not getting a single vote though.

As Image 1 won (which was also my favorite :D), I worked on getting the image ready to be used in the game. First I had to extend the image to get it in a 16:9-Format. I could have cropped it, but the I would've either lost the baths at the top or the the beach at the bottom, and I didn't want that, so I pulled out Stable Diffusion, linked it with openOutpaint and started extending the image. Now one problem I had, was the four original images have been generated with Midjourney as it just is one of the most powerful models currently but it is a bit limited in it's usage so I went with Stable Diffusion for adding bits to the sides. But as those are different models and the image is quite complicated, it's really difficult to tell the ai what you want to have there. So you can see the seam where both models meet quite clearly but I think it is good enough

I think I can just say, it is made like that so the main focus wanders more to the center of the image. Well I might say that. You know? I do say it!

Now that is the image I want to go with. I plan to have the baths at the pool where the small pools are, the office building will be the smaller building to the right of the pools. The long building below it will be the school building and the long one to the left will house the labs and other subject-specific rooms. The small complex below it will be the gym. The blue area will be the swimming pool and the sports field next to that will be the sports field (Duh!). The small building to the left of the poll with the red roof will house the kiosk. Now the large green area in the lower half of the image will be the courtyard. The building on it with the red roof will be the cafeteria and one of the others will be the dormitory. No idea what to do with the other buildings though. The small houses you see at the left of the image will be the housings for the teachers. And the at the bottom right we have the beach.

Well I could've put all that just in the image with circles and arrows, but yeah no.

If you've got feedback for that or ideas, just tell me on Discord.

Now that is all for today. I hope you have a lovely time and enjoy the summer.

I will as far as the weather here in germany allows it. In summer we live in a constant cycle of scorching heat (thanks to global warming. It wasn't that bad a decade ago...) then crazy thunderstorm, then scorching heat. Thunderstorms. You get the idea.

Alright! Bye!

It is time!

Here is the new update for Mind the School. Version 0.1.3!

With this new update the cafeteria is finally introduced and filled with events.

Here's what's new:

Changelog:

Version 0.1.3 should be compatible with all 0.1.2 Versions!

One of the big new additions is the Replay Gallery.

Just open the gallery in the journal, select the location, the event, the values and start replay.

The gallery enables you to replay all already seen events from all savegames in the journal. The Gallery tracks all variants and all decisions, so you can freely select what variant you want to have and are only prompted with decisions you already made.

To end the replay, just hit 'End Replay' in the Quickbar at the bottom or in the Menu.

Almost all bugfixes and QoL-Changes are made because of the feedback I got from you peeps. So thank you all and please keep the feedback coming.

Also feel free to join my Discord where we freely discuss the game, anime, the purpose of life, the normal stuff.

Now for the important part, the game download.

This time I decided to also include a version with uncompressed images, because even though the compression I chose shows almost no difference to the original, I still found some differences I didn't like, but to force 2GB on you would be harsh, so I let you decide. The uncompressed variant has the images formatted to a lossless webp-format.

Version 0.1.3B

Uncompressed:

PC - MAC

Compressed:

PC - MAC - ANDROID

Hello, glad you could make it. Do you know, why I called you here?

First of all, the work you've done here is amazing, and I'm really happy that you're attending this school. But unfortunately there is one thing. I'm really sorry but today is the time for another post about the progress for Mind the School. I know it will be challenging... for both of us, but together we can get through it and come out stronger and better informed than before.

So let's get through it in a structured manner and start with...

I would say the release of version 0.1.3 went rather good. I got a lot of good feedback.

Of course there was a lot of negative feedback as well. Most of the criticism was about the lack of content and the current stat progression.
Those are points that are absolutely understandable, the only thing I can say about that is, I'm working on it.

The lack of content is just due to the fact that the game is just not that long out yet. I started work on the game back in April 2023. Most of the time I spent on creating the framework of the game and all of the mechanisms to make the game as easily expandable as possible and to make it really easy to populate the game with content. Something that definitely pays off now. When creating an event, 10-20% of the work goes into integrating the event in the game and the rest goes into rendering the images. That just shows the power of the framework. Still I decided to release the game in September with only the framework and the game introduction in place. Something I received a lot of criticism for but something I don't regret doing. Since then I implemented a lot of changes in the game. Changes I was only able to implement thanks to your feedback. Since I'm working on this project all by myself, I'm just missing the different perspectives. A developer is always a bit biased when it comes to it's project. That's why in a team there are other people testing your project. Since I don't have a team, I'm misusing you peeps as my lab rats.

Now creating events takes a lot of time. Not necessarily the texts themselves, when I got an idea, I pretty much finish them in a short time. The most time goes into rendering the images. I'm still very inexperienced with it and just can't throw them out in a matter of minutes. For that reason I'm limited in the amount of content I can create each update, since I don't want to make you peeps wait too long for each update.

Now the problem with the stats. The stat problem is based on two factors. 1. The lack of game progression and 2. the lack of content.

First, the game being in it's early state does not have a lot of in-game progress yet. The current version progresses only up to level 1 of the planned 10 levels. So there currently is no real use for the stats right now. Something that will change once more progress and more options are availble.

Second, the game just lacks diversity. There just aren't enough events, so that creates a sense of repetition. I try to make it less repetitive by adding different variants to most events, so they don't feel as repetitive, but of course that has limited success.

So my piece of advise to you is, don't focus that much on the stats, play the game, enjoy the events already added. There just is no need for stat grinding. Not yet, even though I want to prevent the stats from being too grindy.

I know this might sound like me making excuses, but I am really not. I just want to make clear, I am aware of all the issues and all the shortcomings of my game. I'm often reminded of them in the time after each release. Especially since I take my time to go through all the messages and to answer most of them. It's always mentally exhausting, depressing and anxiety inducing every time I get a notification, but I think at this time of the development such feedback is crucial and will benefit the game. So I keep struggling my way through it.

Now the good part of the release. This time there were almost no bugs to fix. At least no bugs I have been made aware of (￢з￢). There was a small amount of bugs, but only 2 or 3, so huge success!

Now for version 0.1.4 I planned a few things.

The biggest change will be the introduction of composite events. I already talked about them in an earlier post but again a small overview of what composite events are.

A composite event is a different kind of event. The difference is that a composite events is put together by multiple smaller event fragments. This allows for longer random events with the events being more divers, flexible and less repetitive. Imagine a class teaching event. In the composite event it would consist of 3 event parts. One running at the beginning of the class, one during the learning phase and on at the end of the class. Now for each part there are multiple fragments which are chosen randomly. I think you understand where I'm going with this.

Now fortunately with the event system being as well built as it is (*pats myself on the back*), it was really easy implementing the new event type. With that said, it is almost fully implemented. Just needs some testing and then I need to integrate the new event type into the gallery system, which takes the most work.

For that I ask all of the peeps who already made use of the gallery to give me their feedback, whether good or bad, ideas or improvements. The gallery system while being extremely flexible and absolutely simple when using, it is very complicated and extremely sensible in the inner works, so I'd rather touch it as rarely as possible, so if you have improvements or ideas, I'd fancy putting them in now, while I have to work on it anyways.

Now for other changes in 0.1.4, I want to add more events to the office building, mostly covering the organisational stuff, like earning money, providing counselling sessions, looking at papers etc.

Also some fun time with Emiko. Or some happy accidents during counselling:

Now that is all for today. Thanks for reading through all that stuff.

If you have feedback or just want to talk to me join my Discord! I try to answer on all platforms I'm on but discord just works best for me and enables me to answer as fast as possible. For the Patreon DMs, I only get the notification hours later, even for all the follow-ups. But on discord I'm always able to answer, except for when I'm sleeping

Now that's all! Thanks. Smell ya later!