Intern Simulator's first update!

Hello, internet!

With our first update of Intern Simulator being released today, we thought we’d share some of the updates we made and the decisions that went into them. We’re very appreciative for everyone who tried out our alpha 1.0 version of the game we released last month, especially given this is our first game.

Of course, one of the main things we wanted to do in this game was to add more playable tasks to the gameplay. To accomplish this, we first fixed many of the dialogue related bugs in our task/ dialogue system, and added three new tasks. We’re probably most excited about Neesy’s survey, which has our hapless intern roaming outside to poll the general public about ways to improve our favorite office!

We also wanted to take some time to improve some of the game’s overall functionality, bringing more life to the game and improving player experience. We initially were wary about using tooltips; we thought the short game time and the relatively combined map would make tasks too easy. However, we found it was harder for players to understand what to do as well as to understand changing stats through the game. To fix this, we added two kinds of tooltips: a quest availability indicator and a happy/sad indicator for NPCs. We also added a mail indicator to the player’s computer.

Finally, we thought the NPCs seemed pretty lifeless in their current state, so we added animation triggers that could be cued from dialogue. We’re pretty happy how these turned out, and will be continuing to add more and refining this system moving forward.

All the best,

Eli and Joe