Shady Character One here for another Friday devblog!

You know what? Balancing a game is hard (not 'normal' or 'easy'). You really need to maneuver between it not being too easy and not having people drop the game after ten minutes of not understanding if it is their fault or the game's. I really don't want the game to be a clicking exercise. I want the players to feel good about the milestones they are reaching. Which means that the game must be difficult to a degree.

This week I made the first major revision to the difficulty, it will definitely not be the last one though. As more items and jobs open up, as new events that give extra boosts to stats will appear - I will have to take closer look at the difficulty.

But that's all future stuff. Back to the present. I sat down and tried to calculate how much time it will take to max out all the stats if it was done in the most (or pretty much the most) optimal way, and it turned out that it would take 220 days. That didn't take into account any "bonus" stats and pocket money that you receive, but it also didn't take into account the days lost due to plot events and the like. With the game being 228 days long, it left too little wiggle room.

It also felt like right now the player hand to rest way too often. Almost every day. Even though it is a good notion, it almost made one activity slot per day redundant.

This led the following changes to the difficulty: 1. Resting was significantly buffed across the board, you will have to rest about 33% less. This might change in the future, but I would like to see how things feel on this level for a bit. 2. The skill growth curve was adjusted a bit. Classes were made a bit stronger while extracurricular activities were very slightly nerfed. Overall it should give about 10% boost to stat-growth. And will also slightly speed up the early game stat-growth.

I will leave the game at these values for a while to see how it all goes.

There we some unexpected changes to the difficulty too. While testing, I found out that Study and Spell Practice was using twice the Stamina that they should have. Now that is fixed and it should make these stats grow about 20% faster, give or take.

With all the changes and fixes, should now take about 200 full days to max out all five stats, even training sub-optimally. Which leaves a lot of time to spare. This doesn't take the stat deterioration and bonus points into consideration, but I will be very interested what optimal strategies the player might lay out. I myself will be keeping eye of the balance and see that it stays aligned with our vision.

Wishing you all a nice and balanced week,

Shady One, out!