Turning a Temporary Prototype into a Real Game

Hello everyone, International Student Simulator is finally officially launched.

It started as a long, long one-page prototype. How long does it grow? It’s so long that every time I open that HTML file, I wonder if someone is already living in it. Everything is crowded together: pages, styles, events, endings, archives, buttons, all kinds of strange judgments, and a lot of words that I have to be silent for three seconds even after reading it.

At that time it was actually playable. I can start the game, I can choose a route, I can generate files, I can go through each week, I can encounter some outrageous things, and I can finally reach the end.

But there is an entire Pacific Ocean between "can play" and "can go online".

International Student Simulator wants to simulate the randomness of a person's life in a foreign land. It’s not the standard narrative of “hard work will lead to success”, but many times you don’t have enough money, sleep, or information, but things will still happen as usual. You don’t know which choice is definitely correct, and you can only keep moving forward under a bunch of incomplete conditions.

So this game was not designed to be a guide from the beginning. It's more like a small random experiment: change a city, change an identity, change a major, change a personality, will you become a different person? In other words, is the person who is struggling to survive in a foreign land actually you?

When it went online this time, the main thing I did was actually very simple: turn it from a temporary thing into a game that can be placed in VibeSims for a long time.

It now has its own entrance: /liuzi.

There are independent pages, mobile layouts, local archives, ending illustrations, copied endings and ranking entrances. Instead of being an experiment that I opened locally, played a couple of games myself, and then turned off, it's officially VibeSims' third game.

It sounds like it's "just upload the file" and it's over, but it's not.

The prototype stage is the most freeing. Just add whatever comes to mind, add an event today, add an ending tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow you feel it's not fun, so you change it temporarily. It is very much like a rental house when it was first built: mattresses are laid on the floor first, boxes are piled against the walls first, and pots and pans are stuffed randomly, as long as they can survive.

But if we really want to launch it publicly, we can no longer do this.

The game content must be continuously added, the page must be read normally on the mobile phone, the archive cannot be damaged casually, the ending cannot be lost inexplicably, and the buttons must not be unresponsive after clicking. The most important thing is that the names written by players, the files generated, the events encountered and the final ending should not become something that is secretly uploaded.

So in this version, local archives still stay in your browser. The name, file text, event text, and ending text will not be uploaded. What the rankings need to record are only some structured results, such as the number of endings, routes, scores, etc. To put it simply, the website can know "someone has completed a round", but it does not need to know "how embarrassed you were in this round".

This is also the boundary I always wanted to keep when making this game.

There are a lot of funny things in "Ryuko Simulator" and a lot of things that remind you of a moment in the past. It can be absurd, it can be outrageous, it can make people laugh and say "this is too real", but it should not take away the player's little bit of private embarrassment.

This time I also compiled some experiences online.

The opening process of the mobile terminal has been broken down. Previously, there were too many things crammed into one screen, like the bombardment of orientation information at the beginning of school. It seemed like everything was there, but people no longer wanted to read it. Now choose the degree route first, and then choose the character, the pace will be lighter.

Random archive pages are also compressed a bit. It used to be that every field was like a serious resume, but now it’s more like a biographical sketch that can be read quickly. The main game page puts more important information at the front: who you are, how you are in the fifth dimension now, and how much you have lost this week. As for the diary and to-do, put them at the back first. After all, when people collapse, the first thing they look at is definitely not historical records.

I also removed the original weekly action point processing and made the process more straightforward. Studying abroad life is complicated enough, so the game shouldn’t require players to fill out a flow sheet every week. Each week now starts with a small episode, then leads directly into the main random event for the week. It's faster, and more like life itself: it's coming before you're ready.

There are also some additions to the ending page. You can copy the ending copy or generate an ending poster. The purpose of the poster is not to make it grand, but because I feel that after a game is over, there should always be something left behind. Even if it’s just to prove: you did survive to the settlement page in this game.

From "Text Cultivation Simulator" to "Bake the Blame Battle", and now to International Student Simulator, VibeSims seems to have slowly grown into a strange little playground. There's nothing overly ambitious here, and there's no system that's so complex that you won't be able to breathe. More often than not, I just want to make something that I can play when I open it and think about it after I play it.

"Ryuko Simulator" is probably such a game.

It does not guarantee your success.

There is no guarantee that you will be happy.

There is no guarantee that every choice you make will make sense.

But it lets you move forward through a bunch of random events.

Sometimes we walk in a dignified way, sometimes we walk in a mess, and sometimes we realize as we walk that we are no longer the same person we were when we first landed.

Welcome to play International Student Simulator.

If you see yourself in the game, or think of a long-ago afternoon, a morning when you didn't wake up, or a moment when you stared at the prices in front of the supermarket shelves, then it was probably not in vain.

I hope you can slowly turn chaos into life in a foreign land.

VibeSims / International Student Simulator