Leave the Choice to Fate: Autoplay Arrives

Hello everyone, in this update, International Student Simulator has a new gameplay: hosting mode.

The meaning is simple: if you don't want to make your own choices every week, you can leave this round to the system to advance randomly. The game will automatically confirm the weekly episode, randomly select the main event option, and then move on to the next week. You can sit by and watch the fate of the international students go down by themselves.

It sounds a bit lazy, but I think it works well for this game.

Because many times, studying abroad is not a process of "I carefully weigh all the options and then make the optimal decision." More often than not, you are just sleepy and hungry, the deadline is coming, the rent has gone up again, your friends ask you if you are going out on the weekend, and you make a random decision in ten minutes. Only after a long time do you realize that your random choice that day really pushed your life in another direction.

So the hosting mode is not for players to complete the game. It's more like amplifying the "random fate" thing.

In manual mode, you can still make careful choices. When you see an event, think about your current situation and decide whether to save your GPA, money, spirit, or survive first.

Hosted mode is more like watching another self. You know what he will probably encounter, but you don't know what he will choose. After the system selects an option, it will be highlighted on the results page, and it will not secretly make the decision for you and pretend that nothing happened. You can clearly see: Oh, so fate has chosen this for me this week.

I like this little design very much. Because it makes hosting less of a black box and more like a slightly evil side story. It doesn't explain much, it just shows you the results.

The hosting mode cannot be changed after the start of the game.

You can switch from manual to managed in the middle of the game, and you can also switch from managed back to manual. This feature is very important. Because the player's mood will change.

Sometimes when you are just starting out, you are in high spirits and feel that I want to run this life seriously. In the sixth week of playing, I found that my GPA had dropped, my money was gone, and my mental state felt like being tossed through a dryer. Suddenly, I wanted to say: Forget it, just go on your own.

Sometimes, while hosting is running, you see an event and suddenly want to take the steering wheel back. After all, the strangest thing about human beings is this: You clearly agreed to leave it to fate, but when you see fate really starting to drive randomly, you can't help but want to hit the brakes.

For this switch, some protections have been made inside the game. The old archive does not have a gameplay mode field and will be restored in manual mode by default. It will not suddenly change to automatic playback after an update. Trusted advancement will also avoid games that have ended and will not continue to move forward foolishly after the ending.

It’s best that players don’t feel this kind of thing.

If players feel it, it usually means it's broken.

A function that seems to just "automatically select for me" actually has to take care of many small states: is it the early-week episode, event selection, or results page? Should the next step be confirmation, selection, or moving on to the next week? If the player switches back to manual mode midway, should the previously scheduled automatic advancement be cancelled? If the save is restored after refreshing, how should the mode continue?

None of these questions are romantic. But that’s the case with mini-games. What really makes the experience smoother are often the things that no one would particularly praise.

When I made the hosting model, I also thought about whether it would make the game too "no operation". Later I thought it didn't matter.

"Ryuzi Simulator" is not a game that tests operation. It's more like a game that keeps asking you: Would things be different if you took a different path? Manual is the answer, hosting is the answer. The former is "I choose", the latter is "I see what fate will choose".

Some rounds are suitable for serious play, and some rounds are suitable for sitting aside and watching it go crazy.

This time, we leave it to you both ways.

May your hosting life not be too outrageous.

Of course, if it's too outrageous, it doesn't seem to be a Ryuko simulator.

VibeSims / International Student Simulator