This Time, Your City and Major Are More Than Two Lines on a Profile

When I first made *Liuzis Simulator*, I loved the feeling of generating a random profile at the beginning of each run.

You might study media in London, computer science in Toronto, arrive as a first-year undergraduate, or begin as a PhD student who already looks personally betrayed by their dissertation. One click, and an entirely different life appears.

It sounds wonderfully varied.

After playing for a while, however, I noticed an awkward problem: the profiles were very specific, but once the game started, many of those details did not matter nearly as much as they should.

London and Sydney could lead to similar events. Computer science and art history students might face the same crisis. The city and major looked more like decorations on a character card—useful for making the opening feel like a real life, but not for actually changing that life.

To put it less politely: I carefully issued every player an identity card, and then built a game that never checked it.

So in this update, I decided to let the city and major on the profile finally take part in the story.

A city should do more than appear in the weather forecast

Previously, events could distinguish between a “major city,” a “mid-sized city,” and a “college town.” That was better than completely unrestricted randomness, but only slightly.

A Toronto basement, the London Underground, a Sydney beach, and Melbourne’s four seasons in a single day should not all be compressed into the same “major city” label. Life abroad is often shaped less by grand cultural revelations than by painfully specific details: a heating bill, a strike notice, a missed bus, sudden snowfall, or a perfect sunny day that somehow fails to cancel a 23:59 assignment deadline.

This update adds one dedicated main event for each of the 18 cities currently available in the profile pool.

In Toronto, you may watch the first snow through a basement window while deciding whether your health matters more than the heating bill.

In London, the Underground will naturally go on strike on the one day you absolutely cannot be late. Random events have excellent timing.

In Sydney, the beach and a deadline may call your name at the same time. In Melbourne, the weather may personally volunteer to join your group project.

These events are not city guides, nor are they attempts to summarize an entire place with one joke. They are small windows that give each run something that feels as though it could only happen there.

A major should do more than appear on a diploma

The problem was even more obvious with academic majors.

Previously, computer science, architecture, finance, sociology, and the arts could change the profile description, but rarely changed what actually happened. It was as if everyone had chosen a different degree only to sit the same “General International Student Survival Exam.”

Reality is not nearly that fair.

A computer science student may meet their first Merge Conflict during a group project. A design student may spend the night before submission making the version that was supposed to involve “just one tiny change.” Business, medicine, the humanities, and the sciences each come with their own familiar anxieties, ways of collaborating, and forms of self-doubt.

So this update also adds 24 major-specific main events.

I did not turn every major into a completely separate game. This was not restraint so much as an independent developer finally developing a healthy respect for workload.

The new events still use the existing three-choice structure, attribute changes, and random checks, but they only appear for matching profiles. A major is no longer a line of introductory text. At some point, it steps into the story and reminds you that the words you entered on an application form were always going to have consequences.

Occasionally, those consequences may include a sense of achievement. Usually after several less pleasant consequences.

Random should not mean unrelated

This update adds 42 new three-choice main events: 18 for cities and 24 for majors.

The number of main events has grown from 95 to 137, while the number of main-event choices has grown from 285 to 411. For a brief moment, those numbers made me feel that the game had become impressively enormous. Then I opened the project again and discovered everything that still needed work.

More important than the count, however, is a new guarantee.

City-specific events enter the pool early in a run. If one has not appeared naturally, it will be triggered no later than Week 4. Major-specific events enter later and will appear no later than Week 8.

Whether you follow the undergraduate, master’s, or PhD route, every run will now contain at least one story tied to your city and one tied to your major.

I still want *Liuzis Simulator* to feel unpredictable. Players should not know exactly what next week will bring, and there should never be a single optimal route that can be solved by memorizing answers.

But random should not mean unrelated.

When a profile says London, architecture, socially anxious, and broke, the story that follows should have at least something to do with London, architecture, social anxiety, and being broke. Otherwise, a “random life” is simply the same event list playing beneath different names.

Good randomness feels like fate. Bad randomness feels more like a database malfunction.

Letting a profile slowly grow into a person

*Liuzis Simulator* has never been a game about “how to succeed at studying abroad.”

It is about continuing to live when everything familiar has been removed: making choices without enough sleep, maintaining dignity without enough money, pretending to understand when you do not, and still going to class the morning after a breakdown.

A city and a major cannot determine an entire life.

But they shape the streets you walk every day, the people you stay up late with, the problems that keep you anxious, and the moments when you suddenly realize that you may actually have built a life here.

This update is only one more step in that direction.

The profile at the beginning no longer merely tells you who you are. It now begins to participate in a more important question:

In this place, studying this subject, after all these accidents—who will you slowly become?

Life cannot be restarted. Games can.

And at least on your next restart, the city and major you draw will finally take you seriously.

architect
2026/08/01