Success City

Practice your business Chinese in this story game!

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Inspiration

I was just a young student enrolled in a Business Chinese class at college. One day my teacher told us that it was time for our final presentation. Although we had different topics, and the understood method would be to just make a PowerPoint presentation, I still asked my teacher if it was possible for me to create a visual novel. She said the idea was good, since it was interactive.

What it does

In this game, you leave your house to start a new life of being a business intern (specifically dealing with stocks) all the way in Beijing. It simulates students being in an actual "business Chinese" environment. Through out your days at the company, you are faced with different situations one would see in a Chinese business: Negotiating with customers in Chinese through the phone, understanding how to maneuver your way in certain situations (What's the "Chinese" cultural way to do in this situation?), and having to know business Chinese words!

In these social situations, you can gain points. These points determine whether your boss, who will speak with you at the end of the game to give you a performance evaluation, will give you a RAISE or not! Cue insane screaming because m0n3y. Test your knowledge of business Chinese and cultural awareness in this fun video game!

How I built it

I used Ren'Py (which uses Python), the virtual novel engine! Check it out!

Challenges I ran into

Honestly, stuff got super confusing super quick. Because there were so many story lines and paths you could take in this game, it got a little confusing and annoying having to slide up and down my window when I was writing it in my text editor. I wish there was a book mark feature. Honestly, there probably is, but I did not know of it. But I'm also a visual learner, so honestly I would have just preferred it if I had diagrammed the different possibilities. Then I'd just look at the paper and the visual map of my game would refresh itself in my head.

But that was a minor challenge. It was more annoying than anything. This project was a fine length and the game wasn't that complex, so I could do it all in my head. But if I make something bigger, I am going to diagram it out or something beforehand.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The game got some laughs from the crowd, especially at the weird robbery scene. cue drum roll I'm also proud that I created my first ever visual novel. I never thought I would make a video game (this is technically my first video game, WOW!) about Chinese class! xD

What I learned

I learned that it's important to have a road map of some sort for all projects, even if it's not algorithm-focused. Because this was just a fun social game with minimal tricky math, and it was still a bit much to remember Oh, so what happens if you get X points?" you lose your fucking job, Bob cue depression

I also learned that it's important to be able to finagle your way to learn stuff you don't know. For example, I needed to somehow generate characters for that visual novel. I found a visual novel character generator online and used that to create the characters in the game! Maybe I didn't learn how to create the characters or something super dope like that at first, but who does that on the first time? What's important is that I did something I never had to do, and I learned about how software like that even exists. I also found that I love doing new shit I've never done before because it's fun.

What's next for Success City

Honestly, I think Success City is over for now. I won't be developing further. I however can see myself creating another video game like this because it is incredibly fun. I love story telling, writing, art, and visual novels combine all three. Also, visual novels in Ren'Py are like a super relaxing form of programming, because it's very intuitive with jumps and branches in Python.

Support me and get the game here: https://mcfloofenbork.itch.io/

Built With

  • renpy-python
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