tonko

The silence on the blog has been partly due to working on my dissertation, but I must brag a little and say that I stuck to my timeline and had quite a lot of free time in the end when I was just proofing for an hour each day and practicing my presentation for another hour. So the real reason why I haven't been posting is because I was playing ramen sensei 2.

But first, a brief interlude.

What started this whole desire to play a good ol' simulation game is Citybound. I was following this game years ago when the concept was first developed, and recently caught up on the dev updates. Still quite far from the eventual release haha.

So then I went to look for a casual-ish simulation game in the app store since I'll be spending sometime on trains and flights. Ideally I was looking for an offline game, but those pickings are slim. The couple of games I downloaded were...what are the best words to describe them...uninspiring and shallow? Just not fun to play, especially when compared to the values of Citybound.

So then I thought about what my ideal casual-ish simulation game would be like. Generally I prefer the player's decisions to focus on resource management. The perks of having a lot of trouble falling asleep and taking long showers is that both are fertile times for ideation.

Exhibit A

I even half seriously considered making this game myself. If Anselm can do it...I probably can too for a much simpler concept.

Currently this idea is safely parked away in the list of "someday...perhaps in retirement"...mostly because I found ramen sensei and got quite addicted for the last couple of days. Kairosoft makes a whole bunch of sim games, and I'm regretting just picking them up after knowing about this dev for many years.

Good points of ramen sensei:

• Sufficient depth and control in creating custom ramen: there's ingredients for the components of noodle and soup base, which you then combine and add toppings. There's also not too much english resource online on the ingredients and combo, so I'm forced to experiment and not just google the optimal ramen. 
• Different gameplay modes: there's operating your own restaurant, arena (pvp-ish...you're against bots) and odyssey (board game). 

One off-putting aspect of the game is that there's too little instruction in the beginning so it took a while to figure out how to do what I wanted to do. Some options are buried in the menu system and takes time to find. There's also 3 (or 4 depending if you count rank points) different currencies in the game used for different things. Overall, too much information to digest for a new player. Maybe all of Kairosoft's games are like this, so its only confusing for a completely new player. 

...

The silence will continue a little longer as my mom is here to spend some time in the UK / help me move. Too bad ramen sensei isn't an offline game ;o;