Devlog: Medical Exams new features

Hi guys.

Today I'll tell you about the new Medical Exams interface and overhauled "Exam Help" setting.

Whenever you choose a medical exam, being it from the brand new waiting room or by choosing a patient from the "Exam Mode" screen, the game will pop up an ID card for that patient, explaining the main characteristics of him/her such as ID (I'll come back to this right away), Difficulty, Type of Exam (Scripted/Random), Age and Ailment.

The Difficulty is tightly related to the "Medical Aid" setting of the game.

With this setting enabled the game will help you diagnose a patient and choose the correct prescription for him/her, provided your character's Knowledge Level is at least as high as the number shown in parenthesis (in the above image 45).

Difficulties for exams are:

• Very easy 5-20
• Easy 25-35
• Normal 40-60
• Hard 65-80
• Very Hard 85-95

This will help each player to understand the knowledge and difficulties of the exam and help him choose to be helped or not by the game.

Enabling the Medical Aid shows two new icons next to the answers for both anamnesis and prescription. Icons represent the two most likely correct answers and make easier for the player to choose one of them as the correct one.

Another important info is the patient ID Number. This is an unique 10-digit number that identifies each patient within the game.

You can use this ID to play (or re-play) each examination in the game, both in Story mode and in Exam mode. The game will prompt you to choose if you want to visit the exam room or use your computer to access a specific patient ID.

Then, you will be prompted to insert the proper ID, which you can find in the Codex for each patient (you can't copypaste that since this doesn't work on Ren'py's input screens).

You have to put only numbers in the field, ignoring every other character (such as the "P" for Patient you can sometimes see in the game).

If you input an invalid ID the game will inform you and prompt again to the screen. 

If you input a valid ID the game will load that specific exam.

This has been included in the game for several reasons:

• It allows replayability of a specific exam to score it 100% without having to reload every time
• It allows to boost one's money or relationships without the need for cheating
• It allows players to replay their favourite exams
• It allows players to play a specific exam they are curious about
• When releasing an update it allows players to play specific exams while still in story mode
• It paves the way for modding, as Workshop content's patients will have their own unique ID every creator will give them thus ensuring uniqueness for each one and compatibility between custom contents, it also allows to play custom content at will, both in Exam Mode and in Story Mode.

So that's it for today's Devlog, stay tuned for further infos! Thank you for following this project!

Be safe and healthy,

Release schedule for 0.0.19 update which includes the features above:

October 26 for 20$+ Patrons
November 2 for 10$+ Patrons 
November 10 for 5$+ Patrons 
November 17 for 3$+ Patrons
November 20 on the market (Steam, itch.io, Gamejolt, DLSite etc.)