Devlog: The Need for Clarity

One of the most reported negative feedback about General Practitioner is its difficulty. Over time, I received reports of people who didn't enjoy the medical portion of the game (which is half the fun!) because of its inherent difficulty.

This is understandable and I always wanted to improve this aspect of the game without sacrificing its nature in doing it: General Practitioner is a Visual Novel unlike most others, as it involves a real medical simulation made with the help of real doctors and I never wanted players to just skip the medical part as it wasn't important for the game.

Of course, this makes GP sort of a "niche game", but so were the games from Legacy Games which I always took for inspiration for this project since its beginning.

In time, I added a setting "Medical Help" which, if the character has enough knowledge, gives hints about the findings. I recommend most players to play with the Medical Help ON, because some cases are very hard without it.

It was also suggested that every part of the game which is "normal" (in medicine nothing is "normal", it might be "unremarkable" at most), be labelled differently, so that people won't have to read through the same conversation and dialogues dozens of times.

With 0.0.27 every "normal" finding will have its text in blue and bold, so that you'll know those parts of dialogues mean the patient is ok with that part of his/her body. Of course now you will have to play an even closer attention to the black parts of the exam's text, because they will hint at real problems or will have remarks from the patients or other physicians present.

I could've colored the "remarkable" parts in red, but I didn't do it for a variety of reasons, the first one being that remarkable parts are most common of unremarkable ones (because unlike real doctors you won't have to perform "healthy head to toe exams" at all in the game), and because part of General Practitioner's success is also its non-linear difficulty, facing the finding of something odd inside what has been quite normal until that very moment.

Starting with 0.0.27 I will also remove some very hard to read parts of the exam, because they weren't really adding something to the gameplay and were fun just to real doctors to read.

For example: "ECG shows no ST-segment elevations in leads V1 and V2"

becomes: "There are no unusual synus patterns and no alterations in frequency of the hearbeat." which is far more readable.

Finally, we're going to introduce a new option to show the clinic's daily results or not when going through mornings and evenings.

I hope you'll like the new additions to the game, we're approaching Beta in six months and everything will need to be polished by then! Wish me a good luck! :D