... That's so not what I meant. I'm of course talking about the game mechanic in Frosh Life, the drunk status.

Just to recap - the drunk mechanic lets you use alcohol items to increase your drunk status. This might open up new conversation options or alter events in other ways. It might also punish you for being drunk in the wrong situations.

Now - did anyone actually use and enjoy this mechanic? There were sort of two reasons I added this mechanic. The first was that alcohol feels like kind of an essential part of college. The other one was that I thought it might be a fun mechanic to experiment with, just to make something out of the ordinary happen in certain situations.

However. I'm not really happy with how it turned out. The whole mechanic is just... too opaque. It feels like you have to use the walkthrough to get something out of it or it's just trial and error. And while the drunk mechanic largely is an optional mechanic in the game (i.e. it's not required for anything truly important to happen), it just doesn't feel like fun or good game design to guess blindly.  "Okay, so I was drunk in this scene but nothing happened. Did alcohol have no effects in this scene whatsoever? Or was I too drunk? Wasn't I drunk enough?"

In addition, it sort of means I will have to add drunk conditions to pretty much every scene in the game, which means extra work. And honestly, in a lot of situations that will probably just mean me punishing the player for being drunk in an everyday situation where it generally is not accepted to be drunk. Again, not fun.

So, what do you think? Did you enjoy the drunk mechanic? Or do you think it might be fun with some modifications? Or should I just scrap it? I'm leaning towards the latter. This is your chance to save it ;-)

Let me know what you think in the comments, or leave a vote at my Patreon page if you have a Patreon account!