It’s tempting to make a lot of jokes about Two Point Campus along the lines of “A nudist gentleman and a magician studying the dark arts? Looks like my first year!” and then laughing at the open microphone night audience. It’s also tempting to say something like, “Do you know Two Point Hospital? That’s right, but in college,” but that would also be the lazy exit. Actually, the weirdest person I met in college only wore a top hat and an opera cape to campus once as a joke (and now has a proper job), and Two Point Campus is actually a management simulator much more complex and strange than Two. Point Studios’ previous and, in fact, ongoing hospital effort.
I had an entire weekend to try out a previous version of the Two Point Campus recently, where you run a number of higher education institutions located in the same unlikely crazy world as Two Point Hospital. Despite all my efforts, I never managed to get over 75% student satisfaction on a good day, and it seems beyond doubt to run a school that offered more than three courses. Because it’s a two-point curriculum, these classes can include almost real things, like being a chef or science and virtual reality stuff, but also learning how to be a knight or a magician. There’s also a clown school, and you can learn to be a bad money-making businessman like Jordan Belfort, and yes, they’re separate courses, wakka wakka! But these were the only ones that could be played in my preview. The full prospectus had many blank squares to unlock.
Spy School was, in fact, one of the revealed courses that I could not try.
The educational part of things is the more familiar part of Two Point Campus. Create rooms such as classrooms, science labs, and libraries, and get employees (teachers, janitors, and campus assistants) with the right skills to equip those rooms. At the Hogwarts parody level, for example, he needed teachers for witchcraft and dark arts classes, as well as private lessons (which are essential to keeping notes). The janitors keep the place clean, but they need maintenance and mechanical skill to repair all the weird machines like giant risotto pans and bunsen burners. At least one of your janitors must also have the security ability to expel assailants from rival schools. These things, along with basic comforts such as restrooms and a staff room, are similar to those you would build and manage at Two Point Hospital. You’re giving a service, basically.
This is a public relations screenshot of something called Cheeseball. I don’t know what Cheeseball is, but I’m pretty motivated to find out.
Two Point Studios design director Ben Huskins says they started thinking about their next game in the middle of development at Two Point Hospital and got hooked on the educational environment for a few reasons. “One was that we feel like, you know, everyone has a little bit of experience in education; even if they haven’t been to college or university, everyone has those school memories of their weird classmates or of his eccentric teachers, “he tells me. Another reason was that the stage is associated with many different TV shows or movies, so there were plenty of opportunities to “put our slightly weird Two Point Twist” on a bunch of references from the pop culture as well as real life. uni courses.
“So the other thing was that while we were doing Two Point Hospital, we were experimenting with things like staff and patients that had these interesting personality traits and stuff like that, as well as obviously the weird and wonderful looks of all of them. “Patients. We were trying to concretize these characters so that they had some depth,” says Hoskins. “And we thought, well, with our next guest, we like to dig a little deeper into these little people.”
Some of my science students are about to start a practical lesson. One of them does not appear to comply with health and safety guidelines
Because this is the other part of the Two Point Campus. You also have to manage the life of the students outside the classroom. If they get too bored, they can’t get enough sleep, they don’t have a partner to hang out with, they can’t wash up or they can’t join any club, they will become miserable, at which point they will stop paying dues in protest . Dissatisfied students also run the risk of dropping out of school and dropping out of school, while the happy ones perform better in class, earning you extra money for academic performance.
This means that while monitoring your academic situation, you should also place tables in rooms where they can socialize, do pastoral work, build a student union bar, schedule movie nights and parties, and so on. Oh, and put a couple of club stands and activities on campus and build a second shower block. And a new coffee shop. And expand the bedrooms. It’s a lot of juggling, but not so much that it’s impossible. It’s more that you’re always engaged when you play. There is never anything to do. Fortunately, there is some downtime during the summer holidays, where you can use the cash reserves you have to expand what you need at your own pace. This is a good time to build a new bedroom, for example (the developers recommend one bed for every 5 students, so if you’re not as scrupulous as I am, you may prefer to make a couple of new beds in an existing room).
It is a very timeless campus, in a way that everyone can find a relationship. That’s partly, Huskins says, because putting a little silly on things means it won’t age so fast. And to be fair, there’s no way to look at the Two Point Campus and say, “Well, the fair students at my college didn’t have armor like that!” But senior producer Jo Koehler says they made an effort to get everyone recognized. “I think we knew, like now, the key features that you should have. Like, there’s always the student unions, the dormitories, and like the bathrooms and staff rooms, and all those courses. So it was a reunion. all the while working with artists and animators on how to have that kind of feeling, ”he explains.
Koehler also says that this time “they really pushed the creative side of the game” and wanted players to be able to renovate, build campus buildings themselves and have more decorations. “You can end up with pretty unique campuses and pretty unique gaming experiences,” he adds.
Students also participate. In addition to students of different courses who have different peculiarities, cooking students license hot dogs to others, to reduce their appetite; the magicians could disappear the garbage, they also have personalities. “If I do this course, then I tend to attract these types of students. So your choice of which courses you teach determines the population of students you get. And then different types of students have different traits and advantages. Associated with them, and they interact with each other in interesting ways, “says Huskins.
It’s true that it’s especially fun, for example, to have a bunch of dark arts students (who all look like the kind of goths who delve well into The Crow) mingling with clown students (who all look, already you know, clowns). I can’t say directly that I was ever very aware that his personality traits had a greater effect on the game, but I found that choosing the skills of my staff was much more important. But I enjoyed creating dedicated picnic and meeting areas on campus and forcing all the universities I oversaw to have a thriving reading club. Huskins’ favorite is the nature club, whose members often run with only fig leaves, apart from the knights, who wear their helmets with protective gear.
Dark Arts Students: Lots of Ancient Gothic.
- Developer: Two Point Studios
- Published by Sega
- Release: August 9
- From: Steam, Humble
- Price: £ 35 / € 40 / $ 40
This sense of humor is a kind of trademark of Two Point Studios, and you can see it everywhere in character animations and design work. Koehler’s favorite thing in the game is the Love Trumpet, a piece of furniture that engenders love between students by emitting bubbles. You can also build a dragon tower for Knight School that has a real dragon. But it’s also in writing, and one of my favorite novelties on Two Point Campus is student radio, a series of well-watched little vignettes that discuss what interests each presenter. They play between songs and announcements for the universe. products like Cheesey Gubbins (ONE! BIG! GUBBIN!). Honestly, it’s more entertaining than most LBC episodes.
But Two Point Campus being whimsical and fun hides my previous point, which is that this game, at least in the four succulent tutorial levels I’ve played, is pretty hard to be good at. It may be the sheer amount of information that is being offered that is making me feel this way right now, and like Two Point Hospital before, there seems to be a lot of room for expansion. We’ll have to wait and see when the full game will be released on August 9th later this year. In the meantime, though, I don’t know if they have a plate spinning course, but I’m sure they would do well.