The Problem With DUTP Updates
On March 6 2023, the app Time Princess received a major update. It added major new game features, and was even delayed from the initial release date from March 5 and received a hotfix a few days later. This update had new clothes and a new story, but more significantly introduced new game mechanics and a new type of gameplay into the app: the Story Kingdom. And I can think of no better feature to use as a perfect example of the strange and fascinating development of this little app, from the perspective of a player who may have a slightly large number of thoughts about this sort of thing.
Why do people play video games? Not in general, but the specific games that they choose to put their time and effort (and money) into. To put it broadly, video games have two ways to motivate you: extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is the game giving you a reward: experience points, in game coins, achievements, and unlocking new areas and skills. The game gives you something to signal that you have, in some way, made progress. Intrinsic motivation has more to do with the player becoming better at the game. This varies a lot according to the game's mechanics, but basically its you becoming "skilled" at playing the game, and are playing it not to change the game but to change how you engage with it. For example, if you've got a sudoku game you're probably playing it so that you get better at solving those puzzles, and not because each puzzle solved will bring you closer to unlocking a new colour of game board.
Games that use one or the other kind of motivation are not inherently better; it depends on the intended experience and player expectations. (I've learned a lot about this from SuperEyepatchWolf's video on Shenmue 3, which I will link in the comments .)
The basic pitch of DUTP involves both types of motivation: players obtain clothing and use stamina to play through stories. The collecting clothing and receiving awards for scoring highly on stages is extrinsic motivation: the game is giving you something for performing a task. Intrinsic gameplay is more subtle: while there is some skill involved in styling an outfit, usually that goes out the window when you're playing stages because of the tag scoring system. Instead the intrinsic motivation comes in the form of the choices the player makes through the story as they work to find all of the different endings, and the satisfaction that comes from finishing a story. In game features like crafting clothes and playing minigames similarly have both motivations: you might craft an outfit to unlock a new level or get a higher score (an extrinsic motivation), but may also use this outfit piece when styling a look that you find more visually appealing (intrinsic motivation). Minigames likewise give rewards that are used in other portions of the game, but also involve some degree of skill and can allow players to improve.
There are also some incredibly unbalanced areas of DUTP gameplay, and these things I often personally find frustrating and limiting. For example, the lantern gives mainly extrinsic rewards: you unlock new levels, you get gift boxes and diamonds, and you unlock achievements. The only intrinsic motivation lantern companions provide are their voice interactions, which are pretty limited, and the three letters you unlock pretty quickly when levelling them up. I suppose you might also enjoy spinning their model around, but these are pretty low rewards for the very high cost of crafting more gifts and continuing to level the characters up, especially since most of these intrinsic benefits are unlocked right from the start. Anybody levelling their lantern companions past certain levels is almost assuredly doing it not because they enjoy it, but because they want the reward the game will give them for doing so. There is also no skill involved, beyond rudimentary resource management, so it becomes something to grind through to get the extrinsic rewards rather than a feature that people enjoy for its own sake.
So what is the Story Kingdom? Upon opening it after the update I was quite fascinated and confused as to what this was meant to be. I knew this was going to be a continuation of the Mirage Forest storyline, which explains the framing device of the magical book we use to travel in different stories. The gameplay loop of Mirage Forest very closely resembles a game like Animal Crossing, where you have a map that you run around in to complete quests and unlock collectables. By using energy you can harvest these collectables, which are flowers and berries and crystals, which you can spend on unlocking new areas with new collectables and the occasional story stage.
It's easy to spot the extrinsic motivation in this gameplay: you are collecting resources, which unlock more resources. Eventually you'll get enough resources to purchase clothing items, or unlock new resources to gather, and there's even achievements for each type of resource that you can collect. Yet a lot of these resources are already oddly disconnected from the rest of the game: there's a new kind of energy, and the rewards you gain in Story Kingdom can only be used in that specific map, or in the specific shop where you can redeem a few clothing items or crafting items. These items appear to be limited to the ones used to level up relics and fashion academy: these are score modifiers that make it easier to pass levels and get high scores, which is not a matter of skill.
As for intrinsic motivation, Story Kingdom is severely lacking. The gameplay is more tedious than fun, as it is made of waiting through timers to get another resource. There is no skill, no nuance, and no way for the player to engage in any deeper level of gameplay. The story is an attempt at intrinsic motivation, but it's quite shallow and has an incredibly loose narrative, mainly consisting of scenes where you "purify" a shadow demon with relics.
There are very few customization options for your stylized avatar, and there are no choices in this story. You appear to be investigating why there are shadow monsters, but the story takes quite a while to work through on account of all the timers, and you don't really form a deep understanding of the world or characters. The shadow monsters also appear to be caused by bad feelings. I honestly was expecting this kind of quality from this story, but the problem is that this remains the most intrinsic motivation the Story Kingdom offers. While you can style your characters with the clothes you earn through this story, they are incredibly expensive and may take months or years to unlock, creating a system with low rewards and a lot of effort.
And now let's discuss the fishing. There is a fishing minigame that must be played to earn fish, which function like any other collectible in completing Story Kingdom quests. The main difference is that it costs double the energy for a single fish, and upon completion of the minigame you get a random fish. As far as I can tell there is no way to raise your chances of getting a required fish, so you're often left spending quite a bit of energy to amass the required fish to progress past this roadblock.
Mechanically, this fishing game is a reflex game. The fishing bobber slides back and forth on its scale, and you must tap the "reel in" button when it's in the dark blue "target" range. This is a personal concern, but I find this game incredibly frustrating. I have uncontrollable hand tremors, which leads me to avoid games that require fast reflexes. The other minigames that require reflexes are optional games, but this fishing game locks Story Kingdom progress. There is no other way to obtain fish aside from playing this.
There are three kinds of bait that you can use to fish, one of which is 10 energy, one of which can be purchased with diamonds (you can get a free one every day through quests), and finally you can buy bait with money. The target gets larger with each type of bait, but it's still possible to miss. And if you miss? You get absolutely nothing.
There was a hotfix update released very quickly after the original update, which changed this minigame so that losing did not consume energy. But the difficulty of the minigame remains the same, and the random aspect of fishing is still quite frustrating. Not to mention that it can be possible to "win" but fish up a completely useless item, like a soggy boot or seaweed, which as of right now has no current use in the game.
So why is this bad? Overall the Story Kingdom weighs down the rest of the game. It adds new materials and incredibly shallow and repetitive gameplay, which requires grinding for long periods of time at games of luck to get what few rewards there are. It's also disappointing considering the state of many other neglected features of the game, such as the custom contour mechanics that allow players to dye and pattern certain clothes (with extremely limited options), or the limited range of player character appearances.
I'm not saying they had to work on improving these aspects of the game, but I do think it's strange that so much effort, time, and money was presumably put towards developing Story Kingdom, which fails to build off any previously established elements and offers nothing compelling in its own right. It even makes aspects of the game more difficult: players have long complained about the lag and hefty memory and storage requirements for this game, and Story Kingdom only makes these problems worse.
How could we fix this? There's plenty of opportunities to make Story Kingdom better, and it honestly baffles me seeing how so little effort was made to integrate this feature with the rest of the game. It wouldn't be too difficult to add Story Kingdom energy to the minigame rewards, or add better rewards to the Story Kingdom shop.
The fishing is the most frustrating aspect of the Story Kingdom, and it really doesn't need to be. For starters, many games with this kind of fishing game will have more than one "target" range, with increasing probability at getting a reward, and a lower chance of failure. Additionally it would be nice to see some kind of trading mechanic, where you could swap certain types of fish for ones you need, or even a "fish market" where you could buy or trade fish with other players. Perhaps there could be different types of bait with a greater chance at attracting certain types of fish, and they could all be bought with energy, or crafted from those garbage items that are currently doing nothing in my inventory.
Finally, I see a huge missed opportunity in Story Kingdom. To me, a lot of DUTP's appeal lies in the customization options. It would be nice to expand those through Story Kingdom, such as unlocking new dyes or stamps or patterns for outfits. (The story even takes the character through a dye shop...) The items you gather could perhaps be used as ingredients to craft dye that you could then use to alter clothing items.
I honestly don't think we even needed the Story Kingdom map, as it seems like that took a lot of time and effort to create and animate, but is ultimately wasted space. I'd recommend instead focusing on the current in game map: the bedroom from which the player accesses stories, minigames, crafting, and so forth. The bedroom we have is part of the game's meta narrative about us journeying through stories, and often will have new accessories or lighting based on seasonal events, but players have no options for customizing this space. If we could get a new bedspread, or choose which items are displayed on our shelf, or buy different hanging lights, I think that simple aesthetic change could really enhance the game experience. Such options are intrinsically motivated, since we're doing it for our own enjoyment of aesthetics rather than an external game reward. It could also be a feature that could be fleshed out, with event specific bedroom items, and perhaps new bedroom themed backgrounds for taking selfies, and options for displaying achievement trophies in the room to further a sense of accomplishment.
There is one thing that can change in the static Story Kingdom, namely the player character's appearance. Because it's a new art style and new character model, I do understand why the options are so sparse. But more than the "Default Look" options, I find the "Set Look" category to be quite interesting.
If you choose "Set Look", your character will take on the appearance of the chosen companion. You can unlock more companions through levelling them up in the lantern. I find this somewhat hilarious and quite sad, because it must have taken a good deal of effort and time to create these models, and I simply cannot see the purpose of them. There is no official way to take photos of these avatars, so you are limited to screenshots if you want to display them, but the customization options are so few that it holds very little appeal.
It's easy to dismiss these choices as "fanservice," but I think that's too simplistic. It's fanservice that fails to understand what fans of the game enjoy, and its at best superfluous features that will not be used by most players. Unlocking the companion set looks is extrinsic, but doesn't have much to offer for intrinsic motivation. And I think it would be relatively simple to add intrinsic motivation; if the static map of the Story Kingdom could be populated by companions from stories, then it would be much more engaging. Perhaps you could unlock a certain number of slots to place companions, and companions according to which stories you've played and your relationship levels. Perhaps each unlocked companion, once placed in the world, could have a couple of voice lines when you interact with them, and maybe they'd even have a chance to give you some resource or more energy. This would create actual rewards for progressing in the Story Kingdom narrative, and allow the map to be customized. It would also theoretically be easier to create, since you'd only need to model each character as a static character, or perhaps with one idle animation, instead of needing to give them all walk cycles and the ability to turn around, face new directions, and play a fishing game. Players would also be able to show off which companions were populating their Story Kingdom.
I only play games, and I don't create them. I don't know how difficult it would be to implement these changes, nor do I know the reasons for the choices DUTP has made with this update. But from my perspective, it seems like the developing team has put a lot of effort into the wrong features. They've created many new assets but failed to provide sufficient reasons for players to want to use them. Games don't need to have compelling narratives or engaging mechanics, but they still need some intrinsic motivation to encourage players. This update is indicative of poor management and design choices, and I have to wonder if the DUTP team believes "new" is automatically better. Players often ask for improvements on existing features, but each update appears to deliver new stories and event clothing without building on what was established previously. I can only hope that DUTP shifts its development and begins to look critically at the current game features and work towards improving them, rather than tacking on new half finished features.
