Built-in "test mode"

Dear Kjun and developers!

After discussing on the forum, I noticed that some users are interested in the game being not only richer in small everyday details, but also more challenging. For it to present a real challenge to the player. In regular freeplay, I don’t support the idea of excessive complexity that restricts player freedom, but this got me thinking about something.

After searching the forum, I saw that you and your team have already been considering this topic.
You called it “Fate Engine” - [11.14.25] Canvastown and the Fate Engine
It’s also a wonderful idea, but now I’d like to propose something slightly different. Namely – the well-known “custom challenges” mechanic from another simulator series, but conveniently integrated directly into the game itself.

Your website also has this mechanism that randomly generates certain tasks. But imagine how great it would be if the game could adapt to a scenario pre-set by the player!
For example, there’s the famous “Rags to Riches” challenge. Within this challenge, the game could allow placing Zoey on an empty lot with a completely zeroed budget, rather than forcing you to buy property and stash it in your inventory to keep the lot empty. And the player wouldn’t automatically receive social benefits. Additionally, in this mode, it should become impossible to perform actions that contradict the challenge concept. For instance, lottery stalls could become non-functional, certain careers and activities would be unavailable: for example, no income from painting, selling fish and vegetables, no ability to run a private business, etc. – only building an employee career path where you must reach the specific tier set by the challenge (this is just an example, not specifically “Rags to Riches”).

Or “Post-Apocalypse Survival” – where the entire city is constantly maximally dirty, activity types are severely limited, all residents are constantly maximally aggressive, birth rates are restricted, and under these conditions you must manage to achieve the set tasks within a set number of generations…
Madhouse, kindergarten, dynasties with specific requirements for heirs, “Create Your Love” show filming… Countless options have been thought up, and based on them you could allow fine-tuning your own restrictions, creating new custom challenges.
In other words, integration of restrictions directly into gameplay when creating a new game. Currently, the player is forced to constantly check themselves whether they’ve violated any starting conditions, manually calculate income, etc. Within a launched challenge, they can know for certain that everything that’s off-limits is already pre-excluded, and achievements are automatically tallied in statistics, allowing you to transition, for example, to directly controlling the new generation if that’s specified by the conditions (i.e., until certain conditions are met, children in a family cannot be directly controlled, only as NPCs).

All of this would create that very “goal” in the game that some players feel is missing. So they couldn’t cross the street on a red light without receiving a penalty for the violation, couldn’t get married until certain conditions were met, couldn’t… anything that the challenge entails. This would create all the necessary complexity for those who need it, while preserving all the joy of freeplay for those who prefer to play that way.

Yes, within “Fate Engine,” as I see it, you were thinking even more ambitiously, even to the point of completely reworking character behavior. But that would surely require enormous additional work. The proposed ideas, I hope, could be implemented with much less effort, since almost all of it is realized not by adding new mechanics, but conversely – by restricting existing ones. Plus the effort to track statistics on the game’s side to record quest completion.

Despite loving InZOI the way it is right now, I wouldn’t mind going through several different challenges if they were really conveniently integrated into the game.

As always, thank you for your wonderful work!

I love this idea!

I like the suggestion too, and it would certainly enhance the gameplay.

That would be fantastic! I was just today trying to come up with apocalypse rules myself, but I stopped right at the beginning. I can’t figure out the conditions for removing the restrictions.

The most obvious way to unlock new garden crops seems to me to be simply the birth of a new generation. The idea is that once time has passed, the soil has cleaned itself enough for something other than tomatoes or potatoes to start growing on it. And so, unlocking one species at a time for each new generation.

Also, now that there’s a laboratory technician career, you could “grow” a chemist up to laboratory director—they could also create “cleansing compounds” afterwards. But you’d need to test that career first, I haven’t touched it yet.

You could set it as a requirement to convince at least 3 NPCs to live with us in the same house without resorting to romance, purely through friendship. As practice has shown, not all of them and not right away agree (at least in my game, for every 1 agreement there are 4 refusals). This could be called “beginning to revive society” to gain “support.” At the same time, they shouldn’t have to work unless they want to—just be present. And as children are born, they could be moved out. The main thing is to record the fact that each generation fulfills this “civilization plan”

Proper-like, I should carefully re-read the existing rules for “the other game,” and then I could adapt them to InZOI’s reality

But why NPCs? You have to feed them. We need someone for romance and marriage. Maybe meet someone on the street, within the neighborhood? And try to move them in.

By the way, I found some great lots for the apocalypse here

“Charming” them isn’t really a problem. But here we’d have the concept of “leader in the apocalypse”. And yes, we’ll have to feed them, no way around it. But then someone who catches your eye will be ready to marry a “worthy” person afterward

Yeah, the color scheme is spot on, I agree! Make it a bit darker inside the residential houses - and that’d be perfect!

There we go, already getting ideas! Now we wait and hope that the developers will help us implement all this with in-game settings!

I’m not hopeful that the developers will do this anytime soon
So my friends and I are coming up with our own rules on our forum right now.
If we manage to pull it off, I’ll share it with you.

Actually difficulty settings could be added to the game. But this should be optional.

Example ; Easy - Normal - Hard - Very Hard - Legendary

These settings should always be changeable within the game.

Great, it’ll be interesting to see!

And I don’t know about the near future, but they’re definitely thinking about it. That’s why I mentioned this topic for a reason: [11.14.25] Canvastown and the Fate Engine

They’re cooking up something interesting there… Though they’re getting distracted by bugs right now, so they don’t have time for it, I understand that too.

Yeah, but that would only work within the “trial mode” then. Because in the actual game it would be too “vague”. What does “easy” mean if we’re talking about a simple life, and how would it differ from “legendary”? By the fact that in the latter mode the character gets penalized for every wrong step off the “home - work” route, and they don’t even have time to sleep because they have to work at three places constantly for pittance? It hardly makes sense to implement something like that in normal life mode

No for example relationships might be harder to develop. They can be broken very easily. You can be fired more easily from your job.Needs decrease more quickly. You could face harsher penalties and the costs would be higher.

Yes, it sounds interesting that way, I agree!