Independent Game · In Development
Every choice shapes your story.
Enter a living academy where academic ambition, social relationships, rivalry, and personal choices determine the path you take.
The premise
The Merit Academy is a single-player, narrative-driven school-life simulation and social strategy RPG. You arrive as a new student at a school that measures everything, and from the first morning your choices begin to shape your reputation, your relationships, your results and your future.
Attend lessons. Prepare for exams. Build up what you are capable of. Get to know the people around you, and work out which of them are friends, which are rivals, and which are both.
Students and teachers keep their own schedules. The academy is busy whether or not you are part of it.
What you do is remembered, by the people it affected and by the academy itself.
Trust, friendship and rivalry move slowly, through many small interactions rather than one good answer.
Lessons are taken, not skipped. Exams are sat, and their results matter.
Everyone has somewhere to be. Finding the right person at the right moment is part of the game.
The game
These are the pillars the game is being built on. Each carries a label saying how far along it really is.
Screenshot · Classroom · Build 0.0.0
Lessons, exams and the work between them
Status: In developmentClasses are something you take part in, not something you skip through. Learn the material, answer when called on, and sit exams that count.
Trust is slow. Reputation is slower.
Status: In developmentEvery student has a personality, opinions and goals of their own. Who trusts you, who rivals you and who owes you is decided over weeks, not one conversation.
Nobody becomes a friend in one conversation. Nobody becomes an enemy in one, either.More on relationships
In-game environment art · Library
A campus worth walking around
Status: In developmentClassrooms, dormitories, the library, sports facilities, shops and cafés. Each place has its own hours, its own activities and its own regulars.
Screenshot · Campus map · Build 0.0.0
Progress you have to earn
Academic, physical, social and strategic abilities grow slowly, through what you choose to spend your days on. Different strengths open different doors.
Read moreNothing you do is neutral
Missions, conflicts and events react to what you have done and who you have become. The game rewards observation, preparation and understanding people.
Read moreThere are only so many hours
Lessons, club practice, opening hours and appointments all share the same clock. Being somewhere means not being somewhere else.
Read more
The signature system
The ambition is a school of hundreds of characters, each with a schedule, interests, relationships and routines of their own. They go to class, train, study, meet each other and go home. Stand still, and the day carries on around you.
Morning
Lessons. Most of the school is indoors and the paths outside are nearly empty.
After the last bell
Clubs head for the sports facilities. The library fills. The café gets loud.
Evening
Appointments are kept or missed. People drift back toward the residences.
Night
Lights on in the dormitories. Everyone's tomorrow is already taking shape.
Characters travelling across campus
Status: ImplementedStudents appear on the campus map while they are walking between real commitments.
Indoors means out of sight
Status: ImplementedCharacters who are in a lesson, a club or a building are not shown wandering outside.
Weather, seasons and time of day
Status: ImplementedThe campus changes mood with the calendar: spring blossom, rain, snow, sunset and night.
Individual daily routines
Status: In developmentSchedules that differ from character to character, driven by their interests and obligations.
Events that override routines
Status: In developmentMeetings, missions and special events that change where people are and what they are doing.
An academy of hundreds
Status: PlannedScaling the simulation to the full student body, teachers included.
Background: In-game campus art · Night
Development journal
The first entry is being written.
The journal will follow the game as it is built: what works, what does not, and what changes along the way. Subscribe to the feed and the first entry will come to you.
Media
Roadmap
The core of the game: a school calendar, a day you move through, saving and loading, and the basic loop of lessons and free time.
Students and teachers with schedules, destinations and routines of their own, so the academy carries on whether or not the player is involved.
Lessons you take part in, exams that count, and the studying and tutoring that happen between them.
Putting the game in front of people who did not build it, and changing it based on what they do.
No dates are attached to the roadmap. Nothing here is a release promise.
Support development
The game is being made independently, without a studio or a publisher. Community support is what lets development continue at the pace an idea this size needs.