Some late replies..
If you fire a girl, can you hire her again later (hopefully at a lower price), or does she disappear from the game forever?
Yep. But the price (actually, the salary) will reset to the original as you erase your relationship with that girl.
If you modify a girl's price in the JSON file, does that take effect in existing saves, or do you have to start a new game?
The price isn't used in TUSC to compute salaries. The salary depends on the girl popularity.
In general, several of the girl properties get initialized/randomized on game start, so if you change some aspects in the girlpack they won't take effect in existing saves.
All the videos are very stuttery. Is that normal? The video file itself plays fine outside the game. And fine in VC.
I'm aware of this on some packs. Never really figured out what's the actual issue there. Decoding should be performed by the included ffmpeg lib, so again, not sure why some videos exhibit that behaviour.
Why is it "intentionally" set up in a way that excludes the vast majority of girlpacks that were made for VC? It seems strange to me that the dev would work so hard to make the rest of the game compatible with VC, but then structure this part in a way that makes normal VC packs useless there.
I think *useless* is a bit too extreme here
The game doesn't exclude anything from VC packs, it just have its own sections, and the existence of those sections in the first place makes sense only if the content is different. In other words: what's the point of having an entire separated section and workshift for a blowjob scene if that scene it's already achievable in VIP?
IMO there's no need to have all the packs including contents for all the sections; the game is perfectly playable with just a limited set of girls with content for those sections. Or at least, this was the idea when I started working on TUSC years ago.
If I do anything with those categories at all, it'll probably just be copying all the clips from the default folders into the specialty folders, which seems way less easy than if it just worked that way automatically in the game. At this point, I don't even feel like it's worth the bother to do that (since I can see all those clips on the regular stage anyway), so I guess I'll probably just be skipping those categories that give it more flavor and make it more meaningful.
The advantage of girlpacks is that you can decide which option is best for you. I find this quite cool.
And honestly, it's a shame, because gym and massage settings are actually big turn-ons for me. I think if there was a big assorted folder with random clips of no one in particular getting fucked at a gym or spa, I'd probably really like those (and I'd probably enjoy adding some more of my own occasionally). But I don't think I care nearly enough to hunt down multiple specific scenes for multiple specific girls. If I start small and just do one scene for one girl, then that scene will be the only thing I see in that category until I add more, and I'll probably get sick of it. Having the default content (or category-specific content with random girls) show up at those locations would allow me the use of the locations in the game, while letting me add specific content at my own pace.
In my experience (made a few packs over the years) as soon as you have even 1 valid source video for gym/spa/gloryhole performance is quite easy to make several scenes for TUSC. ofc you need the original content to exist, but yeah, as soon this condition is met, I think it's not such a burden to expand a VC girlpack with TUSC specific content.
I've noticed that the hiring in the game is flexible. You have to somewhat negotiate, but I don't know what a good price is for anyone. Is it intended that I get them to 100% and then pick the default offer, and then get back to 100% and move it up a bit, etc and repeat until I get the best, low offer they are happy with? I find that even in the early game I'm running into problems just breaking even.
As
Logan1377 mentioned, if you reach 100 relationship you can cut the salary by half.
So in general at 0 is full price, at 100 is half price, the middle linearly follows the same principle.
Another issue I've had in the game is that I ran into a problem a few times where no girls were ready for club opening. But I couldn't figure out why. I had 3-6 girls at one point and none of them were ready for over a week.
As far as who is ready to work and not, honestly it sometimes still goes over my head. Energy and mood are contributors, but not the end all. But once you have enough girls hired, it doesn't matter all that much. And that's only ten to twelve, not 30.
Yep, in general the contributing factor are mood and energy. Over a week sounds strange, you probably got stuck in some bug in processing/girls restoring. The "best hack" is probably what
Logan1377 said, and thus to have at least 10 girls hired.
Anyway, it doesn't seem like the game is still being updated, so there's probably no point in giving feedback like this.
Feedback is always valuable, conversations about game design and mechanics are always nice to have
On the lack of updates: I know. And in some measure I feel sorry about that, but on the other side I'm not really. A lot happened in the last couple of years in my personal life, and thus on one side I had very little time to think about TUSC, on the other side I kinda lost part of the original interest/enthusiasm in updating the game and evolving it.
Boy, at this point I'm not even sure I remember the plan for the next steps I wanted to take after 1.0

I'm not sure whether I'll get back actively developing TUSC, we'll probably figure that during the year. Regardless, I'm quite happy the community kept building and updating packs, and even without any new release of TUSC – and with the exception of few bugs in night processing/day scheduling – the game was still enjoyable from some people
