The obvious example of a scheduling game in the US right now is Persona 3; that said, the earliest I’ve seen the mechanic was actually -The Magic Candle-, a fairly obscure CRPG from the mid 80′s. It was a “character rancher” game, and one of the things you ended up doing was taking your party and farming out tasks to them simultaneously during your downtime. You might have a couple working, one or two training, and another one memorizing spells.
The genre has a lot of interesting potential, as we all know it’s NP-hard and subject to an inordinate amount of DoD funding
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