Posted December 30, 2023 by Cat Lord Games
Lots of progress this month! After collecting a ton of great feedback at the PIGSquad demo event at the beginning of the month, I prioritized and worked on several key features:
I chose to solve both of these in one go, by adding a short Prologue that the player can start in media res, right after character creation. The writing will need a lot of care of feeding to get through the truckload of info I'm dumping here, and the need for a glossary of some sort needs to get pulled up the roadmap, so I can figure out how I want to implement it before I get too much farther into content.
Here's a 12min play through of the new Prologue. I rewrote a few of the Cartha interactions to fit the narrative into place - this content was originally slotted after the Cartha bit. But I like this a lot more - it introduces several ideas, and for the new gap I can just get to the expansion of ideas using this new part of the game world that much faster.
For new-new ideas, you can see in here that I'm experimenting with making the campfires an explicit game world feature, rather than a "do it anywhere" feature of the UI. Shamelessly modeled after souls-like Bonfires, this takes feedback around "committing to the bit" more as far as camping and long rests are concerned. If I'm going to ask the player to find a safe place to level up, or use the rest system for health/spell slots, just go all-in on that idea, give them a presence in the game world. Hopefully I can create a similar sense of relief/joy at finding one out in the wild.
Upcoming sprints:
A shorter intro/tutorial experience to make demos and play tests more accessible and productive
Having a short prologue section is great for this also, much quicker cycle times for testing and iteration. See you in January!