Development Update 4 - Skeleton

Time for another update!

The last month’s been focused on building the skeleton of the game, i.e making placeholder maps for every location, connecting them together, putting the basic quest flags and events in, so that it’s possible to do an absolutely barebones playthrough of the game walking from one end to the other. It doesn’t look terribly impressive when all’s said and done - a lot of empty, boxy rooms - but playing it, it’s much easier to see the shape of the finished game. Up until now I’ve been making a lot of involved features like inventories, shops, etc. but now everything can be put into context.

There’s a whole design philosophy I love but struggle to adhere to, doing rapid iterations, playtesting constantly, trying to see everything in context. There are big perks to that approach. You get something playable much faster, and you are less likely to spend ages making big features that don’t really fit in. But, well. Sometimes it feels really difficult to make the bigger, more time consuming things like the inventory or the shops. Well, I’m hoping that I can follow this approach the best I can.

But that’s not the most visually exciting thing in the world, so I spruced up a couple of maps to look a little more satisfying!

Next time I'm hoping to focus on more party member recruitment quests. Please look forward to it!