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(+1)

Awesome - I'll chuck a couple quid your way for the enhanced edition.

I feel like you should make a decision on how you want to proceed with this project as you seem to be at a sort of crossroads.

1. Do you continue to develop as you are?

2. Do you encourage future development primarily by the community via marketing?

3. Do you want a big publisher to pick up the project and run with it?

4. Do you commit more development time yourselves (not preferred/wanted)?

How do you want to proceed? You can always call on the community to try and help grow the community too, though I think a steam release would be beneficial as it legitimises the game.

Shadows started life as a That Which Sleeps proof of concept if I remember correctly. I don't mean the following to be harsh critique, so apologies in advance if it comes across that way but Shadows still lacks much of the most engaging elements of TWS. TWS was pitched as this dark fantasy, narratively driven, pseudo boardgame with procedural, narrative gameplay. Politics was an optional part of the game, as was military, magic/rituals, relations, trade/economics and the other systems that supposedly worked together to make the game. Now Shadows actually exists, so you've already surpassed TWS in that respect, but my point is that your primary target audience, at least to start with, was those who craved TWS but for obvious reasons were unable to play anything like it.

Shadows has the political systems down and to a degree some of the insidious magic systems, but it does not have meaningful combat (a staple in many games likes this), it does not have any economic gameplay and, crucially in my opinion, it lacks any real narrative drive. I can't emphasize this enough - one of, if not THE main draw of TWS was the ability to 'tell a story'. We wanted to influence the story/ies of the heroes trying to thwart this evil power in fun and engaging ways. We wanted to see Bilbo Fraggins go mad while trying to destroy the ring. Or perhaps our plans fail and against the odds he succeeded. But that was part of the fun to tell and experience those tales. Similar to how Rimworld, or even Dwarf Fortress allows for emergent narrative gameplay. The fun of the game isn't 'winning' - it's about experiencing a unique and interesting story through play. While I think there is a story getting told when I play Shadows, I have to work to find it and sometimes fill in the gaps.

If you want to grow the community quickly, my recommendation would be to make as close a game to TWS as is feasible (or closer in some key respects), to draw in that crowd first and foremost, since it was the root beginnings of Shadows. The community will grow organically too - if you look at the TWS wiki (that still exists, bless), it was all fan made.

There is a market for a TWS-like game - there is an active TWS discord, their YouTube and Kickstarter pages both still get regular comments and there are other games with a similar feel currently in production.

Regardless - thanks for the update as always, have a great Xmas and New Year.

(+1)

Okay, let me try to answer of all this, apologies if I miss a point:

- There's a discord? Could I get a link? I've read a bunch about That Which Sleeps, ever since I found the SA thread, but wasn't aware of a discord for it.

- We intend to roughly continue development as we are. Neither of us want to increase commitment to the project, including actually becoming published by a real publisher. I don't want to talk for my co-author, but I personally am very committed to my current career path, and while I love working on the game, wouldn't want to make it a full-time thing.

-If the direction the project goes in is that this means that we become slightly sidelined by a more active developer who forks the project and makes it their own, that's a good thing in my book. I'd be happy retaining credit for the original foundations and become a contributor to another lead dev's work. Or, possibly, two projects would exist side by side, and we would be happy to share and co-ordinate with our sister project so they can use any of our work going forwards.

-Shadows started related to That Which Sleeps, but isn't a clone by any measure. It's its own thing, for a variety of reasons. Some of these are: 1) We can't say how TWS would actually play, as we have no true implementation. 2) I do this mostly for fun, so want to work on stuff I find fun to put in and think about, and so try to balance what will be fun to play and what will be fun to implement. 3) It's just plain bad form to straight up copy someone else's idea, regardless of how they may have behaved, it's just a bit creatively bankrupt to not try to give it your own flavour.

-That all said, I do agree with a desire for a more personal and narrativelike structure. This is part of the driving force behind the new agents. The enemy would perhaps have a kind of RPG mechanic, in which your actions influence their growth. They'd individually learn about your individual agents, so would have personal connections in a one-to-one way. Hence giving them faces, which hopefully would add to that.

-Events and suchlike are cool and interesting, and would definitely enhance the game, but I also try to play to my strengths, and I don't feel that artist is one of them. Events in, say, Crusader Kings II, have a cool picture attached, and I don't have the talent to really give life to some of these things. As such, I tend to naturally gravitate towards stuff I feel I understand.

-Events also rather depend on foundational gameplay loops to be in. We'd be more comfortable adding 'fluff' to a working game, than adding it first and hoping that the gameplay adds together afterwards. While the gameplay needs a bit of work, expanding and definitely balancing, it at least has its shape now.

-Expanding the community is interesting to us, but not necessarily our greatest desire. It would be nice to have maybe three times as many people here as there currently are, but as a hobby game, it can't receive the degree of attention with maybe Tynan is able to devote to Rimworld, and we wouldn't be able to cater to such a wide audience in a way they might hope for.

Hope this answered at least some of your queries. I think you're right on a number of fronts, and hopefully we actually share more thinking about the future of the game than you might have feared.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you too, if we don't chat before then

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Ill reply fully later, once kids are settled and I have a minute, but here's the link for the TWS discord: https://discord.gg/ywEnSywu

Right, a few minutes of my own now!

- Whilst I appreciate it is incredibly bad form to copy something very closely, a lot (like loads) of people want a TWS clone, because TWS looked very fun to play (someone on the Discord, on learning that you had been invited literally stated "if it gets us our that which sleeps clone im all for it").

- I love the idea of adding an RPG element to the enemy and I absolutely agree that faces allow more narrative interest.

- Re Events - I just thought it was the quickest and easiest way to allow branching gameplay.  But I'm no gamedev, to be fair.  I wouldn't worry about art mind, that's somewhat superfluous.  The reason I've suggested them is that they allow a sort of roguelike element and replayability.  The player wonders what would've happened if they had chosen another option.  It also allows the game to feel more "alive" (not sure how to express myself well here I'm afraid.  All I can say on this is that some of the mechanics (infiltration, for example) felt like I was going through motions to increase numbers, rather than doing a risky and interesting task.  Not sure that makes sense, but hopefully something there is of use!

- I'm not scared on how you want to develop the game man, it's entirely your baby and it's not my place.  My interest here is entirely selfish - I want a TWS like game and this is by far the closest thing available.  I'll offer my suggestions and you can use them or throw them away, that's entirely your prerogative and I'm not precious.  You'll always have my support though, because you are doing something that I actively get enjoyment from, regardless of where you go from here!

Cheers!

The TWS discord link doesn't work :(

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It was a 24 hour one. Here you