I’m happy to announce that the Beta for Update 2 is in testing and will be opening up to play on the Beta Branch in the next next week.
This update represents a major change for the game. When we started work on it, the focus was just to add specific stories to every single adventure, but that goal ended up affecting almost every aspect of the game.
The goal of Dream Cycle has always been to make a Procedural Action Adventure game. To my mind an Action Adventure game is a combination of exploring, combat, story and puzzles. The previous instantiation of the game delivered on exploration and combat but had no real puzzle or story elements in individual adventures. This update strives to add both.
Adventures are now created around procedural ‘archeological’ stories. By that I mean stories told through objects found in the environment, as seen in the dungeons of games like Horizon Zero Dawn or Skyrim.
With these stories comes a greater requirement to explore the levels searching for clues and puzzle pieces and to support that Morgan has greatly increased movement capabilities in the form of a base levitation ability.
A new Main story wrapper has been added to help contextualize these in-adventure stories along with an updated (and streamlined) intro and tutorial section.
We are opening this version on the Beta branch rather than as a full update because it doesn’t yet represent the complete intended experience. It is a ‘vertical slice’- a single adventure that is limited in scope (as it is the first one.)
We hope to gather feedback on this but it’s important to understand it’s only level 1. The goal going forward is to add many different adventures with different enemies, biomes and stories.
To that end we have added a new map. This map may be familiar to those of you who are fans of Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle stories, as it’s the map made by the amazing Jason Bradley Thompson.
This is the final way that the story update shifted the focus of the game. The previous map system spread the procedural variation across the 10,000 spaces in such a way that you could end up having very similar adventures one after another. The new paradigm narrows the variation within a single adventure but will allow us to have very different feeling Adventures for each ‘pin’. Even so, each pin can be replayed endlessly, each time giving a new variation of the layout and a different story.
- Toby