Knock-knock, seekers!
The developer diaries are back and we’re going to tell you what we've been up to this week.
Long live cosplay!
Before we were just guessing, but now we're 100% sure that KOTCL gets our players’ creative juices flowing.
Just take a look at this fantastic Millenis cosplay by SCHLAFLỢS | cosplay & etc.
Definitely beautiful, and dangerous-looking too – and that means something coming from us!
KOTCL trade guild
The ranks of the venders continue to grow as members of various races are joining in. For example, very soon, representatives of the KOTCL trade guild like those below will open their stalls. Look for them on your biome routes!
And, of course, we haven’t forgotten to animate our traders too!
The animation hullabaloo continues
Which means that along with transitioning animations to Spine, we are also continuing to animate well-known and unknown events. The results don’t take long to arrive!
Mushrooms live in the swamps...
Gnomeo and Elfiet
That’s some real trouble, isn’t it!
Card tricks
After putting on bandit armor, the heroes will undoubtedly see new unique cards appear in their decks, there’s simply no way around that. We're going to slightly lift the veil... but only slightly.
As you must have understood by now, we love animals, so we continue adding them to Vanadis’ deck. As the meme goes, ‘if not friend, why friend-shaped’?
You can never have too much good UI, but there is a catch...
We’ve not forgotten about Mortis' notes. This wonderful auxiliary feature hasn't taken its full-fledged form yet, but we're working on it – honest to goodness! That's why we’re turning to you for help once again. Which of these three options for Mortis' note icons do you like the most? We're looking forward to your comments!
What about some chit-chat?
In line with past tradition, I, Andrew, aka Innrey, founder of RedBoon Studio, am here again.
And today, I'd like to touch on an interesting topic.
It's no secret to anyone that there are a lot of difficulties that arise when creating a game. Sometimes, the variety of challenges can be truly dumbfounding.
For example, even in the final stages of development, there's often a desire to refine something, revamp a game mechanic, or simply work on the final visual a bit more. There's no limit to perfection, and so on and so forth. All of this leads to an increase in the time spent, but we all know that time is one of the most valuable and expensive resources in game development. Thus, the conversation comes back to our beloved balance.
Here, I'm not referring to game balance but rather the balance between the result and the effort required to achieve that result. As sometimes happens, the value of creating and implementing a small feature is not all that great, while the amount of time spent on it is regrettably large. For example, an event system in a game.
Initially, the events were not interconnected; they were standalone events with immediate outcomes and they didn't influence anything beyond the current run and its result.
However, we really liked the idea that events could evolve, change, and impact other events by altering their outcomes, and some of them could even influence the game's ending.
In the end, we took the risk and, through lots of hard work, after many hours of completely reworking the technical foundation from scratch, events saw the light of day. Well what was the result? The result was that our players loved this feature so much that we decided to further develop the events and create entire event chains. Now it's one of the most memorable features of our game.
Or take for example, class-specific cards and clothing. We spent a long time contemplating how much we needed them, if needed at all. But in the end, we decided to go for it because we really wanted to diversify gameplay for different classes. It turned out great and dynamic; for instance, playing any of Bjorn's classes is so different from playing the others that you definitely won't be bored. Generally, you have to make sacrifices in such situations, after carefully weighing and analyzing everything.
It will always seem that you can add or improve something, somewhere. But, again, done is better than perfect, as they say.
Game developers can be divided into two hypothetical camps: "We are developers, our word is law, and we make the game for ourselves" and "We are developers, and we make the game for players." Both principles can work and bear fruit; they are both partly right. But it's so important to find that golden mean and not slide into development radicalism. Can you feel how it all comes back to balance? Without it, we can't get anywhere, neither in games, nor in work, nor in life.
I think we can wrap it up on this philosophical note. Many challenges and tasks await us, but we'll definitely overcome them.
See you next week!
We wish everyone a great weekend, but make sure that you don’t get as carried away on your time off as this guy :)
