Knock, knock, travelers!
It’s time to make another entry in our travel notes. Without further ado, let’s go!
Effects News
We continue working on a convenient and pleasant display for effects.
‘Burning’ will now charmingly flame up like in the animation below. As Mortis likes to say “It’s a fire show!”, and we can’t help but agree with him.
And now a bit about negative effects – have a look at the animation of ‘Blight’. Creepy, but impressive, isn’t it?
And the ‘Cover’ buff that redirects enemies’ attacks to an ally will look like this. Of course, we feel for Waggytail, but he’s ready to protect his master at all costs.
You may recall that during final clashes with Millenis, Mortis just stands there under a dome and calmly watches. We’ve extended that buff to the heroes too, but only if they’re immune to attacks. We can’t make it too easy!
Who’s the Next Landscape Artist?
We’re diving deeper into animating backgrounds for out events. Of course, static images are endlessly pretty (we read your comments and are happy to receive words of encouragement), but to improve visual perception some motion needed to be added. The devil is in the details, right?
Is there a bear around here? It’s big, brown, and angry.
In this peaceful glade a man was cruelly done away with. He and his buddies, all bandits, couldn’t settle on how to split their stolen goods. But that’s another story.
For some reason the diary today is turning out to be all about crime. Anyway, you can see it all for yourselves. Elven shooting practice spares no one.
How About Some Chit-Chat?
Hey! It’s Andrew aka Innrey, the founder of RedBoon, and I’m coming to you today with a cautionary tale.
More and more often, I catch myself thinking that from the very beginning of KOTCL development, we set ourselves an extremely challenging task. Due to the non-linear plot of the game (and you know that our plot is full of twists, and many things are interwoven and interconnected), any, even the smallest, change in the plot can completely break the logic and lore of the entire game. This greatly hinders and sometimes demotivates us from taking certain actions. After all, if we want to change or add something, it all will turn into a large snowball. Let me explain.
Let’s say, we want to change one of the events. However, we know that each event can be drastically different for different heroes, which means we need to rework three events instead of one. Then it becomes clear that the event affects future events, just as past events affect the one we want to change. What amount of work will we have to do? Quite a decent amount, to put it mildly.
And if we want to add something new, the situation doesn't get any better – we'll have to change a lot of what we've done before, and this requires a lot of resources: energy, time, and sometimes even financial means.
The project is growing, and what initially took an hour to implement now can stretch for days or even weeks. And I'm talking about small features here.
So today I’d like to give advice to future independent developers: start small, don't try to make a large project right away if you don't want to get stuck with it for many years. This is fraught with numerous problems, which I wrote about earlier.
Burnout is the scourge of many developers, especially beginning ones. I would add that due to burnout, the result of your work will not feel like a reward for all your efforts, quite the opposite. Redoing your work with a no-desire-attitude is very unpleasant, believe me.
In summary: don't make our mistakes.
As for us, we continue working on KOTCL. There’s going to be some good news, which involves next week when we plan to answer the most popular questions you've asked us on social media. A small teaser: we'll answer the most pressing question that starts with 'When' and ends with 'release date'. I suppose we're ready for the announcement :)
That's it, friends. Don't forget to check our social media; we love keeping in touch with you.
Until next Friday!
