It has been a while since our last update, and we know we’ve been a bit quiet - we really appreciate your patience!
The team has been hard at work on the full game. In fact, much of the work in the last few months has been behind the scenes in service of that.
However, in time for LudoNarraCon, we made a small update to the demo. Below are some more details on what we’ve been up to, as well as what is included in the demo update.
Character Impact Notifications:
- Based on feedback, there is now a notification area that shows when decisions impact specific characters either positively or negatively, as well as indicate if that was a small, medium or large impact.
- Previously the only impacts seen were the status icons, so it was not always easy to understand how characters ended up reaching their frayed states.
- A future update will include the ability to control how much of this information you want showing on the UI, as part of a difficulty & accessibility setting.
Additional Conversations & New Location:
- Some changes were made to the ending scenes.
- Some more conversations that occur in the demo time frame were added.
- A new location has been added to the demo.
Bug Fixes:
- Tracked down a rare bug where the player could get stuck because no conversation options were presented.
- Several text edits & typo fixes.
Changes We’re Working On:
Systemic Story System:
One of the big changes we've been able to make, which does exist in the demo but is not noticeable, is that we've successfully moved the story away from being hard coded on specific days to now playing out relative to your progress with conversations. Conversations are no longer restricted to occur on specific days, and instead trigger after certain prerequisites have been satisfied. This means the game can also now add new days or skip days as needed, depending on the number of conversations available.
That's a pretty fundamental change that unlocks the flexibility we wanted for building out the rest of the game story, and the unique mix of story layers based on what occurs in each game phase and each game event in a phase, and have those play nicely with the on-going character arcs and general random events which can largely occur at any time (as long as certain prerequisites are met).
That's a bit hard to show in the demo as it is only focused on a single event inside of a game phase, and purposefully structured in a more controlled way so you always get essentially the same experience in that timeframe - but as we add more content it'll really pay off, and we're excited to get some of that into a future demo update for you to see for yourselves!
Thanks again for playing our demo. Please send us your feedback, and we’d love to see you at one of our upcoming streams as part of LudoNarraCon! You can see the schedule below.
- The GDS team
