Hey everyone!
Last week, I had said that I would show one or two new biomes today, but I realised halfway through the week that it would be more efficient to first finish the mountains for all biomes and then populate them than going biome by biome. So, instead I will give you a quick update on some of the additional considerations we’ve given to loot and exploring.
Two weeks ago, I talked about exploration, rewards, and accessibility of areas. Based on what we said in that post, we have been trying to give each path a reward, and we have been thinking further about what these rewards should look like (and be).
To start with, we found that even when you find something, you can currently only find chests. Chests were always meant to just be placeholders, but we did not expect for the simple visual monotony to be affecting the fun of the exploration so much. So we want to introduce more ‘things’ to find.
Now “things” come in three varieties: Content, visual, and mechanic.
Addressing content first, we want the type of thing the player finds to have an actual impact on the way they play the game. While that can't be the case for every single exploration reward (there will continue to be simple coin or food or ammo rewards), there will have to be more substantial rewards, such as types of seeds or rare goods which make players wonder if their current find doesn’t substantially reduce the cost or increase the benefit of a certain way to play. Ideally, we want this to result in players changing their tactics as they progress, so the games feel more varied to them rather than starting with a set plan in mind and not deviating from that. They can of course choose to do so - but it may prove inferior to responding to what the map provides for you.
As we will talk about soon, 0.9 will introduce a research tree to unlock buildings, productivity bonuses, and even items for the commander. We think this will provide us with a good amount of options for exploration rewards as we intend them, and should be what the players are “looking for” when they go exploring. As an example, a player may find an upgrade to the productivity of their miners - even though they had chosen to go with farming for money, this may incentivise them to switch to the now more lucrative mining.
The second part to address is visuals. We have found that finding the same two types of chests (poor or rich) over and over, with random rewards in them, just does not have the desired effect of being excited about what you have found. Considering the chest “could” contain something cool - or simply some wheat - we almost automatically keep our own excitement in check, which isn’t a great outcome.
As you can see from today’s image, we are starting to experiment with some options other than chests. The gravesite in the image was one quick idea on an alternative for what you might find (we also thought of buried treasure, bird’s nests, special plants, etc) - which could help create a narrower range of expectations. If you find a bird’s nest, you may find some feathers or similar natural materials in them - if you find a buried treasure, you can expect gold coins, bars, maybe some gems. Overall, you will then know what value of loot to expect from what you can see, which should mean that you can get back to getting super excited about some of the rewards once you see them.
Finally, we have also been considering different “mechanics” for loot, other than just “point and get something”. For example, we thought of “neutral” animals that may be walking around, which you can attack (and then have to fight) if you want a payoff - or you can choose to ignore for the time being if you are low on health, or don’t want to handle the situation quite yet. The gravesite was also chosen as today’s image for that reason - rifling through a grave should come with some moral dilemma, so we will have to consider some negative effects that may happen if you choose to dig through them, but you may choose to do so for the reward. For example, a disease may offset your advantage from epic loot by debuffing the villagers you come into contact with.
While we intend to have some of the visual and loot changes ready for 0.8, we are not expecting for the mechanic changes to happen until 0.10, so hang in there! That doesn’t stop us from being able to mix up the nodes for now though, so we gain variety.
Until next week!