Hey everyone!
There were a lot more bug-fixing and unglamorous things happening this week, but I also took some time to actually play test the game for the first time in a while.
To start with: there are few bugs left at the moment. None were game-breaking, and I was overall pretty happy with the state of the game. Performance on ultra did drop after a little while when my graphics card got nice and toasty, so there is still some optimisation to do there, but I will leave that for after experimental.
Now onto the more important part: my game made me think a little bit more about balancing and designing the progression. When I started the game, I ended up with a very lucky situation: in the immediate area around my base were 6 different groupings of banana plants, which meant lots of very cheap fruit very early in the game. Of course I was tempted to design my gameplay and my industry around it - which is exactly what we were hoping to achieve with randomly spawning resources - but right now, I did not have any options to do so. All it meant for me to have many banana groups was that I could quickly build houses and sustain more villagers to do the usual progression. It did not change what I did, just how fast I managed to do it.
And that is ultimately what we managed to create with the current approach to progression. We created a linear progression across the island, which is either accelerated, or slowed down depending on what resources you find, and maybe has a greater difficulty at different times, depending on where you find those resources.
Of course that is not the goal for the game. For 0.8, creating this linear progression and increasing challenge across the island was what we wanted (and I think we achieved quite well), but what we really want is to give players many branching options for how to get to the end of the island. Maybe using my bananas to sustain many villagers would have been my decision, but the player should have more options: use the bananas to make alcohol to sell and get money early; use the alcohol to provide to your villagers directly to make them happier; maybe save up some bananas to create an orchard from their seeds. Whatever choice the player ultimately would have made should probably depend on what else they found across the island and what they already decided would be their next goal.
When we initially designed 0.8, none of this was on our radar, of course. We had not yet decided to go into more of a coop design of the game, and we had not yet created the new island and progression against the pirates. The main aim of 0.8 had been to improve the way the military and scouting worked, and we certainly achieved that and more. However, for 0.9, we will be very much aiming to create choices and branching options for gameplay, so players can actually decide what their strategy will be and pursue it as effectively as possible.
Until next week!