Omg it’s our first post!
Hey. Hi. Welcome. I’m Laurence. I’m the co-founder, designer, producer, writer, occasional cleaning staff and everything else at Golem House. Let me be the first to welcome you to our devlog. This is going to be a space where we’ll be sharing updates on the game, talking about some of the problems we’re facing or just sharing random thoughts and ideas. I hope it’s a fun place to be.
So I thought I’d start our devlog with kinda explaining the story behind why we’re building this and what the core idea of Treasure Tile is. We founded Golem House out of a sheer love for games like Diablo. And at first that was basically the whole plan. We just wanted to make more Diablos. Or Path of Exiles. Or Grim Dawns (Dawnses? Dawnii? you get it). But as you probably know these games are huge as hell. It took massive teams of way smarter and more talented people to make them happen. We had neither the skills nor the cash-money to pull anything like that off. So we decided to start small.
But I mean like really small. We’d been in the industry long enough to know that feature-creep is a cruel mistress. And we knew that if we’re not careful we’d be drawing up plans for MMO modes, base building and procedurally generated soundtracks. Luckily, that never happened but we did end up adding quite a lot that we hadn’t initially planned for. And that was only possible because we started from a very small game concept.
We did have a few core ideas in mind when starting this very small game. We knew we wanted to maintain the general feel of these bigger games regardless of how small it is. You know that awesome feeling when you start a new RPG and destroy a bunch of low level monsters, get a sword and then destroy those same low level monster but now faster? Yeah, that feeling. I mean, not exactly that but I think this sense of growth is one of the things that makes RPGs like Diablo so empowering. We also wanted the game to not feel small despite being small. I know it sounds a bit silly but essentially one of our goals was to create a quality experience that we knew we could deliver. One that wouldn’t feel like it’s held together by some duct-tape and string. And lastly, we wanted the game to be accessible yet still deep enough that it wouldn’t get boring. More on that sometime later.
So yeah, small game but one that provides with a full RPG experience complete with tons of items, loot, some questing here and there. You know, the works. That’s definitely a challenge and one that required us to make sacrifices. Not long after we started cutting things that weren’t core to this RPG experience. Not in our eyes at least. We realized that if we went with a completely tile-based design we wouldn’t need to animate any enemies which meant we could have more of them. This also meant that we didn’t need to animate player items or armor which meant we could have more of them. There would also be less room for bugs since the game was on a very rigid grid which meant we could spend more time adding cool stuff instead of removing uncool bugs. I know this sounds like a very technical and pragmatic decision but there were also a lot of cool things that came out of this approach and things we discovered while prototyping.
I’ll talk a bit about what kinds of prototypes we had in some other post ‘cause that’s a whole ‘nother story. One thing we weren’t that sure about was whether people would actually like it. For that we decided to go with a fully open development for this game. What this means is that basically since day 1 we’d upload early versions of the game for free so that people could try it. We’d talk with everyone and anyone that had anything to say or suggest and steer our development based on those opinions. You know when I said we ended up adding a lot that we hadn’t initially planned for? Well all of that was based off of those conversations, comments, angry threats. We wanna build this game with the players having a voice and we honestly mean it. If you played the latest build and want to see some feature implemented, a bug fixed or your custom made-portrait in the game head over to our discord. I can’t promise we’ll add everything anyone asks us. Actually, the portrait thing was pushing it a bit probably. Forget about that part. But what I can guarantee is that every comment we get, every video we find we honestly discuss and take it seriously. That doesn’t mean that everything we hear is feasible, but we do our best. Again, no custom made portraits tho.
Now I know what you’re thinking: Laurence, you still haven’t answered what a Treasure Tile actually is. Is it some hidden treasure in the game? Is the goal to find it? Oh boy, I suuure love treasure. Good question. In a way it’s definitely not treasure and maybe some treasure at the same time. As I mentioned we’re RPG players at heart and as every self-respecting RPG player knows the hardest part of the game is coming up with a character name. We honestly had a ton of ideas and couldn’t pick one but we needed to name it something if we were to get that sweet sweet feedback. So we just went with Treasure Tile knowing full well we’ll be changing the name at some point in the future. And no, finding the treasure is not the goal. There actually isn’t any treasure at all. For now. I kinda wanna put in some secret treasure now. Stay tuned for that.