Welcome to Crawlyard Devlogs! We've been busy preparing for Gamescom, polishing the demo, upgrading the graphics, and implementing new systems. The game evolved immensely since we've last got in contact with the community, we've added a new trailer, updated the game page, started working with voice actors, and so much more.
There were lots of themes for a devlog to choose from, but we decided to focus on our beloved puppets for once. Please meet the Knight – your tireless warrior, valiant protector, and the most trusty explorer of the backstage.
Stances
The Knight rushes straight into battle and is able to soak up a lot of damage. Sounds familiar? Oh, we'll have our fair share of interesting game design decisions, from double stat system to physically replacing parts of your dolls to change its abilities, but we all agreed that the core concept should be simple enough to understand intuitively.
But even on the most basic level you can manipulate the way your Knight advances with the help of his unique class feature: battle stances. Switching between them mid-fight allows your knight to swiftly go from offense to defense if things aren't looking too great, or choose a more tactical approach for a particularly tricky enemy.
Abilities
But, as much as we like our brave little explorers, you probably shouldn't expect much ingenuity from a puppet. Thankfully, Crawlyard is far from being an idle game, so you can, and probably should, always use abilities to lend your Knight a hand in battle. This is where both the strategic deck building and tactical ability juggling come into play.
There are so many more abilities we still aim to implement to make playing as a "straightforward" Knight fun, challenging and satisfying on every level! Of course it will require a lot of game design and testing effort, but we believe it will be totally worth it in the end.
Truth to be told, we were at first thinking of making more dolls with unique class cards, but eventually decided to focus our efforts on polishing the archetypes embodying all those other individual cases. After all, puppets get repurposed to play different roles all the time.
So, who will your Knight become? A raging berserk? A stalwart paladin? A nimble fencer? A flashy magical warrior? Or, maybe, a universalist cherry-picking the best individual abilities but never quite reaching the level of the specialists' earth-shattering combos? As always, feel free to experiment and choose something that suits you the most.
Afterword
And that concludes our short sneak peek into the class system. Other doll types will have a vastly unique way to play them which would once again be further diversified by their specific mechanics and decks, but that's a story for another time. Make sure to stay tuned!
Your regular "huh, so I'll be doing design now, too?" indie game developer, signing out.
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