Greetings Travelers!
I hope you are well as we approach the holiday season.
Today’s post marks the start of a trend I will hopefully continue by providing monthly newsletters about the progress of Tales from The Dancing Moon. You can expect to see a post at the end of each month.
So where do I begin? The main feature mechanic I’ve been pushing forward this month is city building. This is something that opens up in the second act of the game and allows the player to fill the village with larger buildings that enable certain functions for the player. You can think of this as perks that the player can unlock via the construction of new buildings. For example, if you build a new house, it means that more villagers can come and live in the village, but if you buy an extension for the Inn, then you’ll get an extra rest bonus when you sleep, which will be useful for tackling monsters! That sort of thing!
I took some time to redecorate some areas of the game. The entrance to the Town Hall has been on my mind for a long time, and I found a really nice article by Obsidian Entertainment about their level building process for Pillars of Eternity. I was inspired by this and tried to have this in mind when making my improvements. I really like how these potted plants fill some of the space!
Aside from this there is always some polishing and UI tidying to be done. One of the things I’ve been doing is to go around some of the UI elements and expand them into what they will become as the player explores. An example of this is the proc-gen exploration menu. At the moment there is only 1 entry for the Dewiland Meadows, but there will be more to explore as the player progresses. I’ve added some "???" fields to imply this.
And just to give you a little sneak peak of one of those proc-gen areas…
My focus moving forward is to finish a first pass of the quests for Act 2 of the game, and to focus on the cooking food and brewing drinks features. I would like to develop these in a way to I can start rolling them into the Beta version for people to try out!
Hopefully we’ll see some of this in next month's newsletter!
Thanks for reading!
- DjMonkey
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1782420/Tales_from_The_Dancing_Moon/