Hello Reverse Tower Defenders!
In our previous Q&A we addressed some general questions. In this issue of our Dev Q&A we will be fielding some questions regarding the game design and the premise of the game!
Q - Would you refresh everyone on the background story of Affogato please?
A - Absolutely! The plot revolves around a good witch called Affogato who visits a magical city called Arorua which doesn't ever see daylight and decides to call it home. There, she becomes the boss of a cafe and holds a double identity as a demon buster, helping her customers defeat their inner demons and overcoming personal challenges.
Q - Who is the mysterious white-haired girl who appeared at the end of the demo? Is she also a witch?
A - Her name is Aoi and she has the same demonic powers as Affogato. But Affogato probably wouldn't call her a witch after helping Aoi out of some trouble (Spoiler Alert!).
Q - Tell us more about the game! In the demo, there are several stages we could challenge. But there are very few locations we can visit in Arorua City. And although there are some shops, interaction is very limited. In the actual release of the game, would there be opportunities to interact more with the shops? And if so, how would these be integrated into the core gameplay?
A - Affogato is a story-rich game. We have planned for 4 Acts and 5 NPC plotlines.
In the game, shops play a role where players can visit them to increase their in-game statistics, which would in turn affect how the game progresses. For example, if you lack Courage points you would not be able to interact with a NPC and therefore not be able to unlock that particular storyline.
We have designed Affogato such that there is a finite amount of time you can spend within a game day, so that gamers will have to make decisions on how to best allocate it and juggle between improving their stats, pursuing the main storyline or exploring side quests and nurturing relationships with NPCs.
Q - What are the key themes of Affogato?
A - Magic, coffee, demons, hope.
Q - How many key characters are there in Affogato?
A - At the moment, we are planning for 4 lead characters and 5 supporting characters. Gamers can make coffee for them, fight their inner demons and solve their problems, establish friendships with them and ultimately save Arorua City together!
Above - A Version 0.1 mockup of a Battle Stage
Q - The 'reverse tower defense' genre is pretty niche. How are you tackling the battle system considering there are few references for this genre?
A - We began production with just a few monsters and direction changing tiles. Later on, we added more complex monsters and other mechanics - such as Charm, Change the World, etc. We also improved on the animation, environmental designs and effects.
Later on, we added Branch Missions and Daily Missions to add more variety to gameplay. The Branch Missions allow gamers to experience the different playing styles the numerous witches provide and the Daily Missions allow gamers to interact with the game on a deeper level. Experienced players will naturally get better rewards and less experienced ones can eventually work their way up to becoming more proficient as well.
An innovation we tried in the initial stages of production was to let players use defeated monsters to help them in battles. However, this design would prove to be very restrictive and we eventually found a compromise in the form of the Witch Card The Empress. This arrangement allows the defeated monsters to become temporary allies without making the gameplay too restrictive.
We also found that while the direction changing tiles is a great idea, it causes the team members to split up. To resolve this issue, we made it such that they would team up again when they bump into one another.
Q - In this process, what difficulties did you face?
A - Honestly quite a bit. One key challenge was that reverse tower defense games are few and far between, and it was a challenge to find any games we could take reference from. We have to depend pretty much on our own creativity and feedback from the early stage game testers to improve on and iterate the game design. In the earlier stages, we suffered from developer's tunnel vision syndrome and what we thought would work turned out to be too complicated for the gamers. Fortunately, you guys really gave us great feedback and we were able to pinpoint and work on those issues. We look forward to what you guys think of our upcoming demo which we will release in late January!
Above - The team is hard at work looking for bugs to squash.
Q - Any more interesting trivia you can share with us on your game design?
A - When we first worked on the game, we imagined that Affogato would share many similarities to Anomaly: Warzone Earth as it is also a reverse tower defense game. Interestingly, that didn't turn out to be so as fundamentally our game premise is very different and that naturally created differentiation in our game mechanics. For example, we allow ingame characters to split up and move about freely on the battle maps. This gives us the opportunity to design the battles in such a way that players can take down the bosses through innovative ways. They can choose to split up their team members to spread out and dilute the damage that is dealt to them, or move around the boss strategically to attack it from different angles.
That's all for Issue #2 of Affogato's Q&A! If you have other burning questions of your own, please feel free to ask them in the comments section below, and do follow us on our socials!