Hey Heretics,
Our fifth dev blog brings to light our intentions in design and gameplay when creating Becoming Saint, and you can find a little summary of the playtests at the end of this dev blog!
Bloody history, light tone
The idea behind Becoming Saint is to merge a strong open-ended narrative representation of 14th century Italy’s political and societal situation with a little strategy funny game of non-bloody confrontations. We want to convey strong messages with a light tone, merging that with “battle” mechanics that are somehow effortless and hard at the same time, absurd and fun.
Just like Bad North, we choose to have short combats that repeat themselves and the reason behind that is very simple: we just love that kind of gameplay! It's a mix of strategic, tactical, and automated action, and it enables both detailed guidance and a “just let them go” attitude in playing; we find it fun and relaxing, and it can be a great experience for very different profiles of gamers while fitting very different styles of gameplay.
Add to this short battles the absurdist and somehow non-violent representation of fights and the auto battler features from TABS as well as the curated narrative content and accessible gameplay-wise of Reigns and you have the recipe of what we were inspired by for our game.
Write your own story with your followers
We want gameplay to be somehow misleadingly simple: the choices are many but always set as simple alternatives, but then the game makes it clear to the player that it is a very hard path to survive.
Everything in the game is in the form of choices, that include the narrative aspects. You decide every aspect of your creed, how to manage, earn, and distribute food, which believers turn into followers, which towns, and which power to challenge.... The world is partially generative, but randomness hardly plays any role in the game; how it will go depends on your choices and your skills in managing “battles”, which we call confrontations.
Choosing which places to try to convert relates to both your food and power needs; so if you have a lot of food and are not strong, you may decide to march to a faraway town that is not very guarded, hence consuming more food but having higher chances of converting it. A smart strategy is that conquering adjacent towns reduces your food needs in marches, so that too is a guiding principle.
A divine journey that is still ongoing
Nothing much changed in the main loop of the game since the first iteration of Becoming Saint, but a lot changed in the design of each step. The game loop is about making choices concerning what is your political and religious program, getting or losing followers, marching toward a town to convert, and finding a way to feed all your followers.
What changed mostly during our different iteration on the game is keeping a fine line between strategy and auto battler, how much control to give the players during “battles”, or how many opportunities to give in managing the balance between food and charisma, there we made many, many changes at each iteration and we are still improving on it thanks to the feedback we received during the playtest.
A holy thank you to our playtesters!
Our first semi-public playtest is closed and you were true saints! It was fun to see all of you enjoy the game and listen to your feedback and questions. We will continue to work on improving the game's experience thanks to your help. We hope to have a new playtest in the future if you want to take part in it and discover the new additions, but we'll keep you informed!
Thank you for reading this dev blog! If you're curious about watching someone play the game during the playtests, here is the super cool video of Olexa:
Stay blessed, heretics!
- The Becoming Saint team -
