The team is hard at work as I write this, preparing for an internal playtest, which helps us prepare for bigger external playtests. Optimizations are especially tricky for this game, not just because of the thousands of NPCs but also the way the city is generated and displayed. So this time, instead of distracting someone for the time it takes to make a proper devlog, we thought we’d do a little screenshot roundup.
In case you haven’t seen them already, from Monday to Thursday every week, a Fortuna developer on the Kitfox Discord (usually Brent) posts a snippet of progress made on the game, giving a behind-the-scenes glimpse, usually of the art or content, sometimes tools or bugs. I’ve picked my favorites for this post, but if you’re curious, I recommend checking the Discord yourself.
Fortuna has come a long way in the past year. It’s hard to believe a year ago, the game didn’t have so many things -- it didn’t have cats, or audio, or real influence, or money, or heck, most shop types. Obviously we’ve been working towards the game’s vision for some years now, but it’s all finally starting to come together, as a world to explore.
Part of it is the artists recently working towards “unifying” different building types visually, to let the player intuitively distinguish between residences, shops, government buildings, etc. But part of it is just that simulation games take a LOT of time. Even after you have a working system, AND you’ve made some functional content, often you need another system (and another, and another) to truly feel like there’s any logic or meaning to the consequences, rather than just a bunch of random stuff happening.
Speaking of complicated simulations, this week I’m personally also a bit distracted also trying to help organize our annual Kitfox Publisher Sale, and all the surrounding complications, like Ostranauts going 1.0 yesterday, and the Dwarf Fortress 20th Anniversary celebration tomorrow at 2pm Eastern, on Twitch. (If you want to support Fortuna, buying some other Kitfox games is a great way to start!)
But I have a few more bugs to fix this week too (and next week, and the week after that), getting ready for that chestnut of a playtest I know you’re excited to jump into.
Til next time,
Tanya & the Kitfox team