Some Rambling News
Heya! Just wanted to give you all a quick look into what we're working on with Wizard Boy and when you should expect looking for the next update!
First thing - I (John) have had a couple non-Wizard-Boy responsibilities come up this last month that needed my more immediate attention (I've been nose down working on console ports for many other games), so my personal progress since the Summer Sale has been a bit slower than it normally has been. I'm getting close to wrapping stuff up, so hopefully it won't be too much longer before I can have my full focus back. HOWEVER, this hasn't ended up changing development that much, as what we're planning for the next update has a lot to do with things that Evan heads up.
Evan has been hard at work with a very large task that is going to be the "foundation on top of the groundwork," which is reworking the castle. Lemme' explain.
We've been working towards the goal of having Wizard Boy having a set of replayable missions, kinda' like a mix of "wizard life" and "Hitman." We talked about the Spider Dungeon before, and although that's still on the mind, we've had so many ideas for other "mission-like-things" that wouldn't fit in there that we've wanted to reimagine how all of that mission stuff would work before solidifying it into the game. After talking for several weeks about the best way to approach the design, Evan and I have landed on a format we feel is really solid and, to the best of our knowledge, is going to only add to what we have now instead of mutating it into a different sort of game. To do this, we found we'd need to do some reshuffling changes to the Castle to add "points of interest" that could branch into a loading zone into different missions. At the same time, we've noticed there is a couple big lacking parts of the castle design as-is: namely, you can't walk around the outside (which is a shame, since that would be super cool), and there's some specific areas that we weren't as happy with as we'd like (especially the area around the vault). After mulling everything over, we think we've found a great design that addresses pretty much all of this in one swoop.
On another hand, a big design addition that's going to help focus the castle reshuffling is the idea of "off limits zones." This already exists with the Goblet Lounge and the Green Student Lounge, but I've formalized that design into a "suspicion" mechanic that we can more easily use to make smaller things (like individual items, closets, doors, or even large sections) "off limits." We can use this to make the castle have a lot more areas you need to "infiltrate" in one way or another, and this has opened up a big well of possibility that we want to work with instead of just tacking it onto the existing castle design without it being able to be fully fleshed out.
We're essentially doing an "additive" process on the castle, where we're keeping all of the most notable areas from the current design, reshuffling them as needed, and then adding on areas that we wanted to have to begin with. Although individual hallways and side rooms may be changed, we're making sure that all of the same basic ideas are kept into the new design, and lots of rooms are getting copied over wholesale (the courtyard and bell tower, for instance, are all remaining unchanged, and so far we're planning on keeping most of the dungeon unchanged). So expect something of a "renewal" of the existing design rather than a new design outright.
For full transparency - we're not 100% exactly how long this process will take. I'm actually in the process of bringing on extra programming help to optimize the AI and world loading as much as possible, since with expanding the castle play area also comes more overhead, and I feel like we're already scraping at the game "only running well enough to get by." But nonetheless, everything is in-progress and going well so far, and just wanted to let you know that if you don't hear too much for a month or two, we're still working on things, just haven't gotten it all together yet. :)
Thanks a ton! Looking forward to you all being able to experience the next Wizard Boy update!
-John