Hi Governors,
It’s been a while. As some may have noticed, it's September and we still haven't released the first KS build yet. In truth, we’ve been having some problems with the main gameplay loop and it has been impeding our overall progress. We want to give you a quick update on the progress.
When we first started planning for Evershine, we’d wanted to give you an experience where you get personal growth role-play as well as the strategy involved in team and city planning. We would use stats such as money, health, comfort, hunger to help the player mark the milestones of settlement development. The story would use the stats to create problems for the player to solve, pushing it forward. At least on paper, it looked like it could work well. But as we finally finished all the separate parts and combined them into one build at the end of last year, the result was unsatisfactory.
The two styles were in constant conflict: The RPG part would send the player out into the field, but the strategy part wanted to keep the player in the base; The RPG part wanted the player to do things in linear fashion while the strategy part wanted the player to have more freedom. We ended up with multiple situations where the story told you to do one thing but the strategy part didn’t really need it. On top of that, it was a pain to express all the stats in third person and to keep track of all things (nobody wanted to care about Ragnar being hungry again for the 6th time!). It was a mess.
So we had a decision to make: continue with what the build had and hope we solve the conflicts down the road or spend time tweaking the main loop until we’re satisfied. Of course we chose the second option.
We did discuss if we wanted to go back to a Builder type of gameplay, but this being the third game, we wanted to give players something new. We went through several iterations trying to hit the right balance, after ten months of development, we think we’re getting pretty close. We ended up simplifying the strategy parts of the gameplay loop and tilting the game more towards open world exploration and RPG.
Of course, due to the gameplay loop tweaks, the main story was also tweaked. Some characters became more important while others had their roles diminished. The challenges facing the settlement also got… more challenging? The twists are still *redacted*.
Despite the setbacks, development is proceeding at a fast clip; the systems, character stories, and art assets didn’t stop development because of main loop issues. We’re doing our best to make available the KS build soon, and we look forward to your feedback!
Thank you for your patience and support!
Evershine Team