This week our update is more designy focus, as we are right in the thick of designing the game’s structure and player purpose.
Update #3 Exploration
Exploration is our next major update to the game. It will greatly enhance the overworld experience, map exploration, UI experience, dynamically generated quests based on NPC motives, and player progression.
- Zach is busy working on the Dynamic Quest engine and making good progress putting the prototype into the game.
- Jessi and Phil continue on the new UI. It’s about 2/3 done the design process, hopefully the design work will be done in about 2 weeks
- Regions are a core component to the Exploration update, so I’ll explain them a bit more
Regions
- A region is a self contained section of the map like a a territory on the Risk board.
- A region is one administrative unit
- It has a name, people can refer to it, “You’ll find dyes in Fessex province.”
- Contains a small number of towns (2-3), with roads between them. The region functions as one political unit.
- It has one leader - a noble of a certain house
- It has one set of rules/edicts that govern it
- NPCs in a region all feel the same way about topics: like the nobles, a kingdom, or the people of another region
- A region can be at war with another region (instead of town vs town)
- A region is affiliated with the Conclave or Renegades
- A region has a specific biome - swampy, desert, forest, rolling grasslands, ashen mordor
- A region has one (or a few) resources natural to it. This makes something special about each region.
- A region has one kind of base problem in it: it has a giant spider problem, or plague, or drought, OR marauding goblins, instead of everything everywhere like we’ve currently done
- Regions have a difficulty level. This region is Level 1, that one is 10, that one is 20, another is 30. (We don’t actually have levels but you get the idea).
- Later when Kingdoms are added, they are simply a collection of regions ruled by one monarch. Any region not affiliated with a monarch are ‘free city states’ like medieval venice or ancient Sparta
- A region has specific ins and outs the player can travel between them.
- They can no longer just walk through the mountains, have to take a pass.
- The pass can be blocked by problems like avalanche, bandits, or a gryphon
- We can focus the map generator on making interesting regions well. Then we make a map by generating N number of regions.
- You will be able to customize your experience at 1.0 where you can change the size (# of regions) for a map.
- Each region will have historical events, which you will see in the world gen screen.
- Regions represents a massive change to the world structure and game map. This will be a save breaking change. But don’t worry, it won’t be out for several months so you have plenty of time.
Regions solve tons of problems with the game! It is time we get to it. This is a core component to the Exploration update Mark and Thomas are working on.
Mini-Update Rival Combat
Rivals is a small update adding the ability to fight specific named mages in the game. These mages specialize in one of the schools and present a unique challenge to the player.
- Phil and I playtested Rivals and found some issues. We’re both off this week, giving the team time to find solutions. Next week we’ll playtest again and see where it is at. It’s real close!
- James, Tyler, and Nolan are improving some of the aspects
No Patch This Week
With Phil and I off this week we decided to just pause the weekly patch. There will be a patch next week. We’ll also be off Steam forums and Discord for a week. I think you can manage without us. 😝