Some of you have been buying this lill monster even though we warned you not to. We hope you won't get scared of it but instead join forces with us to turn it into a beautiful.... ehm. Butterfly?! Meanwhile - THANK YOU! It would help us a ton to know why you recently bought this little monster called Heart. Papers. Border. Was it the price tag, or was it more? Hold nothing back, tell us everything (no asterisk!) HERE.
Learning how to KISS
Now, let's start with the rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid! Aka KISS.
Anyone who has every designed a game in earnest know that this is... Very Freakin' Difficult. Because you always want to make the best game possible, and the best idea always comes tomorrow. Today's ideas are rarely good enough. Nor is today's code, art, sound, you name it. This is what makes game developers artists. And what leads to the horror of all horrors, feature creep.
There are a few ways to stand up to feature creep. The two we chose is to let you hold us accountable and to constantly keep KISS in mind. Which is why the new design will start very simple - childish, even. We want to make sure the base is solid before we build on it.
Everything* changes!
Ground zero is to clean up this mess but once done to a sufficient degree, Heart. Papers. Border. will become a puzzle collector and a logistics brain game. Thankfully this change takes the game away from judgement, too. The faith of the world no longer falls on your shoulder, nor are you in a more or less privileged position to complete your task. Real life does a good enough job at letting us to imagine that - so we will do our best to entertain you in Heart. Papers. Border. We interrupt this program for a short, but insightful College Humor travel clip:
The main systems we plan to implement are:
- a travel planner that lets you schedule your travels for up to a point in the future and then hit Play to make these plans happen
- a commission system where you'll know if important events are happening in a certain place, so you can setup your travels to catch them (or not) - as a photojournalist would
- a puzzle collector where you collect all the puzzles in a country, and some puzzles require you to be there at certain, specific times
The game loop will be plan your travel so you can hop from country to country and objective to objective, while catching the temporary happenings in the best way you can. We absolutely want to keep some of the existing systems, like visas, deportations, universal basic income and the blog-turned-photoblog, but first things first and only if they truly click with these new systems. But, like, we Really wanna keep deportations....
The puzzle collector will likely be first and we already posted a hint about how it will look:
We hope to be posting a game update sometimes in October. We really count on you to get Heart. Papers. Border. right this time, so if you think we should keep a certain system, or if you have opinions about these new ideas, please let us know!