We’ve made good progress on the Early Access version of Honey, I Joined a Cult. Having taken on board the feedback we received from the expos we attended last year (at Insomnia, RGX and EGX) we made some tough decisions about overhauling some of the most fundamental parts of the game to make the playing experience more enjoyable.
Base Building
Construction is probably the most fundamental part of Honey, I Joined a Cult and we’ve decided to give you complete control over how you build your base. To give you an idea of how this has changed over the course of the development, we started off with pre-set room sizes that the player could build, we then improved this by making room construction draggable to allow for any size you want. The latest update allows you to build your base elements individually, for example you can build walls however you like to allow for irregular shaped rooms and merge rooms together by getting rid of walls. This is particularly important when you start to expand your base as previously rooms could only be reassigned or deleted. Allowing people to have complete control of the construction aspects certainly makes the expansion process much more enjoyable and manageable.
Cultist Schedules and Priorities
We realised that there’s no point in having NPCs with unique abilities (and disabilities) if you had little control over how you use them. We’ve therefore ditched the old “3 slot system” and implemented a fully customisable schedule, allowing you to choose certain jobs for a cultist to prioritise or to stay away from, as well as exactly how much sleep and free time they have in between carrying out their cultish duties. You can also now manually command your cultists if they’re slacking off and there’s work to be done.
Cultist Mood
We want a cultist's mood to be the result of a huge amount of different influences. In our previous versions it was too easy and very simple to keep your cultists happy as there were only a few needs to attend to. Now your cultists will be affected by a huge amount of things, maybe your Leader has been abusive, maybe their schedule doesn’t allow enough time to eat, maybe they’ve soiled themselves.
Trait Expansion
Although we’ve had traits implemented for a while we weren’t happy with the traits we had or how they were presented in the UI. Previously a character might have one trait that was set for them when they were spawned. Now characters can have multiple traits and have the ability to gain positive and negative traits over the course of the game in a variety of different ways (through missions for example). The substance of the traits has also been overhauled and they are now presented in a more attractive way.
General Changes
We’ve continued to upgrade the games UI to make things look more attractive. Many of the menu screens have been changed since our last update. We're also added some more bits of information on the bios of the cultists, which gives the characters more, er, character. Generally, where there was once huge amounts of text we’ve now putting in graphics and symbols. This is an ongoing process and we’re not yet finished but things are looking better and better.
Why are you guys so slow?
How dare you! We're working as quickly as we can but the reality is that there's been a a huge amount of work for two people to do, especially given how big the changes are that we've been pushing through. The recent overhaul has been a very long and technically demanding process whereby we binned months of our previous work to make the game as good as it possibly can be. We think the extra time has been well worth it and look forward to showing it to you soon ːsteamhappyː
What next?
We’ll be moving to closed beta testing the current version shortly and depending on how that will affect what our expected early access date is. We know there's a lot of people that have asked to be beta testers but at the moment we're keeping the test group to a reasonably small set of people that we've met in person. Wider testing will follow once we've processed the feedback from this initial group.
:happyyey: Simon & Ed :neutralyey: