As Christmas approaches, we have been focussing on the overall player experience, improving content rather than adding lots more.
Minimum Viable Cult
It became obvious to us that there was simply too much to do at the beginning to get your cult up and running. This in particular leads to a large amount of building at the very beginning of the game, just to stop your cult imploding within a very short time. Most of the building at the start related to satisfying your cultists’ basic needs (for example, bedrooms, bathrooms etc) as well as to start generating resources, so you don’t get stuck in a frustrating doom spiral.
It’s hard to cut out some of this building…it wouldn’t make sense if cultists just didn’t need a toilet at the beginning of the game! But we’ve now removed the Kitchen as a requirement and instead allowed the player to order takeaway food directly to the canteen to satisfy hunger. We also changed the recruitment office, so now very low grade people will wander in to the reception of their own volition, without having to be accosted on the street.
We’ve also made initial recruitment of followers and cultists easier, which means there is no need to immediately build rooms like the hypnochamber (previously this was almost essential to recruit a decent amount of cultists).
All of this means there’s less stress for the player whilst they’re finding their feet during the onboarding process.
Special Characters
There are now three special characters available in-game. These won’t be recruitable from the very start and some of them are dependent on the theme of the cult that you are pursuing. If you pursue the Dark Arts theme then you might find yourself with the ultimate satanic poster-boy:
Futurists, on the other hand, may find themselves with the deadly efficient T-999:
There’s also the chance to recruit a character called Bob Smooth, who doesn’t require any type of theme rating.
Each of these characters has high stat ratings that will really benefit your cult, but will be hard to recruit. You can recruit none or all of them (since you can pursue multiple themes at once). We are hoping to have a theme character for each new theme that we add.
Gameplay enhancements
We’ve made numerous changes to help the player get to grips with the game and be able to play in an easy and carefree way. A few examples of the changes made are:
Highlighting objects that are usable by cultists or followers when you have selected them. Players often forgot that cultists could be micromanaged on to items specifically, so now certain items are highlighted.
When moving room-specific objects, we’ve now made it clear which rooms you can and can’t place items in, by shading unavailable room spaces.
We’ve also very recently gone through a round of usability testing, that will no doubt shed further light on gameplay issues.
We hope that you all have a merry Christmas and a happy new year. Rest assured, that 2021 will be the year that HIJAC is finally available on Steam!
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