Hi! Recently we’ve been receiving lots of questions regarding the development process of HordeCore, so we’ve decided to answer the most popular ones! Without further ado, let’s start!
How did the game’s idea evolve through the development process?
Quite a lot, actually! We can’t stress the importance of player-driven feedback enough! While the core groundwork stayed the same throughout development, we’d say that the overall “fun-factor” has definitely been cranked up by a lot!
We had quite a few different phases of prototyping and iteration of our new ideas, and some of them ended up filling in the gaps that were brought to our attention by both our “closed doors'' testers, as well as by everyone who played our Prologue throughout the last few months.
It’s a really good sign that we’re already having a blast with a lot of these features internally, and we can’t wait to show them to everyone!
3 new planned features you are most excited about?
Skill Modifiers! We’re really excited to showcase what we’ve been working on and continue expanding on how we’re allowing the player to further customize their battle-hardened Survivors through skill modifications that can have bombastic results! No, we’re not talking about slight damage adjustments; every modification results in a completely new set of skills for every class. How exciting is that?!
Hordeling Modifiers! We couldn’t let our Survivors have all the fun, so we’re also creating new subclasses for our green-skinned friends with very different aesthetics, resistances, and behaviors! We even saw one of them run away with a pack full of loot the other day.
Our new Quest system! Having exciting new ways to explore our Wastelands and face many different challenges with a combination of dynamically generated content and hand-crafted objectives seriously improve both first-hand enjoyment and replayability!
Where do we look for inspiration? How do we plan new stuff?
As a team, we’ve always preferred to work with a healthy dose of “free-flow” regarding new ideas and influences, meaning we’re very open to discuss the pros and cons of inserting (or, at least, prototyping) any new ideas that have the potential of improving the overall experience.
The balance between adding an extra workload versus said potential is something that definitely takes both the ability to follow a strict timeline and quickly adapt our planning to include these “extras”, keeping in mind that game development is a constant juggle between deadlines and creativity.
That said, while we wouldn’t go as far as defining our development style as a so-called “controlled chaos”, we definitely welcome new, inspiring experiences and allow them to influence our creative process.
How do you test all these fun things?
Videogame Development is a beast that can be faced in very different ways. There are countless creative approaches, but we found that sometimes taking a few steps outside of the “digital” medium is the easiest and most efficient way to tackle certain themes, which was especially true with our Horde Tactics minigame!
Starting with hand-cut pieces of assorted paper and a bunch of fresh ideas on what HordeCore could look like in a tabletop experience, it didn’t take us very long to come up with a fun way to translate the mechanics and theme into a traditional CCG format. We even made some alternative game modes, like “boss hunting” and “2v2”!
Once we reached something very close to its final iteration, we decided to order a professionally printed CCG set! It was a very amazing tool to get more hands (literally!) on the game so we could “crash-test” the entire experience with our friends, family, and everyone attending our booths in conventions, making the whole process really gratifying.
We can’t wait for everyone to get their hands on the full version of the game! It’ll be an exciting journey for sure!
Don’t forget to add HordeCore to your wishlist, and see you soon!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/980210/HordeCore/