A couple of big decisions

22 Aug, 2023

It's been a while since the last post, it feels like one is long due. We've been working on the skill(s) tree system, had a big think about how our heroes will move around the world, and started dipping our toes in marketing, or better, started thinking about marketing for real.

About the skill tree system, our candidate idea is to have each hero have a number of skill slots, upon learning a skill, a tree specific to the skill itself gets plugged into the hero's main tree. The idea itself is rather simple, we hope it will lend itself to interesting emergent behaviour.

Here's an example picture. The skills are placeholders, so these are more akin to sprouts rather than trees.

We're tinkering with the idea of skills (and the related trees) evolving into more advanced skills, but we haven't bought into that yet.

The second item of the day, which cost us a few days of back and forth and second-guessing, is about how the heroes travel around. Initially, we autopilot-ed into the idea of having a top-down 2d map where players move from one node to the either. It's an idea made mainstream by Slay the Spire and it's a path taken by really many, because, after all, it's a good path.

The alternative we had in mind was something akin to Banners of Ruin, here, at "movement time", the player is given 3 choices to pick from, like a battle, a tavern, or getting into a dark alley, and that's it. We decided to go for something like this, but with a spin, which we won't discuss here since it deserves its own blog post. Aesthetically speaking, the 2.5D approach we're going with could have a chance to shine through this kind of mechanic.

Here's a test scene, as usual, it's a mishmash of everything, from Anton's beautiful drawings to random stuff we found on the internet. In the background, you can see the three alternatives that the player will choose among in the next step.

Last but not least, we have marketing. Not much to say here, we started reading up blogs like howtomarketagame.com and we'll be allocating more and more time to marketing. The upcoming cycle and the next will be about improving the test scene so that it's actually marketing ready, along with moving towards something playable, as in no placeholder skills etc.