Studio Update: Happy October!
Added 2023-10-03 17:41:21 +0000 UTCThe leaves are beginning to turn and the air is crisp here in the far north. My children are wearing orange and black, hanging ghosts up all over the house, and gleefully anticipating the massive influx of sugar they will soon receive.
Along with these usual signs of October, Dreaming Door Studios is moving into a higher gear as we begin accelerated production of the Hierophant project. Recent meetings with consultants, advisors, and scouts for publishing companies have revealed several truths. Chief among them is that we must have a demo if we are to secure funding. While having a good release behind you and great art/writing capabilities might have been enough to get a publisher's attention in the past, investment in the indie scene is at an all-time low, and if they can't get their hands on it and play it, publishers will not consider any experience to be worth their time, no matter how beautiful or well-designed the proposal.
So we have begun to focus our work on creating a vertical slice of the gameplay of Hierophant. Scripts of various kinds are being written, and more art is being produced than ever before. It is our objective to create a visual representation of the gameplay before the end of 2023; indeed, our existence may depend on it!
The core gameplay style of Hierophant is a first-person rulership simulator. The player, a mighty Draak-Kin, must guide a strange race of beings through its own historical journey, providing both physical and spiritual influence while also learning about the fascinating world of Newhome and its many wondrous peoples and ecologies. As the game seeks to recreate the actual experience of a powerful leader in a realistic way... from the leader's literal perspective, working through their subordinates to accomplish things in the world... we call it a "Throne Simulator". I've attached a brief presentation that was used in the past to introduce interested parties to the concept; feel free to have a look, though you should keep in mind that it's not what we would use to pitch to a publisher, but only to give information on the concept.
The tarot-style image included with this post was done by Anne, a talented intern, and shows some of the more prominent gentas of Newhome receiving wisdom from a Kin. From a creative standpoint, I feel good about the Tapa, Luxa, ORO, and Milli'li designs and lore, but am not quite satisfied with the state of the Kaga (second from left). As they are perhaps the most important of all, I will be spending much of this week doing a full redesign of their culture and morphology. At the same time, I'm writing a script for a sample scene which we can use as the core of an actual demo, as well as working on a few rebranding ideas. While "Hierophant" is an apt title with great personal meaning for me, it has been pointed out that many don't know what the heck that even is, which doesn't help to bring publisher attention to it. We're considering changing the name; look for a discussion on that in the Discord soon.
In other news, Golden Treasure will be featured at an exhibit in Ypsilati at Eastern Michigan University entitled "LIGHT X TIME: Animation and Gaming". The exhibit is already up and running and will do so for at least a few weeks. I will also be travelling to Oakland University to give presentations on Golden Treasure and the process of making it on the 24th and 25th of this month. If anyone in or near southern Michigan would like to attend, we would welcome it!
Lastly, the polls regarding which of the Starfallen candidates will be featured in the game will soon close. Votes have slowed to nearly nothing, despite fewer than half of the patrons having voted. The polls will officially close this Sunday, October 8, at 11:59 PM. If you haven't yet cast your vote for your favorite starfaring Draak, please do so now!
More news to come, and thank you as always for your support. Magic is strong in October; may it be so with us this month!
Comments
King of Dragon Pass/Six Ages are certainly inspirational for their use of the advisory board available for help in decision-making; we've got a slightly more complex take on it, but those games were the first to offer real consequential decision-making with full context and advisors. It was the first time in a game I felt like an actual leader; most make me feel more like a general or an civic planner than a truly powerful leader who makes important decisions which affect the fates of others in a fully-realized world. Hidden Agenda's gameplay, and the gameplay of titles like it such as the more recent Reigns: Her Majesty, is similar insofar as they have you spend little time on anything but decision-making, which is nifty, but there is little room for characters, story, or even role-playing; it's highly mechanistic and what you think doesn't even really matter. You're just trying to avoid death, which is what everyone everywhere does anyway, and is not at all interesting to me. Still, I did learn from it that snappy decision-making has a kind of joy all its own, and while I want the decisions in Hierophant to be much more meaningful, I also want to keep it as streamlined as I can. One game which has had an influence on my design for the way you interact with the world in Hierophant is the Dominions series, in which you accomplish your aims not through micromanagement but through macromanagement; you get things done by telling a subordinate to do something. Whom you choose makes a rather big difference, and it gave me a more role-playing feeling of real leadership through delegation (which is pretty much how everything actually happens). Characters in the game have no individuality, but that macro- view of leadership felt more real and interesting to me than the move-military-units-around-a-board approach of Civ or even CK2.
Benjamin Ludwig
2023-10-04 18:36:52 +0000 UTCI'm talking to the programmers about fixing this issue.
Benjamin Ludwig
2023-10-04 18:24:57 +0000 UTCI am curious as to whether the Artwork Formerly Known as Hierophant will at all resemble any other rulership simulator, and if so, which one? I mean, loosely speaking, are you aiming more for: King of Dragon Pass - Sandbox with a huge variety of options, random events, scripted events, and simulation of other clans. There is an end goal, but you can pursue it at your leisure. Six Ages - Like King of Dragon Pass, but there is a specific goal to achieve and if you ignore it for too long or get the wrong person killed, game over. Hidden Agenda (1988) - You have as strict time limit before the game ends. The only true goal is to survive at any cost (not get assassinated or deposed), but you may set your own goals if you please. Zero randomness. Everything is deterministic based on your choices and the consequences of those choices. I would not mind discussing the intricacies of any of these games if you're looking to refine the gameplay loop.
K.D.
2023-10-04 17:52:01 +0000 UTCAh. My mind glossed over IOS for gaming. There's no great option there. You either gotta jump through some hoops effectively running an older version of IOS in a Virtual Machine via Parallels Desktop or running Golden Treasure via wine through a Linux VM or running it directly through a Windows VM, though that last one would cost licensing $ unless you've a spare Windows license key lying around somewhere.
Veeparlio
2023-10-03 20:47:19 +0000 UTCI have a Macbook Pro, and all I know is a past system update rendered my computer incapable of running 32-bit games. If you know of anything I can do to get around this, I’m all ears. I miss Golden Treasure badly.
Sophia Mayo
2023-10-03 19:58:22 +0000 UTCWhat do you mean? All modern Operating Systems I'm aware of should be able to run 32-bit programs just fine.
Veeparlio
2023-10-03 19:23:09 +0000 UTCWith notifications from various apps and chat rooms and emails the way they are, I often find it unmanageable to keep up with the notifications I get and often miss a great deal of them. Long having since recognized this, I've made a point to dedicate additional time whenever I see a notice from Dreaming Door. That said - I did have to put off voting in the poll for a while given the amount of time needed to read all of the Draak descriptions and the followup posts were very helpful reminders for me to make sure I got through all Draak descriptions and voted. It is unfortunate that rising interest rates have tightened-up investment in most industries for the time being. It isn't just indie games being squeezed here - not by a long shot. As for the name Hierophant....a lot of games have names that don't make sense. For a name like Hierophant - I'm not terribly concerned about understandability. While I don't know the degree of relevance search queries still have for finding a game, Search Engine Optimization may be a concern without some action; given that Hierophant is not a unique name, a Google search for it is unlikely to show a website relating to the game on the top match. Golden Treasure also faced a similar issue where Google kept returning generic results when searching for "Golden Treasure" without appending "Great Green" at the end. I look forward to hearing updates and I'm hoping you have good luck with regards to investment!
Veeparlio
2023-10-03 18:51:57 +0000 UTCI look forward to the demo, although my computer doesn’t support 32-bit games anymore.
Sophia Mayo
2023-10-03 17:52:36 +0000 UTC
