Dev Log — September 2023

Hi everyone!

Wow, it's September already! Time sure flies and I'm doing what I can to keep up without burning out! The summer has been rough and I haven't been able to do what I set out to do. What I thought to be a sprint soon turned out to be what felt more like running a marathon with water up to the knees, so I had to slow down and reconsider my approach. Sometimes going slower is how you make it to the finishing line faster, which is something I'm trying to be better at.

While working on the next update, new complications continued to appear from how new and past systems interact with one another, and I soon realized I had to define an exhaustive list of technical requirements for the dynamic avatar and the PvE overhaul before I could continue development, otherwise, I might very easily miss something important. So last month I spent a lot of time wrapping my head around actual use cases for PvE encounters and deriving requirements from them. A very important thing here is scope and scalability, and making sure it's easy to design and write an encounter.

A friend of mine who's a professional narrative designer from the games industry compares this phase to "spinning plates" because of all the things that need to be considered simultaneously! I've been spinning a lot of plates, and I'm still not done, but at least I'm far enough that I can share some more design documents with you! —There are so many design documents by now!

PvE Encounters

Previously I've shared my thoughts on the technical specifics and gameplay aspects of PvE encounters, and in this post I'll share my thoughts on the content aspect in terms of structure and how one might go about writing an encounter for the game.

Notes on PvE Encounters:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GNopBJnjS53fHDRTXS_upmRX5FhgQF-R0N5oPE5FhtY/edit

Effects caused by PvE encounters:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tYHng2BdShr0KKEH7ONZID87d2ZgvvOoTikW9_7SVBo/edit

For anyone who's curious about what encounters to expect or possibly writing their own encounter for the game, these documents should provide a lot of interesting information!

This dev log is going to be a bit on the short side, but that's because the documents are huge and I don't wish to make it an even longer read by repeating what's in the documents!

Anyway, I hope you'll find the documents interesting, and thank you so much for your support!

Please enjoy this colored version of the mermaid that will be one of the characters you can encounter with the PvE overhaul and read about in the notes document! ❤️

Cheers,

Tinon