December '23 Update!

Lots of progress this month! After collecting a ton of great feedback at the PIGSquad demo event at the beginning of the month, I prioritized and worked on several key features:

• A shorter intro/tutorial experience to make demos and play tests more accessible and productive
• A clear introduction to the 'hook' 

I chose to solve both of these in one go, by adding a short Prologue that the player can start in media res, right after character creation.  The writing will need a lot of care of feeding to get through the truckload of info I'm dumping here, and the need for a glossary of some sort needs to get pulled up the roadmap, so I can figure out how I want to implement it before I get too much farther into content.

Here's a 12min play through of the new Prologue.  I rewrote a few of the Cartha interactions to fit the narrative into place - this content was originally slotted after the Cartha bit.  But I like this a lot more - it introduces several ideas, and for the new gap I can just get to the expansion of ideas using this new part of the game world that much faster.  

For new-new ideas, you can see in here that I'm experimenting with making the campfires an explicit game world feature, rather than a "do it anywhere" feature of the UI.  Shamelessly modeled after souls-like Bonfires, this takes feedback around "committing to the bit" more as far as camping and long rests are concerned.  If I'm going to ask the player to find a safe place to level up, or use the rest system for health/spell slots, just go all-in on that idea, give them a presence in the game world.  Hopefully I can create a similar sense of relief/joy at finding one out in the wild. 

Upcoming sprints:

A shorter intro/tutorial experience to make demos and play tests more accessible and productive

• January '24 - UI overhaul to the in-game menu system.  I don't think I like the modal approach, it feels very MMO, and it's not vital to the gameplay in ways that I want it to be.  
• February '24 - Combat System revisit.  Been a solid six months since I worked on the combat system, and the backlog of ideas and needs is strong enough that a good sprint or two is warranted before I get back to content production.

Having a short prologue section is great for this also, much quicker cycle times for testing and iteration.  See you in January!