Hi everyone! ^w^ First of all, sorry for my lack of posts here. I don’t want to whine but I’ve had some hard times in my personal life and I’m an incredibly thin skinned person, so I couldn’t bring myself to face some of the more toxic messages here towards me. But I want to thank everyone who still cheers me on and who supports me. And a
Big Fat Thank You to Stuffie who’s been posting my roundups and shared the builds here so far.
I have read through a lot of the past messages and I can’t address everything, but I see people repeatedly mentioning our rebuilding of the world and I want to address that here.
Rebuilding the world is something we’ve planned to do from the very beginning in 2019 and we have addressed it a bunch of times on our server (there are even pinned messages on that topic), on Twitter and in multiple Weekly Roundups that you can read on both Patreon and Itch.io.
Granted, not everyone is following every update post, so I understand the confusion but I’ll do my best to try and explain our decision to develop the game like this again.
Reason 1) The game and development are non-linear and often don’t run parallel to each other.
Kincaid is going to be a somewhat non-linear platformer - you can go wherever you want and you gain new abilities to progress. During the development, one of the first abilities we implemented was double jump, because it is relatively easy to do that if your character can already jump anyway. So “in” goes the double jump. If you want your players to play around with it, you need to build maps that make use of it.
Then you implement the next ability, and you need content for that, too. Let’s take “Dash” for example. This one came later in the development process and we then built maps around it.
Now, if you look at the game from a completed point of view, would it make sense to acquire a Dash *after* a Double Jump? Game design wise, the Double Jump opens up more maneuverability than a Dash, so in a finished game, it would make sense to get the Dash first and then add a Double Jump on top later.
Reason 2) Secondly, from a finished game’s perspective, does it make sense to acquire all abilities so shortly after one after another, in a single temple? Or would it be more fun to stretch them out over the other two planets we have planned to do and introduce a new ability every so often as you explore the world?
In order to develop the game, you have to build the game systems first, the abilities, figure out the progression and the pacing, and then build the world around that.
In an ideal, non Early Access world, you could just use debug rooms to throw away that will never see the light of day. But we also have to entertain players to support us.
So right from the beginning we said we’re building the levels “to order” to give players something fun to explore and play while we figure out what the game is going to be.
So, knowing that we’d eventually be going to do it, the Big Question was about the right timing.
We thought the timing was perfect now because of a couple of reasons:
- We hired an environmental artist. While we worked together, we realized that his background art harmonizes well with my characters, but my own background art clashed with his style. So we decided to invest a little bit more into the art and revamp the whole jungle+temple biomes as well as touch up the village to bring everything closer to Fabian’s style. It was a big project and cost a lot of money (we pay him by the hour) but we thought it was worth it to end up with a more coherent game.
- We decided to increase the gameplay resolution of the game to make exploration, platforming and combat easier. In the old version many enemies would appear not too far away from you on the screen. Even simple enemies like the bombers were hard to incorporate in levels because they’d either be placed obviously or they’d throw bombs at you from off screen. The more we experimented with new enemy ideas the more it became painfully obvious that our chosen resolution sucked. Knowing we had to rebuild our levels at some point anyway (see above), we decided to coincide the new resolution with the point in time in which we’d be forced to redo the levels.
- We expanded on Kincaid’s moveset and abilities: Since Kincaid is a tall character instead of a more roundish or square’ish one, platforming felt a bit awkward at times, especially if you barely missed a jump. We added ledge grabbing, crawling, hand over hand climbing, ziplines, rail grinding and so on. Again, knowing we were going to redo the levels anyway, we decided to build them with these new movement options in mind and also timed it with the completion of the new jungle art getting done.
I hope this sheds some light on the decisions going into our recent development milestones for people who haven’t been following our Roundups and are wondering why suddenly all the old maps are gone. At the moment some of the old content isn’t tied into the game yet, like the Temple of Trials or the Old Ruins, but everything will get connected as we wrap up the redesign of each section.
Next, another question I saw coming up a few times was the future of the CG scenes since they are not game over scenes anymore. They will become in-game content that you unlock by following the main- or sidequests, talk to NPCs etc. and they will then also become unlocked in the gallery, too. We already have ideas for where we’re going to place them and it will just require some minor tweaks in the intros and outros to make them fit.
Thank you for your interest in my game and again, Big Thanks to Stuffi! <3
