Partially Healed Knees, New Maps and Animations, and A Prototype (Announcement)!

Mine

Hey folks, I know that it's been a while since we've last blogged, and that's because we've been hard at work!  Quite a few things have been happening lately, and I just want to go through a couple of them before we get into the update.  First off, I'm walking again!  I'm not sure I mentioned it but when I got back from Japan I had a knee injury that kept me off my feet for 3 months.  It was a long and frustrating road but I'm mostly recovered now and so we're gaining a lot of steam with regards to development.  I'm personally stoked and I've been hard at work tinkering with the art.

Maps and Animations

This time I've been playing with our world map.  The last time I worked on the map I made some changes to the colors and added some new landmarks.  I'd felt for a long while that it looked good but lacked something to make it 'pop'.  Well I took that to heart and turned our locations like the casino and the mine into pop-up like images.  I quite like how everything looked, and I even added some little animations to them to make them more fun when they're zoomed in.  My current favorites are the mine (seen at the top of the page), the cathedral, and the fishing village, but there's a lot more in the pipeline.  This new board game look is really starting to come together, and I like to imagine this map in Mousey's campaign headquarters as the campaign team debates their options.

Cathedral

Fishing Village

Prototype!

Second, We have a proper game designer on board!  I'll get into the details later but this guy is a friend of ours and has been around the game dev scene for a long time.  We're really lucky to have him.  That means that with me on art, Julius on code, and our friend on design, we have a solid team onboard to make the game.Speaking of which, we're working on a prototype!  I know, I know, we should have been working on a prototype a long time ago but we fell into multiple first time indie developer traps and we've only now got our act together to put a prototype together to test our ideas. This is the prototype we're showing off to publishers to try to sell them on the game, so we'd definitely love some feedback from you guys.  As a treat we're going to share this prototype to the first few people to sign up on our mailing list so if you're keen to try the game out please do sign up in the next couple of weeks!

Kapitan Relationships

The Ititerary Metaphor brought to life

You can see a sample of the prototype above.  I should say that graphically the prototype will look nothing like the real game.  On one of the Game Design Roundtable podcasts I heard one of the hosts say that they regularly make prototypes of their games in engines or languages that are entirely different from what they'll use to create the final game.  They did this to make sure that they would feel free to experiment, since they wouldn't have to worry about making sure that the code they wrote would be usable in the final product.  I think it's a great idea and we've moved forward at a much faster clip ever since we decided to do this.  Well, that's all for now, and do make sure you sign up if you're interested in trying out the protoype!

We're Featured in Rockpapershotgun's Devlog Watch!

And we're quite frankly both terrified and motivated in equal measure.  I don't want to write a giant blogpost like the last one, but I thought I should at least acknowledge the coverage and welcome everyone who's decided to pop in because of RPS.  Welcome!  And do sign up for our mailing list (top of the right sidebar, can't miss it) to get updated on release news.  I also wanted to address one of the comments on the article where they mention that the devlog hasn't much gotten into the nitty gritty of game mechanics.  Well that's because we chucked out our original mechanics as shit and we've been trying over the past weeks to put together something that makes all of the individual mechanics that we like work together seamlessly.  I even made a diagram about it to help me think about it better!

In the meantime, I continue to build out our roster of Party Animals, and so I present to you the Platypus Campaign Manager, who was actually featured in my last post.  More updates to come soon!