Overview

It has been a couple weeks since Alpha 1.0. Now what? Well, I hope to go over that in this post by explaining what we've been doing, what next steps are, and where we are planning on going with the project. But first, I have a fun announcement. The development team is growing! A few weeks ago I brought on 3 new devs onto the project, so hopefully updates will come out quicker and the game will be able to grow more smoothly with the extra help. I am excited because this means the next big part of the project should be able to grow pretty quickly. The new team members will be added to the credits page on the next update of the game, so stay tuned for that.

Now, what have we been up to? Well, firstly I have been needing to get the project a little more organized for the new members, so there has been a few growing pains as we work to get the project workable by everyone. But, this has not stopped development. Recently I have overhauled the grindwheel mechanic and added a tooltip system so you can actually see item stats when you hover over them. These two mechanics really change the feeling of the game and add a bit more weight to different stats in the sword.

Grindwheel Overhaul

Let's start by explaining the grindwheel mechanic a bit. Previously, you would just take your blade or sword and interact with the grindwheel. That interaction would change the state from "unsharpened" to "sharpened" allowing the hardness stat of the sword to be calculated with both hardness and strength, rather than just strength. This felt very arbitrary and unimpactful when using the grindwheel, and was really bugging me for a long time. The other part of this that I didn't like was that the weight and balance of the blade was completely unable to be changed. It was just pulled from the material and set. As other people have also mentioned, that inability to mess with weight and balance of the blade discouraged mixing materials between the blade and pommel, because they would be off balance, hurting the value of your sword.

So, what did we do to change this? Well, we added two actions to the blade and one action to the pommel when interacting at the grindwheel. Both the blade and pommel have a "Lighten" action, and the blade has a "Sharpen" action when interacting with the grindwheel. This is chosen when putting one of the items onto the grindwheel. After you choose an action, you can press the interact key ("F" in this case) to increase the speed/pressure of the grindwheel. A little bar fills a bit when you press interact and slowly decays over time. You can press it multiple times to increase the bar and that in turn will increase the speed of the action. From there, you have a gradient on both the "Sharpen" and "Lighten" actions to lighten or sharpen the item until the bar fills. Once the bar fills, the stability of the item is too low and the item breaks. Also, depending on the stats of the material, if you increase the speed of the grindwheel too much, you have a risk of cracking the item as well. With this, grinding the blade and pommel now highly impacts both weight and balance of the blade. On top of this, blades and pommels of the same material are not longer the same weight by default, meaning you have to balance every blade you make for the best results. One last note on this mechanic: the amount you sharpen/lighten the blade also decreases the stability of the blade when quenching, increasing the chance of cracking. This means you almost always want to quench your blade before sharpening it, which reflects real world metallurgy.

Tooltips System

Now, with all of these systems, the biggest thing I have noticed from players is they don't really understand how each step in the process effects parts of the sword. I think this is because they don't see any stats of the material they are working with until they get to the workbench. So, to help with this I decided to add a tooltip system to the game. I think in a previous post I called the information menu a tooltip menu, but I have come to realize that is not the correct term for that menu, so I apologize for the confusion in terminology. The tooltip will appear when you hover over an item, and will give you the item name and some of the stats of that item. I believe this was very needed and I am excited to do some playtesting with this in the game. Now, when you are folding an ingot for example, you can see the number of folds and the hardness of the ingot, showing how it increases with each fold. It is really useful for seeing what you are doing throughout each process and knowing the difference between two blades of the same material for example.

However, this new system has shifted the game feel a bit in my opinion. It makes the game very heady, and takes some of the feel out of the game. Even while I am working on a material, I have the constant itch to see and look at the numbers of that material. I think some of this will be fixed as we display the information better and get some better design around what information is needed (which one of our new team members is currently working on), but I am still chewing on this new system, where to display it, and how exactly information should be displayed. Having said this, I also know this is the primary difficulty in designing this game. It is a complex game, and therefore the biggest struggle is how to portray that complexity to a player in a way that is useful and they will understand. So stay tuned as we refine and work on that system.

Next Steps For The Project

So, where are we at now? With a new team and some polish needed on the project, we are currently working on a lot of much needed minor additions. We've already gone through two new mechanics, but beyond that we are working on/planning a save/load system, updating the UI art, adding more feedback to the crucible, and getting a settings/pause menu added. This is our current phase while everyone on the team gets acclimated to the project. A lot of these aren't massive additions to the game, but I do think all of these minor changes are going to make the experience of the game much smoother and more fun for people to play. It is also adding in the skeleton for new updates down the line that will heavily rely on these systems being implemented, so it hopefully will help with the scaling of our project.

Also, I should probably go over the new additions to the team real quick since I keep mentioning it. For those who don't know, until about a month ago, I have been working on this project entirely solo. The game is a passion project of mine and has been incredibly rewarding to work on. That said I have a few friends who are also into game development. I offered to bring them onto the project, and after a bit of discussion everyone agreed it would be good for growing everyone's skills. So they hopped on board. Currently, rough roles of the new members are a Designer, a Programmer, and an Artist. These guys are all great at what they do, and I am excited for this team to get going on this project.

Great! Where Are We Going?

These polish updates I think have been a great space for the team to get adjusted to working together on this project. And once we are done, we are aimed at tackling the Shop Management systems. This is a super exciting next phase of the project, but also kind of daunting. It requires an NPC generator, overhauling the current level design, adding in a day/night system with event management and a new lighting system, and so much more that is planned. It will pull heavily from some of the shop management mechanics of Moonlighter and Potion Craft, and will require the player to not just make good swords, but learn to estimate the value of their work. It is not just additional content for the game, but the final pillar of the project that will establish the primary structure of everything else that is planned. We currently have the core crafting with bladesmithing, and the scaling of the craft with advanced metallurgy, and the last piece is making it all meaningful through running a shop. This next phase is going to take a while, but I hope to have regular updates as we prototype and work on getting these new pieces added to the game.

So, that is hopefully a nice, clear picture of what we've been up to. If you haven't given the demo a try, feel free to play it and leave feedback on the form if you can. Playtests and player feedback are critical to our development process, so the more we hear from people, the more we know we are on the right track/need to tweak some things. And stay tuned for the minor updates Update, and hopefully we will be on the road to shop management soon!