Corral Countdown 18: Battle Introductions and Victory Messages
This entry in the Countdown is pretty simple compared to others, but I still wanted to talk about it because it demonstrates how details and flavor can be packed into every bit of Boot of Boot Hill Bounties.
One thing that’s always bugged me in RPGs is that sometimes the reason you’re fighting a group of enemies is not very clear. In Boot Hill Heroes I had descriptions for each enemy group that introduced the enemy group, but I’ve taken the concept farther in Boot Hill Bounties. Now various characters will weigh in on the fight, either from your team or the enemy team.
And when victory is achieved, different characters, including your defeated foes, may also comment upon the battle.
It’s not ground-breaking, but I put in details like this to add more lore and flavor. These battle introductions are good opportunities for characters to display their personalities and to give Bronco County more depth.
Tomorrow, we’re going to have another video entry that I think you’ll enjoy!
As we enter the final four weeks of the Corral Countdown, there’s little holding back with all the stuff I want to share before the release of Boot Hill Bounties on December 1. Today is an example of how several previous Countdown entries had to first be explained before getting to this one.
Previously, we talked about buying food from restaurants, cooking food at camp, growing ingredients on your farm, perks from eating food, taste preferences of different characters and gaining Chef Ranks in cooking. All of these entries are like the ingredients needed to cook this Countdown entry.
The Chuckwagon Chief Cooking Competition takes place at the Traveling Circus. Here the best cocineras in the West put their culinary ingenuity to the test to be worthy of the title ‘Chuckwagon Chief’ and win the coveted ‘Gilded Spoon.’
It works like this, Rosy and friends must compete against various other chefs you will meet at Bronco County. The competition has three random judges and three rounds. Each round Mad Earl McGovern announces a ‘themed ingredient’. Each team cooks three meals for the judges that use this ingredient. The judges decide which meal they liked more and whoever sways the most judges wins the round. After three rounds, the overall winner is determined and that team’s chef walks away with the Chuckwagon Chief title and the Gilded Spoon.
Here is what you should know in order to successfully win the competition:
A Good Arsenal of Recipes - You never know what the themed ingredient will be each round. So it’s best to come to the competition with a variety of recipes so you’ll be prepared for anything.
A High Cooking Rank - The higher Rosy’s cooking rank, the better her food will turn out and the more judges will like it and declare her the winner over the other team’s entry.
Epicurean Knowledge - It’s important to know what taste sensations are found in each dish. Different judges favor different tastes. So a judge who prefers sweet food would be more likely to be swayed by Apple Pie than an Omelet.
Insider Information - Knowing what taste preferences the judges have is also key to victory as it should determine which food you cook for them. You can probably find out with a little espionage!
So what do you really get for winning? Along with the title of Chuckwagon Chief, you get the Gilded Spoon - a valuable treasure! The entire party also gets another slot for Perks so they can now have more Perks (or also Wounds) active at once.
After winning, you can play again against increasingly difficult opponents. All with increasingly higher Chef Ranks. It’ll take all your cooking chops to beat the all!
Tomorrow we’ll talk about another new hat. This time it’s for Rosy!
Corral Countdown 21: (Devblog Friday) Inception to Realization
Imagine a house. What does this house look like? What’s in this house? What are the blueprints? Who lives there? Now you have this idea of a house in your mind. You might be able to see it clearly in your mind in tremendous detail. But since it’s in your mind, only you can see the house.
But being a game developer gives you the power to take that idea from your mind and realize it. You can take something that once existed only in your mind and make something that others can see and experience. Imagine someone else holding a controller and moving a character through this house that once only existed in your mind.
For today’s DevBlog Friday, I thought it might be interesting to dig up some old notes I made while thinking up ideas for Boot Hill Bounties. These are the “houses” and other ideas that I once brainstormed into haphazard doodles that eventually wound up being in a game that other people will be able to experience. People who have played the game should be able to recognize some of these doodles and make sense of the ramblings.
What’s great about working on Boot Hill Bounties is that the engine has come so far that the time it takes to turn an idea into a realization has been drastically reduced. If I have an idea, I have the tools in place to make it exist in just a short amount of time, sometimes just a few hours.
This is a very cool power, but also kind of dangerous. Once it becomes too easy to create anything you can think of, it becomes hard to say no to ideas. That’s when you end up with the dreaded scope creep and your game takes years longer to make than you originally intended.
But not forever. Boot Hill Bounties will be out on December 1. Just a few more weeks.
Corral Countdown 22: Question Master Boxes
There are many mysteries in Bronco County. One such mystery is the strange appearance of green metal boxes. They’ve been sitting in the forests, houses, caves and mountains for many years unopened - locked with a four digit combination lock.
The boxes lead to many questions… Who put them there? What’s inside them? What does this have to do with the ‘Wild West’? No one knows!
What we do know is that in every issue of the Bronco County Sunrise, a new article by a secret “Question Master” appears. The Question Master divulges a riddle that, when solved, reveals the secret four digit combination that will open one of these boxes.
Treasure hunters eagerly await the clues published in the newspaper that will lead them to finally opening the mysterious green boxes that have tantalized their curiosity for years.
Will you participate in the treasure hunt?
Corral Countdown 23: Coupon King!
This entry in the Countdown isn’t as amazing as the others, but it’s kind of a fun little thing that brings some more life into the world and a nice detail.
Last week I made a video about The Bronco County Sunrise, the local newspaper. There’s a ton of stuff in the newspaper that ties the game together, from news stories revolving around the plot, to side quests, to new recipes for food. There are shop advertisements and there are also coupons for those shops.
Whenever you visit a shop, you may have the option to input a coupon code. When the code is entered successfully, then the next item you purchase at the shop will be 50% off! What a deal!
So how do you enter a coupon code? They’re easy to remember because they are sentences made up of four words. You can read the sentence code for the shop in the newspaper and then input the code where each word must be chosen from a list of ten options. That’s about 10,000 possible combinations, so don’t bother trying to guess blindly!
Of course, coupon codes aren’t only found in the newspaper. Sometimes other townsfolk will slip you codes as well for hot deals. Who knows how much you will save?!
So coupon codes aren’t ground-breaking but they are just another little detail that adds flavor to Boot Hill Bounties.
Corral Countdown 24: Another Hat for Doc
Last week we revealed a second new hat for Kid and now we’ve come back around to Doc again. Just how many hats are in Boot Hill Bounties? You’ll have to play the game to find out. But if you don’t want to be spoiled by any of these hats, then DON’T click the reveal image!
Corral Countdown 25: Imbuing Weapons
Welcome to the second half of the Corral Countdown where each weekday I talk about something I want people to know about Boot Hill Bounties. Only 25 more entries to go before launch!
So far I’ve shown how Kid can harvest crops and grow his farm and how Rosy can learn new recipes to cook a variety of treats. So today, it is Moon’s turn.
Various natural materials can be found from enemies and just lying around in the world called “reagents.” Reagents contain hidden properties that can be unlocked using the ancient craft of imbuing. Weapons can be imbued by reagents by Moon at camp to produce various effects, such as:
Attack Up - Raises the attack power of a weapon
Fire - Increases chance attacks with the weapon will set enemies on fire
Disarm - Increases chance attacks with the weapon will disarm an enemy
Poison - Increases chance attacks with the weapon will poison enemies
Death - Increases chance that an attack with the weapon will instantly defeat an enemy
Leech - Heals some percentage of the damage caused by the weapon
Critical - Increases chances for critical hits when using this weapon
Every reagent has three possible effect properties. A horn, for example, may have Disease, Critical and Fire. When three reagents are combined that share a common property, they will imbue a weapon with that property.
However, until a property is discovered, the properties within a material are not known to the player. And combining three reagents with no common properties fails the attempt to imbue and uses up the reagents. So you need to collect a lot of reagents to experiment with finding common properties. Of course, there may be some characters who can give you tips about what you should try to combine for imbuing.
At first Moon can only imbue a weapon with a single property. But as Moon successfully imbues, she will gain experience and raise her rank in imbuing. She starts out as a “Scavenger” but potentially become an “Augmenter” or “Enchantsmith.” And as her rank increases Moon will be able to imbue each weapon with more properties. So you can customize a single weapon with up to five imbued properties.
Furthermore, imbued weapons can be sold back to shops for more money. Imbuing weapons, along with cooking food, is another way to earn money in Boot Hill Bounties.
Corral Countdown 26: (Devblog Friday) Mine Design Time
Last week’s Devblog Friday about how I designed a forest using scraps of paper was so popular, I thought I would talk about another map I made that I felt was kind of interesting. This doesn’t invoke any interesting design principles though, it’s simply something I want to talk about.
It does kind of spoil an area in the game a bit, so I’m going to put it behind a spoiler warning.
Boot Hill Bounties isn’t the first game where you explore an old mine, so I wanted to think of something that would make it a little different than the typical mine map. I was looking up information about 19th century mines when I found this.
All the little square rooms and levels intrigued me and this already looks like a compelling maze for players to explore. Also, this sort of design would look great using the orthographic projection angle in Boot Hill Bounties. The perspective really plays with your eyes like an Escher painting, which is part of the challenge for players.
Notice how there are a lot of false paths where you go down one set of stairs that leads to a dead end. This is an issue because on this particular map, the player is timed. So along with fighting past enemies, they must find their way through this gauntlet of mine levels before time runs out.
But once they get to the bottom, they can activate a lift to bypass the level descent in the future. Saving a good chunk of time.
Well we are officially at the halfway point of the Corral Countdown. Can you believe it? Because I can’t! Boot Hill Bounties comes out in about a month now. Are you ready? Because there are still 25 more things I want to tell you! Be patient. If you got through the first 25 then that means you can get through the next 25. You’ve proven it can be done. Good job, champ.
Corral Countdown 27: Wounds and Doctor Visits
There are a lot of injuries that can befall your party as you venture out in the Wild West. Fortunately, you can heal from even the most grave injury - as long as you can find a doctor!
Wounds are typically acquired when falling in battle. Party members auto-revive after enough time passes when knocked out in combat, but they’ll acquire a wound in the process!
The wound you get depends on what attack was the hit that brought you down! Here are some examples:
Dysentery - Start battles with poison and may become poisoned after taking actions.
Lockjaw - Cannot use mental attacks.
The Vapours - Start battles staggering and may stagger after taking actions.
Gunshot - Lose a large amount of health over time.
Vertigo - Greatly increases chance you will miss with your attacks.
Concussion - Forget how to use one of your equipped Vantages.
There are 15 different kinds of wounds that you DO NOT want to acquire!
Wounds are like status ailments that don’t go away! Not easily. They can pass after a number of battles, but you probably want to visit Doc Finch and have him treat the wound.
Wounds are kind of like the opposite of Perks, which we talked about earlier. They share the same space in a character’s statbox and a new Wound will even override a Perk if there isn’t any free space!
But even if there’s no doctor around to treat a wound, you can use Med Kits to treat a Wound at any time. Med Kits are expensive and rare, so it’s best to rely on a doctor. There’s another way to treat wounds, but that won’t be revealed until next week!
Tomorrow is DevBlog Friday and we’re going to talk about another interesting map.
Corral Countdown 28: The Bronco County Sunrise
The Bronco County Sunrise is the local newspaper that’s published in Bronco County. Just like a real newspaper it’s packed with all kinds of information from news stories regarding things happening in the plot, to classified ads, to jobs offered, and even a cooking corner for new recipes! It basically ties all the sidequesty stuff together in one convenient place.
Check it out yourself. But be warned - this video contains spoilers from Boot Hill Heroes.
The new issue of the Bronco County Sunrise is released after each chapter, so there are five issues in all. Back issues can be found in Train Depots. There’s a lot more going on in the newspaper that I can’t reveal just yet.
Tomorrow we’re going to talk about suffering from serious wounds and injuries. Won’t that be fun!
