Devlog #11 - Secondary modes of the game, second alpha testing info
Hello guys! In this devlog I wanted to share some details about secondary game modes I plan for Gedonia, and also some thoughts on second alpha testing.
Secondary game modes
From my game developer experience, the best types of projects for Early Access are the ones that allow for a lot of replayability and also give the players a way to play around with game mechanics endlessly. That's why I wanted to add two secondary game modes for Gedonia:
1)Arena mode 2)Dungeon crawl mode
These will be a good option to provide people with some play time, while I work on updates for the main campaign mode, and also quite easy to throw together using existing assets and mechanics developed for open world. I plan to introduce them at the start in early access and develop them as I develop the main game. You would be able to test out different character builds, test the game for bugs or just spend some time there.
Arena
If you participated in the first alpha testing, you might be familiar with this mode already, however I plan to change and improve it significally for the early access release, adding different waves of enemies, boss fights, traps etc. You will be unlocking advanced equipment gradually and will also be able to craft items for yourself.
Dungeons
I plan to use my experience with randomly generated dungeons from previous projects, and add a dungeon crawl mode. You will explore random dungeons, get loot, craft resources, all the good stuff. This type of dungeons will be completely different from dungeons in the main open world, which are all handcrafted with unique mechanics, puzzles and story content.
Second alpha testing
As I am still in the process of reworking combat system, I plan to make a second alpha testing sometime in march-april to test it out and fix some issues. There will be no open world in this testing, only arena and dungeons modes. As usual, stay tuned for updates.
Thank you for reading this post, stay tuned for updates. Follow me on twitter for more info: https://twitter.com/OlegKazakov1990 Join the discord to talk to me and discuss a game: http://discord.gg/XQjSzCN
Devlog#10 - Plans: new content, combat system
Hello guys! In this devlog I wanted to share what is currently happening with the development of the game.
First of all, I wanted to thank everyone who participated in pre-alpha testing, your feedback really helped with the development and you gave a lot of great ideas.
Right now I started to add new content to the game, specifically first dungeon in the first area, and new quests for the second zone.
I've been thinking a lot about current combat system implementation, and, even though I stll think that it has a lot of benefits over action types of combat, after the demo I realised that it might not work as good as I thought, especially when you play solo, without the companions.
So this leads me to the conclusion that I probably will change current combat system to be more involved, than it is now. Can't really say more details than this, but expect more info in the future.
Thank you for reading this!
Please take a moment to answer the poll about combat
Hello everyone! First of all, I wanted to thank everyone who participated in pre-alpha testing and offered their feedback. It was very important to me to see people's reactions to the demo.
Although most people seem to be fine with the current combat system in the game, some people found it pretty boring. I've asked people if they would prefer better combat system, and almost everyone agreed that the game would benefit from this.
I've wrote about my motivations for making combat the way it is in some of my previous posts, and I still stand by my opinion, however I can agree that it could be improved or changed, while still maintaining important RPG elements of curent system.
Please take a moment to answer a simple poll I made about the combat system you would prefer to see in the game on release:
https://www.strawpoll.me/19218347
Thank you for reading this post, stay tuned for updates. Follow me on twitter for more info: https://twitter.com/OlegKazakov1990 Join the discord to talk to me and discuss a game: http://discord.gg/XQjSzCN
Pre-alpha demo of the game is available for testing
Hello guys! I am happy to announce that pre-alpha demo of the game is available for testing for a limited time (a couple of weeks).
I am interested in your opinions so feel free to post it here, on steam forums and on discord!
Devlog #9: New location, new faces
Hello guys! In this devlog I will talk about the stuff I’ve been making for the past 2-3 weeks.
New location:
I had a great concept art made for me for one of the high-level zones in the game called Volflar fields.
It’s a mysterious, barren zone, filled with ancient artifacts, ruins of old civilization called Volflar who lived there a long time ago, and ghostly apparitions of the past. You will be able discover its secrets, find rare magical items and maybe uncover, what really happened there. Here is a small walkthrough of the zone I’ve put, still work in progress:
New faces: I’ve been making the faces for the NPCs and the player, to replace old placeholder ones. They are more realistic, however I still want to keep them slightly stylized.
Other than that I’ve been working on save/load systems and working on making a playable demo for you guys, so stay tuned for that.
Thank you for reading this post, stay tuned for updates. Follow me on twitter for more info: https://twitter.com/OlegKazakov1990 Join the discord to talk to me and discuss a game: http://discord.gg/XQjSzCN
Devlog #8 - new interface, sound design, new gameplay video
Hello guys! Just wanted to show a little bit of new gameplay I recorded recently. It shows interface improvements, new sounds and music, a little bit of character customization and character creation, and also some combat and 1 quest.
I've decided to create a charisma based character and show off some companion control in this video. Everything is still very wonky and unstable, but I'm working on it. Anyway, check out the video:
[previewyoutube="qOYYfhPiVSQ;full"]
Thank you for reading this post, stay tuned for updates. Follow me on twitter for more info: https://twitter.com/OlegKazakov1990 Join the discord to talk to me and discuss a game: http://discord.gg/XQjSzCN
Devlog #7: First quests, combat changes, plans
Hello guys! In this devlog I wanted to tell you about what I've been working on these past weeks.
First side quests.
I've started to work on first side quests in the game. I am still in testing approaches for quests, but so far it seems to work fine. I am trying to get away from simple kill/collect formula of the quests as much as I can, and for the most part, except for some starting quests that are supposed to be training ones, all side quests are quite complex. I am trying to write an element of mystery to each quest, tough choices, different ways to solve them that depend on your character build, etc. I will show you guys a couple of teasers from some of the quests I made:
I plan to have at least 15-20 side quests in each of the 7-8 game zones in the game, in addition to the main storyline and faction questlines. A lot of work to do, but I hope this will give players a few hours of very exciting gameplay.
Combat changes
I've decided to make a couple of combat changes for mage and archer builds. Now you can cast spells or shoot arrows and move at the same time. I decided to do this not really because I wanted to add more action, but more of balancing concerns, so these types of builds could easier kite enemies and escape tough situations.
Plans, news
Recently a great youtuber Click4gameplay made a preview of Gedonia, with a lot of new footage and interesting info. Go check it out, it's a great video: [previewyoutube="AJEFeN5vGh0;full"]
I am planning an early access release sometime in 2020, probably spring/summer, so stay tuned for that. Also, I was planning some sort of alpha testing in January/February, I will tell more when the time comes.
Thank you for reading this post, stay tuned for updates. Follow me on twitter for more info: https://twitter.com/OlegKazakov1990 Join the discord to talk to me and discuss a game: http://discord.gg/XQjSzCN
Devlog #6: Battle system
Hello everyone! In this blog post I wanted to share more details about battle system development of Gedonia, and also explain a little, why I chose to implement this system in the game.
Battle pause and battle plans
I design fight mechanics for Gedonia to be inspired by older RPGs, which means auto-attacking and using a number of abilities to win. There aren’t much “action”y types of mechanics in the game, however, this doesn’t mean that the fights will be slow and boring. Actually, if you don’t pay attention, you can end up dead extremely fast. You need to use your abilities and items quickly and smart, that’s why there is a battle pause implemented in the game. If you played any Dragon Age or Kotor game previously, this will be very familiar to you. At any moment during the game you can pause it, look around, assign orders to your character and your companions and then see them perform those orders. Sometimes careful planning determines, will you win a tough fight or lose the game.
This week I’ve made a bunch of improvements for battle interface, controlling you and your companions, and their AI. I plan at least 20-25 different companions that you can meet and recruit to your party, which can be as big as 4 units. Some of your companions can be summoned creatures, like skeletons or elementals. In that case, each summoned creature eats the part of your maximum mana, while it’s summoned, and the max amount of them depends of your skill in magic.
Why I chose to not implement action combat in Gedonia?
In the comments for the recent reddit post a lot of people were saying that they don’t like wow-style combat that I chose to implement in the game. It’s completely fair for them to not like it, however I wanted to try to explain, why I chose this system instead of the more modern style of combat with aiming/dodges, flashy combos etc. It wasn’t just because it’s harder to implement it, although it is one of the reasons, but there are also many others.
Action combat devalues your equipment. If I want to put it simple – your armor doesn’t really matter, if you can completely block an attack or dodge roll from it. Yeah, new shiny armor item looks cool, and it might give you more times you survive an attack or less times you attack an enemy, before he dies, but it’s not the same is for example – finding a power armor in Fallout 1. I recently played two great games – “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning” and “Darksiders 2”. In both of them, I found myself not caring at all about each new piece of equipment I found, because it didn’t really impact my gameplay. What mattered is my personal skill, and even if there is nothing really wrong with that, I find that for RPG it’s much more important to have gear that is impactful for your gameplay. A lot of older RPGs had that, and I hope to achieve this in Gedonia too.
In more action-oriented game there isn’t much depth to the stats. Gameplay mechanics like dodge, miss, parry, block, attack speed are all handled with controls, and aren’t stat-based. This means you can’t for example create a character with a lot of dodge chance and base your gameplay around it, and that means less freedom in creating a unique character. And this is also very important in RPGs for me.
And finally, there is already a huge amount of great AAA and indie action RPGs out there. I feel that I might have a tough time be compared to them, or adding anything new. If you love action RPGs, you have a lot of choice, but if you want new RPG with targeted combat, not so much. I can’t even remember any right of top of my head right now.
I conclusion, of course action combat is flashier, more exciting in the short term, and more marketable, however I believe that it would be better to not go this way with Gedonia.
Thank you for reading this post, stay tuned for updates. Follow me on twitter for more info: https://twitter.com/OlegKazakov1990 Join the discord to talk to me and discuss a game: http://discord.gg/XQjSzCN
Devlog #5: Abilities, Itemization
Hello everyone! So, recently my post with gif became viral on reddit, getting at this moment more than 80k likes, and the gif itself got more than a 400k views. Not bragging here, just wanted to say that I’m incredibly overwhelmed by all the attention my small indie game got and all the support you guys gave me. Thank you so much.
I haven’t posted in the blog for a while, mostly because I did a lot of boring work with coding, but I also got to develop a number of abilities and add some items to the game.
Abilities.
I managed to add about 70 new abilities to the game, for almost all skill types. It is mostly early-game abilities, requiring skill levels from 1 to 7-8 (out of 15 max). I’ve only started playtesting and balancing them in the game, still a long ways to go. I test abilities from a single school, but I think it will be a lot of fun when players start mixing different abilities from different skills and making cool combos. Anyway here is a small showcase of a number of different magic abilities I’ve added. [previewyoutube="567T-uRApog;full"]
Items.
I’ve started adding different items to the database and assigning them to the loot tables from enemies, merchants and crafting. Armor, weapons, potions, scrolls, crafting ingredients etc. Not much to show there yet, I’ve only wanted to talk about my approach to itemization in the game. A lot of RPG’s kinda “shower” players with loot, drowning them in hundreds of different items, and it becomes really tedious after awhile in my opinion. I try to use different approach, where it’s not a lot of items in the game, and you rarely get a new item, but each one is unique and impactful. And I will also add a number of ways to improve your items using crafting in the game.
All of the items are handcrafted and in fixed locations, so, for example, you can discover a powerful staff hidden in one of the chests in the world, and in the next playthrough you can get to it early and get yourself a huge increase in power. Is it balanced? Probably not, but I think it’s more organic and logical this way, which for me is more important in the game like this.
There are hidden chests throughout the map, and I tried to make a loot in each one very important and impactful to reward people exploring the map.
Alpha testing
One thing a lot of people keep asking me about is when the game will be available for alpha/beta testing. It’s very early right now, so I cannot announce a concrete date, but I think about doing some alpha testing in early 2020, so stay tuned for that. I will announce it in my blog, in our discord and everywhere I can basically.
Thank you for reading this post, stay tuned for updates. Follow me on twitter for more info: https://twitter.com/OlegKazakov1990 Join the discord to talk to me and discuss a game: http://discord.gg/XQjSzCN
