Blind Descent Monthly Update #12

Hello, everyone!

We hope you're all having a great start to 2024! We're excited to share monthly updates with you again.

It's been quite some time since our last Monthly Update—precisely 10 months. Since then, we've completed our demo, conducted a private playtest with our Discord community, received invaluable feedback, and began preparing for pitching and documenting our game. Over the past two months, we've shifted our focus back to development. As we entered the new year, we thought this might be a good opportunity to start sharing news from the game as well. In this monthly update, we would like to talk about the Game Design Document.

[h3]Documenting Blind Descent[/h3]

One of the most important things in game development is having a Game Design Document (GDD) that defines basically everything. While we had one when we first started, it was lacking some important aspects. During this period, we put significant time into improving our design document, which led to a better defined scope, and a more precise timeline. It also helped us realize certain things wouldn't work best, so we changed these things in the game and in our plans.

Previously, we've been using traditional methods for our documenting process: a single Google Document that contains everything. Imagine something like a huge Word document with many sections. We transitioned from that to something more like a Wiki. We used Notion for this, which ended up being a really good knowledge base for both the team and others who needed to get onboarded. The new approach also saved us a lot of time in communicating things, as it had many powerful tools that our team could utilize.

When we were working on the documentation, we defined many things, such as every single item, story, quests, characters, creatures, dungeons, points of interest, and many more. We also created new concept arts for the art team, so they could have a better idea of what needs to be created.

[h3]Concept Art[/h3]

Creating concept art for our creatures was a significant part of this effort. As creatures are important for both storytelling and gameplay, we needed to have all the details about their backgrounds, why they were inhabiting here, why they looked the way they do, and so on. We used these details to finalize our design, and we will use the visuals to help our 3D artists and animators finalize these creatures. As a player, you will initially see these creatures in the world, but you will also have an opportunity to answer the questions that we just asked. Having all this work in harmony requires these efforts, and we truly hope to provide the best experience in the end.

We are excited about the future of Blind Descent. In our next monthly update, we will share more details about the gameplay.

What are your thoughts on this update? Would you like to learn more about the hidden aspects of game development, or are you more interested in the gameplay itself? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!

Thank you for being part of our community.

—Pokuch Team.