December 2022 Newsletter

Happy holidays and well wishes into the new year! And welcome to a very festive themed newsletter!

As I mentioned in the November newsletter, In December I intended to start looking at the mechanics for the second act of the game. This includes things like cooking food, brewing drinks, and just generally advancing the main story quests.

So let’s start with cooking - if you’ve played the demo then you may have encountered an NPC named Nicolas, a high strung chef who works at The Dancing Moon Inn. At the moment he introduces you to the fishing mini-game, which makes sense to me right now as any fishing NPCs would be found down at the docks or the lakes, which is currently only available in the full game (or beta!). So I wanted to introduce the fishing mini-game to the player earlier.



Nicolas doesn’t have many quests right now, but as a chef I’m going to start implementing the cooking related quests onto him. Cooking will work in a slightly different way to the crafting system, in that it will be purely discovery based. You will only be able to figure out new recipes by trying different ingredients, or finding lost recipes throughout the map. To give you an insight, here’s a new UI I’ve spun up to help accommodate this new cooking mechanic!



As for drinks, the brewing interface will be exactly the same. But drinks will play an even more important part of the game, as each drink you brew will allow the player to receive temporary perks. In it’s basic form, food and drink will give you extra health, but drinks in particular will be able to improve your strength, or even see hidden items in the world (think of them a bit more like potions that you’d typically find in other RPGs). As a brit, I'm very inspired by tea drinking culture - and brewing tea will be a big thing in this game!

Speaking of quests, steady progress has been made here, and a few of the new quests will be leveraging these new mechanics I’ve described above. In particular, brewing tea will be very important during the quests you’ll be doing in Act 2!

The character portraits are one of the few things I outsource in the game and I absolutely love it when a new batch comes through from the artist that I use. Here are some new portraits I’ve never shown before to help flesh out and visualise the characters you'll be interacting with. (credit henryez on fiverr, watermarked)



And that's it for the December update! I'm publishing this a bit earlier in the month as I'll be taking the rest of this time off until the new year. To finish this newsletter I thought I’d put together a little mindfulness GIF. Please enjoy some of the areas of the game during the Winter seasons, it definitely has a more slow and calm feeling compared to the other times in the game. 😊❄️



Thanks for reading!
- DjMonkey

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1782420/Tales_from_The_Dancing_Moon