Greetings Travellers!
This months newsletter will be a bit different - I'm going to start with a
gameplay insight, but towards the second half of the newsletter I will go into some nitty-gritty details about game development.
The reason will be come clear if you read on, (and will also explain why the banner image for this update is cracked and corrupted!).
[h2]Gameplay Insights - The Loop[/h2]
For this months newsletter I'm going to delve into the core gameplay loop of the game. I'll be touching on some story things - so let this be a
warning that there may be some light
SPOILERS in this newsletter!
If you have wishlisted this game and intend to play blind - then turn back now! (and thank you for wishlisting!)
Anyway - some quick context! You spend your time in the game in a village called
Ïllisor - a fantasy seaside town that is recovering from an invasion of deadly
shadow-beasts. You arrive to the village as a stranger, where you spend your tutorial time familiarising yourself with the area and the different gameplay systems.
One of the first things you will learn during this time is that you're not actually the first stranger that has come through the village recently. In fact - four teenagers mysteriously disappeared around the same time you arrived, and you suspect that their disappearance is the reason why you're there.
One of those teenagers is called Andrew - and during your explorations around the game world you will encounter diary pages written by him that give you gameplay clues and a "meta" story to follow alongside the many quests that drive the overall narrative.
You can think of these diaries as collectables that enhance the story-telling and your understanding of what is happening in the game.
So what do these diaries have to do with the gameplay loop, I might hear you ask?
As I've mentioned in
previous newsletters - one of the themes of the game is
discovery. You may be following a series of quests with a simple goal, but eventually there will be points in the game where it won't "
hand-hold" you into solving a particular task.
I'm calling these moments "
knowledge walls" - for the lack of a better term.
This is where you'll need to rely on your own intuition to figure out what to do next, but many of the answers here can be figured out by reading the diaries or remembering things like recipes (just an example) that you've discovered previously in the game.
To recap - the main gameplay loop consists of...
- Interact with NPCs and pursue quests.
- Collect diaries and other bits of lore.
- Reach a "knowledge wall".
- Figure out how to proceed based on your knowledge.
- Get past the "knowledge wall".
- Go back to step 1 and repeat!
Progressing through a knowledge wall essentially passes you onto the next "act" of the game, this will unlock further quests from NPC's and new locations to explore via the procedural generation zones! All of which is supported by the many gameplay mechanics like combat, crafting, cooking, building and fishing!
I hope that gives a little insight into what you'll be doing in the game. If you've played the
demo then you may already have an idea of what the first "
knowledge wall" is in the game.
The first thing you'll be figuring out is how to get past the blocked cave in the
Ïllisor Steppes region.
Oooo mysterious!
[h2]Hardware Failures[/h2]
So the unthinkable happened - I had a failure with one of my hard drives that resulted in some lost work. It’s incredible to think that after all the years I’ve had a computer in some form or another that this is the first time this has ever happened - and so close to getting this damn game finished! Ironic right!?
The good news is - it’s not as bad as it sounds. I already have mechanisms and extra back up drives for the really important game dev files. But the particular drive that broke kept some of my quest stories that were version controlled on GitHub, and unfortunately I didn’t
check-in most of the work I had done over the last month or so.
Regardless, it was a bit of a wake up call to put in place more failsafe measures in case this happens again in the future.
For anyone interested, I’ve drawn up a diagram of how things looked before, compared to how things look now with the extra backup measures I now have in place after the incident.
I highly suggest for anyone working in game-dev or (any large project) to think about your backup processes. I was already leveraging tools like Perforce and GitHub, but the key difference is that there is now an additional drive specifically for holding image backups for ALL source files and content.
Anyway, all good success stories come from these sort of hardships right? … right!?
[h2]Notion Templates[/h2]
During the downtime this month whilst I figured out how to recover from the above hard-drive failures - I was trying to think of other ways I could be productive. Short-term goals for long term gains.
I came up with the idea of "open-sourcing" my project workflow.
I've tried many project-planning tools in the past, and towards the start of this project I settled on using Notion as the '
be-all-end-all' tool for managing
Tales from The Dancing Moon.
It's difficult to talk about this without coming across like I'm being sponsored by them - but Notion is great because you can package things together and provide it as a template that other people can leverage for their own projects - and I did just exactly that!
It's a first pass which I intend to adapt and evolve over time, but the first version includes template for writing this very newsletter, things like change-logs for game builds, card-based task management (think Trello), and more!
If you're a developer who struggles on focusing on your tasks, then you might find it useful.
Click here to check them out!That's all for the June edition of my developer newsletter! I apologize for the lack of game content in this one, due to the hardware issues, but hopefully I'll have lots of exciting updates in July, including more information about testing and Early Access!
- DjMonkey
Enjoy reading my dev diary newsletters? Then please consider giving me a Wishlist & Follow! I'd greatly appreciate it! You can do so from the the Steam page.
If you’d like to join the community and discuss the content of this post, please visit the Discord or make a comment on social media!https://store.steampowered.com/app/1782420/Tales_from_The_Dancing_Moon/
