Captain's Log #02

[p]Hey space survivors, it’s time for another dev blog!
[/p][p]A bit of news from the team, first. Everyone is hard at work revamping the battle system of Dead In Antares. It’s a big chunk of gameplay with a lot of new things to implement, so it has taken quite a bit of time. We’re quite excited by this new battle system, we kept the overall view and flow but we changed a lot of things on the game design side.
[/p][p]For now, I can talk a bit more about how we modified the Exploration system from Dead In Vinland. We always found that this part of gameplay needed some love, it took a lot of shortcuts and didn’t really feel like exploring an unknown land. We tried to input some new interesting ideas here.[/p][p][/p][p]First and foremost we now shifted to an Expedition system.[/p][p][/p][p]Instead of virtually sending characters to “explore” in a camp entity, you now set up expeditions.[/p][p][/p][p]Every day, you can choose to launch 1 expedition in order to examine the content of a tile that has been previously discovered by the Radar entity, in the camp. The Radar will uncover several tiles each time you use it, and when you feel ready you can send 3 characters to explore one or more tiles in a row, before going back to camp.
[/p][p][/p][p]Sending people in expedition will cost 1 unit of Water per character. You can choose to give them any type of water if you are lacking in pure, clear water (or if you just don’t like your characters, no judging).[/p][p][/p][p]We made the choice that sending people to expeditions is asynchronous from the time passed in the camp: the expedition phase is self-contained, you play it until you get back to camp and you can resume your turn there. Characters coming back from exploration will be available for their daily tasks, but they will endure the Fatigue cost of the expedition. So it’s not entirely “free” either.[/p][p][/p][p]After you've selected your expedition team, you’ll get access to the map and from there you will be able to choose a discovered tile to explore. The farther the tile is from the camp tile, the more fatigued your team will be! (Of course you’ll be able to lower this with camp upgrades, to explore farther)[/p][p][/p][p]Early in the game, you’ll be able to explore more than 1 tile every expedition. Then the Fatigue cost will be calculated from the distance between the tile you’re leaving to the new one, so you’ll have to plan a bit your travels to maximize each expeditions.[/p][p]
[/p][p][/p][p]Of course, roaming around camp is dangerous, so each time you travel to a new tile there will be a chance you’ll trigger an encounter with a foe, the farther the destination tile is the more chances you’ll get.[/p][p]As you can imagine, this is NOT how this will actually look like in the game[/p][p][/p][p]Here, we wanted to give more player agency. First the team will make a Stealth Skillcheck: if passed, you’ll then have 2 options, either you sneak around and get access to the tile without combat, or you ambush them, getting a small advantage during the battle (and after that, you’ll get access to the tile).[/p][p][/p][p]If you fail the skillcheck, we’ll still give you the option to retreat: you’ll then lose 1 expedition point and get Fatigued as if you did the exploration, but without the reward. If you still have exploration points, you can try again or go to another tile.[/p][p][/p][p]With that, we want to give players more control on the flow of the game: maybe you just don’t want to fight because your characters are already in bad shape, or because you didn’t bring your best fighter along with you. But you’ll maybe want to force battles to get you some loot, if you are confident. It’s up to you!

[/p][p][/p][p]When you finally arrive on the tile, you can at last interact with its content. You’ll be shown a screen like this, with a nice background showing the biome you are exploring and an “entity” (that’s what we call them), which can be anything really: a small object, a big weird tree, NPCs (whoops, is that a spoiler?)… [/p][p][/p][p]We wanted to streamline a bit more the exploration content here: an entity will have only 1 and 1 only point of entry - you click on it and interact with it - and most of them will present to the player some straightforward choices. We’ll describe a bit what kind of challenge you’re facing, and then we’ll give you a small amount of choices.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]These choices can be of many types, but globally we want the player to have more infos on the possible outcomes: while hovering on a choice, you’ll be able to see the positives and negatives outcomes, if there is a skillcheck you’ll get the exact information on that, and finally we also added some agenda on choosing “who” will be doing the action. You’ll maybe want to use a character with a skill that will boost the resources gained, but also maybe be wary of any negative impact on their health.
[/p][p]You’ll also get access to more complicated, non predictable storyline entities, but most of the time we want you to make educated choices on which risks you will be taking, and which rewards is more impactful for you at a set time. (a bit more boardgamey if you like)
[/p][p][/p][p]And that concludes this diary focused on the exploration part of the game! Of course, a lot of the fun will reside in discovering those weird entities and what outcomes they can provide. We’re making quite a quantity of strange and interesting thingies, see above one of the latest ones drawn by our talented HUMAN artists (*wink* *wink*)...[/p][p]
That's all for today![/p][p][/p][p]If you have any question related to the dev, please feel free to let us know in the comments here or on our Discord server![/p]