News From the Six Realms #93 - Happy Horny Holidays

Hello all,

It is the end of yet another year; they seem to fly by so fast these days. I was hoping this would be the year the year that we managed to finish Act I, but unfortunately, that wasn't meant to be. With the progress we have made this year, along with the new writers we have hired to help, I am cautiously optimistic we'll be able to wrap things up next year and move on to working on Act II.

When you actually look at what is left to be done, there isn't a huge amount of work. Most of the remaining NPC plotlines (Jezera, X'zaratl, Helayna, and Andras NTR) are only one (or at most two) events away from being done now. Some such as Jezera NTR need a little bit more work, but they are still completely manageable. Blackholt only has Che-Lin and a few epilogue events, and Rein is getting closer to completing the mammoth event that is the Battle of Astarte all the time. When all of this is done, all that is left is the epilogue to tie everything together and then we are pretty much done. So, while there is still a way to go to be completely done, it is fair to say that the finish line is pretty clearly in sight.

While the writers work on this, we will begin to work on Act II to prepare for the launch. Once Jr. X has finished with bugs and some QoL stuff (which is nearly done) we are going to start prototyping so we have something there to work on as soon as writing for Act I wraps up.

With that said, I would like to talk a little about plans for Act II today, but as always, keep in mind these are subject to change. Firstly, we should talk about the scope. When I started making this game I had no idea what I was doing, and as a result it ended up being far, far larger than intended. As much as I would like to continue in the same vein, as more branches continue to appear as we go forward in the story, it will soon become unmanageable. It also, as we will see later, severely limits my options while going forward because adding one new feature generates a huge amount of work.

How then, do we reduce the scope without hurting the game too much? I do have a few ideas on this front, which I'll share today, but like I said, keep in mind it is all subject to change as I said earlier. They are:

• Severely reducing the number of random events - When I started making this game, I was playing a lot of CoC and wanted to make a sandbox game. As the game developed, though, it morphed from its initial form into the narrative RPG it is today. The result is a game that requires a lot of work and is often at odds with itself. If, for example, the player wants to see a Cliohna event, it makes no sense to make them sit through 10-20 random ones until one occurs. The goal then is to move away from the random model to one that gives players more say in seeing the sorts of events they want.

• Merging NPC arcs into the main narrative - One of the things that generated a lot of work was having all the NPC events be a separate thing, often feeling disconnected from the game's main story. In Act II, we will be aiming to move a lot of NPC development into the main narrative events, reducing workload and also making them matter more.  

• Simplifying the maps - Perhaps the thing I'm most dissatisfied with the game as it developed was Rosaria. I wanted the map to be this fun thing to explore with events that lead to other events, but due to the sheer amount of work required, it has never really quite worked as intended. Also due to the fact each map requires a very large pool of random events, it severely limits the amount of regions I can place in the game. To avoid that we are looking at moving away from large grid maps to something simpler that will also allow progression and some exploration without the massive amount of work required.

As you can see, we are putting a lot of thought into avoiding some of the pitfalls we fell into in making the first Act I, and reducing the scope while focusing on the things our players have told us they like about the game. I was going to talk a little about the release, but this is already a long post, so I will save it for next time. As usual, though, that release will be out on the last Sunday of next month, the 26th of January. Until then, I wish you all the best for the holidays and the new year from all of us here at Venus Noire, and as always, take care of yourselves.