Recently I started using this News section and I was describing why we decided to postpone the release of DREAMERS.
One of my favorite aspects of our game is that not many things are explained and we want you to discover them.
We imagine DREAMERS like one of these deferred experiences where we - at first - plan and hide stuff, and then you - when everything is ready - go on and discover them.
This said it is sometimes very difficult for me to design an equilibrate experience that can be exciting but not frustrating.
One example is the collectibles that we spread in the game world.
Collectibles are collectibles, so we all are familiar with how they work, but since our game has multiple scenarios you may risk missing some.
That's not a big deal for the overall game experience, but if you are a game-completionist as we are, it may be irritating for you not to know how many collectibles we have hidden in a certain scene.
Time ago, in fact, we already added a piece of information about how many collectibles there are in total and how many you already collected.
And this was fine and quite informative (even a bit spoiler-ish) but still useful on a global overview of how you are exploring and collecting stuff.
The problem surfaced only in these final days of deep debugging where, while playing we were saying "okay, but how many other collectibles are in this location?" and "how can I be certain that I have everything before leaving such a big area?".
So yeah, that's it, we spent some time designing and implementing this new functionality in our development framework.
Also, in DREAMERS we have a sort of hierarchy of collectibles and we group them in mysterious milestones, so this way, at least you will always have a clear idea of how many are still out there.
And for what they are and why you do need them, well, this is another story ;)