Abandonned prototype
8 days before the release now... Soooo, let's reveal some behind the scene secrets !
In the early stages of production, Foretales was to be a lot more procedural and a lot less story driven. You know, roguelike and everything...
At that point we wanted maps to track your progression during missions. With each region matching a biome and regions being generated and sequenced procedurally.
We did quite a few visual researches to know how that map would be displayed... but obviously this was never actually used.
Gameplay optimisation
For the first playtest with people external to the project we did, we had created a dedicated tutorial with 'dummy cards' to teach the basic mechanics of the game in a very 'controlled' environment.
On each card you could do ONE thing, and one thing only so that we would be sure you had no choice but to experience all the effects we wanted to demonstrate... but we finally completely scrapped that.
It's not very fun to follow indications step by step : steal that character, kill that character, recruit that ally, etc. And in fact, it runs completely opposite to the core idea behind Foretales which is "go on and try stuff, you'll see what it does". So the new tutorial mission is of course designed to be forgiving and to give you opportunities, but you may or may not encountered most of the mechanics in it as you play it.
We tried as best as possible to catch you later in some missions to remind you of some basic stuff but it's not necessary bullet proof. Anyway, the game feels much better like this than in this previous version.
Interaction map
This screen is a zoomed out version of approximately half the table of card interactions in just one of the major biomes of Foretales.
Each cell represents the result of one action card (item, skill, ally, resource, etc...) played on one location or encounter. It's errrrrrr... a bit big, and it took errrrr... a few months of work to implement. All the interactions of the game would cover something like 8 to 10 times that.
If you want other "Fun fact" on the development of Foretales, The Alkemiste in chief publishes them regularly on Discord.
Our Discord --> https://discord.gg/Hbyf6ZrUhQ