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We decided to start a newsletter to create a channel to talk and document all the things we are doing with lauflauf. Basil and I discussed a lot about ways to share progress of our projects within a form that isn't alien to us. We decided that a written format, longer in its form and content was more fitting to the way we look at our work, so we are going to start writing longer texts and put them out via a newsletter. We will post all content concerning Castle Come also in this channel, but if you are interested in all topics we ramble about, consider subscribing to our newsletter here: Newsletter Signup
Much has changed since our last blip into the ether.
We have not really talked about Castle Come in the public since our announcement trailer last year; The idea of today's newsletter is to counteract this and document some of bigger chunks of progress which has happened and explain the design questions and reasonings behind them.
Starting with our game's main game loop and structure.
The level structure and design has been an unanswered question for us for quite some time.
Our earliest drafts had been open zones, which hosted enemies and you could run around in without any blocked paths. This created a really vague experience, missing clear milestones in your journey. Even if there was progress in won fights, the "aliveness"/simulation of the world was lost on the players. Our process of creating everything procedural at the beginning just created a lot of content without necessarily posing the right questions to players.
A while back, our solution was to create regions with doors inside our generative world, which created distinct areas of combat, but they tended to be too small to pleasantly move around in. But locking down spaces to create small "bursts" of gameplay for players to engage with proved as the right idea.
By ditching the approach of completely generating the world from scratch every run and moving to a more "hand-placed" structure which houses tile based units of gameplay scenarios, we use a much more manageable system that lets us place multiple layers and craft more specific encounters and environments to explore.
Each room can host a fight encounter, a fight arena design and a "beautiful tile", which hosts the contextual dress-up of the room and is very important for navigation for players. Its a simple system, whose parts are easily upgradeable to a more procedural version.
Originally, players had to fulfill several conditions to pass through the gate with their mecha. Due to how the level was structured and how our progression was designed, this created a number of problems. It either left you breathless in the end or had you run around pointlessly trying to match the last condition while in its sum being an unclear goal.
In January we sat down and re-did the system with three things in mind; a quicker time to the gate, rewarding exploration and clearer goal setting.
Now, cores, every mecha's source of power, need to be placed near the worlds gate. When you find and pick up a core in the wild it starts screaming, awoken from its slumber and your surroundings turn hostile. The world of Castle Come is a world of scarcity and the power source that is the core, is a valuable target for everybody.
Once you fought your way back to the gate, the core can be submitted to safety. In doing so, the world returns to its calmer state, which lets you explore, search for new cores, expand your mecha and plan further routes in peace. This introduction of alternating game states helped pace the game way more and we finally have a form that we are happy with.
In a way, this new game loop reinforces a lot of our ideas with storytelling and generational persistency inside the game world and lets us play with the idea of a roguelike that always stays in the "same", "persistent" world. It creates a lot of player-knowledge about said universe, where things are located, routes to the gate and places to revisit, and empowers progress the player can unlock with knowing the world he occupies. (this persistency will probably be a topic for an entire newsletter/update on its own)
yours truly
Sam