What is Castle Come?
We started by calling it a rogue-like mecha action game. While feeling accurate to portray a returning start in a procedural world, we are standing at a point that makes us question if that's the right choice.
This newsletter is part throwing around game terminology, part identity crisis about the game and the outward talk we do called marketing (sometimes).
Castle Come is a walking fortress rogue-like. That's what our steam page says.
In a "room-after-room" structure you fight different enemies and amass power. Upon death you lose all of it to the world. Begin anew a bit cleverer, a bit more prepared, fingers more atuned to enemy rhythm.
This is a collection that nicely describes a lot of rogue-likes, and for us was also a first identifier to tag our game with. It was popular at the time and gave enough constraint to not "make" a big game.
In our last week's on-site testing we ran into the question whether we now have a game that doesn't suit the term any more fully. While going through our tutorial and starting the first runs, the current version of Castle Come (0.99.27 Blackrock) is not necessarily perceived as a rogue-like and fulfilling expectations set by the "genre" term, or probably it makes sense to shift the rogue-like term from the genre spot to the mode spot.
There is a great video by Indie Game Clinic that disects the genre/mode/mood thing, which Christian, our tester, pointed us towards during our playtest-run-discussion.
The rogue-lite/like term took the portemanteau of quick restartability / quick scaling / bite sized gameplay with games like Brotato, Balatro and the other B-Style-Games.
Castle Come plays different currently.
And now as we are approaching proper production and do more public work we are in need to re-align expectations. Over the years we've juggled many genre terms around; strategy, immersive sim, action, adventure, tekken-like, fighting game, builder, survival. We hope to find out a bit more with testing the game here in our offices and with a public play test to get an outside view on how they feel the game played.
Let's see where we end up with our tags :) We'll keep you posted.
While the expectation thing was one thing, the pace, with which you grow at the start, needed to change.
The game had Tower Forges which, for 3 ore, produced an additional stage, you could drag onto the mecha and gain an additional weapon slot and additional slots for protective armour.
Getting there took a while, having enough ore at hand was a requirement and currently we didn’t push players towards it.
This meant you could finish a run without every gaining an additional stage quite often. You spent the ore on repairs, bought new weapons as your old ones got destroyed.
We skipped an easy win at the beginning of the runs, having players quickly play with the stages and give them a first power boost from which they continued on feeling more in control in a hostile world.
Our quickest prototype, gave the player a stage once they have all open slots filled. While being really generous this approach lacked a satisfaction moment. You haven't really earned this. Plus with how our world was populated with "junk", you could sometimes encounter situations where it was too easy to grow.
The next version introduced a trash bag/milling mechanism and introduced an additional ressource. Every item in the game now has a "scrap" value. You can decide if you want to normally build it onto the mecha or destroy it and gain it's scrap value to eventually add an additional stage to your mecha.
Choice is interesting. This milling system introduced choice when you encountered a situation that gives you a new item as a reward.
Do you have space? Yes? Take it with? Always.
But at the same time if you wanted to quickly grow you can now sacrifice important defensive shell pieces to quickly gain an additional stage right at the start.
It's interesting as this system now plays way smoother, and also mimics how we've recently implemented the meta progression. At stations you can pay to send ressources back to the village to unlock permanent upgrades.
Plus we now have a few backlog items which we've been pondering since a long time back on priority.
Enemies becoming cratelikes
Timber
Double down on "everything destructible" / "everything buildable"
From outside the fog and until next time
Sam