Macguffin Games

Dev Blog: State of the Game Update

As I’ve noted on Twitter, today is Communications Day.   So here is the second of two posts I’m doing today.  The first was a welcome to our new designer Joe Freemer; this one is an update on the state of the game & details on our next release.

Since PAX

Since PAX we’ve had a fantastic response to the Beta.  We got a good chunk of sales from that weekend and onwards, some great buzz, and a small legion of awesome beta testers!  These folks have been playing the game, reporting bugs, and giving us suggestions at a rate and quality level that far exceeded my expectations.  You folks are fantastic, thank you.  You can read their comments and thoughts in our forums.

Info on the Event Systems & Children

I need to do a full blog post on the All Heroes Die event system, but here’s a good chunk of information on how it works.  This system represents the core of the game – it’s how we handle storylines and plots.  We’ve designed it to be very open-ended; our goal is to allow content creators to take the game and turn the story around 180 degrees if they so choose.

I’ve also shed some light on how heroes spending time with their children works.  Essentially, the system is pretty opaque at this point – when we put it in, it was something of a “well we need SOMETHING here right now” moment.  It will be getting a heavy revision in the future, and we’d love your feedback on what that could end up looking like.

Next Build

Our next build is going to focus on the Warfare system.  Our current tentative date for that release is May 7th, but this depends heavily on some conversations Whitney and I will have this weekend about the coding tasks.  We’ve had a lot of this feature finished for a while, but we’ve never had the time to get it to a point where I was happy.

Rather than get into a long dissertation on what this will be, I’ll just describe it generally for now – we’ll follow it up with some visuals as soon as possible.

Warfare in in All Heroes Die is based in many ways off the system used in the indie cult-classic King of Dragon Pass.  Combat forces will consist of soldiers and their leader – for the player, that will be one of the heroes from their family.  The player will have knowledge of the tactical situation based on that hero’s skills – the better a hero is at certain things, the more information they can discern.  Once the player has selected tactics and a goal for the fight and hits “go”, we’ll figure out and present the results.  There are also several chances throughout the fight for game events to fire that can significantly alter the course of the battle – as well as for game events afterwards dealing with its aftermath.

We’ve intentionally kept the Warfare system a high-level affair, like many other things in All Heroes Die; it lets us tell the big story we want to tell without too much micromanagement and detail getting in the way.  The catch, of course, will be for us to keep the player’s choices interesting while doing that.  We’ll have more details as soon as we get a bit further into this build; if possible, I’m going to get a FRAPS video up or similar where we can show you what we have going on.

And finally, thanks again to everyone that has supported us by purchasing the Beta (still only $5!).

Tags: All Heroes Die, Dev Blog