Shady Characters
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Devblog #26
🕑 Added 2025-01-20 09:50:38 +0000 UTCHey, Wizards!
Shady Character One here!
Sometimes you get stumped on very strange things, and sometimes those issue get resolved in very beneficial ways. This one issue was bothering me for some time now, but it was only last week that I finally decided that in needs to be tackled.
I am talking about this blacked out button that you have seen in the town since the game's first release.
"Back Alley" was never meant to be a major part of the game, but it was meant to house a bunch of supporting mechanics that started to add up after a while. So without noticing it, in my head I turned this one button into a heap of minor mechanics all crammed into a single location. At that point, going into the Back alley turned into a mini adventure of sub-menu-ing. This was something I was not happy with. Not one bit. So, I started thinking on how I can combine several mechanics into a single one, which felt very inelegant. Cutting some of them off, which just removed stuff from the game. Or even bargaining with myself, and say that it might be fine to overburden the game in one place, if the other places were fine.
But then the solution came to me completely unexpectedly. The game is built on a day-by-day schedule mechanic, and the Back Alley is not a normal nine to six establishment. Why not let it have different mechanics depending on the day of the week you are visiting it? And that's how I think the alley will work from now on. Giving the players something to explore, discover and base their schedule around. The alley will not be around for some time yet, and not all of its content will come in a single update. But at least now I have a concrete direction.
One other thing that we focused on this week, was another attempt at promotion. I mentioned this in one of my previous blog entries, but promo is neither of our strong suits. Most of our attempts fail miserably, so it was a nice surprise when a suggestion of one of our friends suddenly worked better than we anticipated. On the wings of that discovery, maybe some of you have any suggestions for places where people might be interested in this game of ours? Or maybe you can even help with promotion in one way or another?
Either way, thank you for being with us, and see you next week!
Shady Character One, out!
