I was digging through some old folders on a couple of abandoned hard drives this week and discovered a various old prototype Flash Games I had once worked on at one-point or another. I had never managed to finish any of them due to other commitments or getting distracted by other projects at the time. However, its interesting to see where some of the ideas for RPG Tycoon came from and I think it highlights the passion I have for the sort of games I want to make moving forward as Skatanic Studios. It’s highly likely I’ll end up borrowing and evolving some of the ideas explored in those old prototypes in a future project in one way or another. If you’re interested, I’ve posted them here.

As for progress this week, I’ve begun work on the Alpha 11 build of the game. The focus of which, is on improving the mid-to-late gameplay… In its current state, and thanks to the improvements made in the last build, I’m really happy with how the game “feels” now. The previous update has really helped direct the gameplay and give the player an overall goal to work towards when playing. I’m often finding each time I play now that I’m trying to score the highest amount of points and I’m eager to see it through to the end. Because of this, it’s become more clear that there needs to be something that keeps the game fresh and keeps the player interested during this period of the game. The period when you’ve discovered and understand how the game works and you’re confident in how you’re improving your kingdom. Although the game is inherently repetitive by design (earn, build, expand) there needs to be something else that keeps the player working towards an objective and keeps them invested in the experience at these later stages. I added the School and the Event Plaza a while a go, but they’re poorly implemented and have always acted as kind of placeholders for something I’ve wanted to come back to later. Now, is that time… well… next time, I haven’t actually touched either of those yet, but I’m planning on addressing them for this upcoming build.

I had to lay some pipework at the start of the week for an improvement to the Buildings that I wanted to make in order to implement a new system. So I’m happy to announce the introduction of Growable Buildings. Meaning that, a building can have various states throughout the game in which it can transition into. For instance, it would be most useful for when a Store levels up in the game that the sprite for the building changes aesthetically somehow into either a bigger or more developed version of itself. (I won’t be designing levelled variations of all the stores, but the feature can be extended and has been added in order to support that.)  

The main purpose of this was for the instance of the Guild Hall system which I’ve spent most of the week working on. The Guild Hall will unlock around Level 6 and allows the player to affiliate their Kingdom with a Guild based on how they prefer to play. Each Guild offers the player a bonus to a corresponding area of the game (joining the Fighters Guild offers a boost in Experience from Quests) and once joined, the player can boost that bonus further by levelling up their Guild Hall.

This is achieved through Guild Points which are earned by completing missions for the Guild. The missions (like the bonuses) will correspond to the style of gameplay the guild represents and once turned in, another mission will be randomly generated.  Guild Points will also be tracked and relayed into your final score and stats at the end of the game, so it’s also a great way to get ahead of the AI. I think it’s a step in the right direction to keeping the player invested into the system while rewarding them for the style prefer to play.

I’ve also started to make progress with some of the new building and decoration designs that I’ve wanted to add. The first of which is the new trebuchet decoration, which will offer a high attraction rating but will take up a significant four tiles. It’s the first decoration to be larger than a single tile and I plan on adding a few more like this over the next few weeks.

 

Elsewhere on the main screen I’ve implemented a new “Randomise Kingdom Name” feature. So you can say goodbye to Defaultia and hello to a number of combinations of prefix and suffixes mashed together into weirdly fitting titles. I’ve very suddenly fallen in love with this button. It might be my favourite feature.

In modding news, I’ve optimised the way that RPG Tycoon handles modded files so that multiple mods can be installed and added to the game by users with very little effort. Alpha 11 will have a Mods folder in the Game Directory meaning that players wishing to make or use mods will be able to collate all of their mod files into a single directory and the game will handle loading them without needing to edit any of the original data files. I’ll be posting a tutorial video explaining the changes closer to release.

There’s also a new mods screen I’ve added to the main menu that will display all of the mods installed in the directory by the user. It will give details of the mod, an icon and a list of the files installed. Eventually, I expect you’ll also be able to download new mods from this screen when/if I get around to adding workshop support. You can also expect a link out to the modding documentation / videos here on release too.

I’m hoping this will make mods more approachable for players. It’s streamlined the process of installing them to simply dropping a folder, which I’m very happy about, so hopefully more people will get on board with writing their own quests or adding their own buildings to the game. (I’m also pondering over the idea of an editor and so it’s something I’ll likely add just before or shortly after release.)

I’m really happy with where the game is at and I’m confident that Alpha 11 will be the last major piece of the puzzle left to place. RPG Tycoon is very much a playable and enjoyable game in its current state and I’m starting to see the finish line now. There’s a few more things I want work on after this build, a lot of bugs that need fixing and polish in plenty of places, but after almost two years it’s close and very much around the corner. 🙂

If you want to track the development progress between builds I’ve opened up the Trello board publicly so you can see what I’m working on day-to-day as we get closer to reaching V1.0.

All the best,

Matt