Welcome to the "MoonWard Going Forward" (MGF) blog!
I'm Mr. Slate and I'm here to let you know what's been happening with MoonWard as of September 2024!
Before I begin, please make sure to check out the MoonWard demo on the Google Play Store and our Discord Community!
With that out of the way, let's get to the news!
There are two primary features I want to talk about in this month's MoonWard Going Forward.
Storytelling and Lore
I've done a ton of work on the existing stories, bounties, the way they are presented and the lore supporting them.
Presentation wise, I added a new type of story called "Personal" which is narrated by the player character rather than a handler. It's crazy I only just thought of this but I think it's an extension of the story becoming a bit more complex. These can be main or side stories and the demo will have an example of both.
I've updated every story in County 1 with character and lore details. I made an effort to focus on the themes and stories of County 1 as opposed to going from quest to quest with little narrative progression. I also added a pacifist option to most of them. The dialogues in these new stories also have many more options and skill checks, leaning more on the choose your own adventure aspect that's always been present.
Most stories now unlock a mechanical element of the game. This partially ties to onboarding but it goes beyond that. You can now choose to ignore (or miss) certain non-core game features if you like!
Lastly, I added a few more lore-friendly locations. One example is the "Abandoned Factory".
"For the past 100 years, Vinterstrath has been one of the most important mining and logging centres of the Zephyr Empire. Throughout this time, processing factories kept the Imperial industry satiated with ore and lumber. Not long ago, large companies also started building manufacturing facilities to take advantage of the cheap land and labour. The gold was flowing through Vinterstrath and it's people were happy.
This went on for a few years, when suddenly trouble began brewing in the Ustrean province. Ustrea is located directly between Vinterstrath and the Imperial Capitol. Sensing a large conflict and fearing sabotage of goods and resources going through the rebelling province, the Empress decided to move most mining and production closer to the Throne.
Overnight, large factory complexes and mining facilities were abandoned, leaving entire communities of Vinterstrath's people without livelihood. Some turned to banditry and the Families, others to the newly founded 'Adventuring' companies.
Worse yet, rumours say terrible abominations now lurk in those forsaken places, feeding off the Deep energies radiating from the decaying machinery."
Brawl Screen and Active Tutorial
I updated the Brawl screen visuals quite a bit. The old screen is to the left, and the new screen on the right. I moved the character avatars to their respective clocks (I sometimes refer to them as lockets) and removed the status bars. Statuses now drop from the nameplates. Those changes allowed me to add a little bit of space between the health bars and other elements. Speaking of that I also narrowed the stamina bar to help with that effect.
I made the pause button larger and the first time you meet Rowan it also has a glow animation since I was told it can be hard to find when entering a brawl for the first time. The last change was to make the health bars different colours so it's easier to distinguish between the characters.
All of that makes the screen less cluttered, easier to read and it hides the idle clock arrows.
With that covered, let's talk about the Active Brawl Tutorial next. Oh boy. It's been... interesting. Where do I even start.
Ok, first thing - what you see to the right is very much work in progress. I'm in the middle of implementing the feature so it looks clunky and, well, unfinished. That's going to change.
Here's how it works. Basically, you have a dialogue sequence during which the brawl is paused. When the sequence reaches an input request it stops the dialogue and you can minimize the dialogue window (small blue button left of the dialogue panel).
I built a simple scripting system so you can customize the sequence in basic ways. One of the features of the system is enabling and disabling the input buttons (six buttons on the bottom) as well as showing arrows to tell you what's enabled and required to proceed.
I know It sounds simple, but it required so many changes to existing systems and UI that I'll probably find bugs in brawls for days after I'm done. But! At the end I'll have a scriptable dialogue system inside of combat. Gonna be honest, that's got me excited... Oh, yeah, a better tutorial I guess. That's neat too.
Features
Here's a list of done, approved and work in progress features as of writing this. The WIP percentages are all over the place, that doesn't mean I've started and stopped work on these, or working on them in parallel. In games development larger features are broken down in standalone tasks as small as 1 hour. For example, "New Enemies" is actually 4 separate tasks of varying duration and can be done in any order. So with that in mind...
Enough rambling! Here's the current approved major feature list:
WIP 80%: Improved Player Onboarding. Includes interactive battle tutorials.
DONE: Dialogue Recap. Added a dialogue recap system which is a mix of Transcribed Dialogue/Records for Completed Adventures and does the same but better.
TBD: In-Game Wiki (Notes).
WIP 65%: Revised/expanded story content. I'm planning a more cohesive, engaging story. This includes unlocking mechanics as you play.
WIP 20%: New enemies.
WIP 30%: More County 2 content. This includes more lore friendly dwellings and main and side stories.
TBD: iOS Build. Yup, it's in scope now. Things just got real!
TBD: Long term Save Game. Currently all of your characters are deleted forever when the game is uninstalled. This is obviously not ideal. Modern games save these in the cloud. I'm not interested in that. So I'm looking into options to let you save/load a character locally. I also have no interest in encoding those files so you could in theory just open them up and cheat. Wouldn't that be cool?
Pricing and Support
Lastly, I'd like to elaborate on a couple of things regarding the demo and pricing.
Price. The demo (and App Store intro version) will always be free. The full version will always be a one time purchase. There will never be any in-app purchases. There will never be any adverts. There will never be battle passes. There will never be Web3 technology.
Support/Patching. When the full version is released, the demo will continue to receive patches at the same rate as the full version. This will include new or changed content in county one and two, as well as any upgraded/new systems and mechanics available in those hubs. The demo will also get bugfixes in parallel with the full version. In reality, the demo will stop receiving content updates once county one and two are content complete.
Before I go, if you'd like to support us, please check our Patreon and Ko-fi! Any donations and patronage towards Slate Games and MoonWard development are greatly appreciated!
Thank you all so much for your continued support! It's very humbling to be able to do what I love!
Like always,
stay awesome!
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