Copy
View this email in your browser

Dragonwatt Games Newsletter - April 2021
By Derek Conrad

Happy Spring! 💐 Can you believe vaccine season is already here? Did you get yours yet?

In the last newsletter, I expanded on the design shift I made in 2020. This month, I intend to continue explaining my choices, while introducing some more changes to Rise of the Gods's mechanisms.

Being "stuck" at home has proved to be less limiting on my creativity than I'd anticipated. I've been toying with new ideas, some which may stick, while others are more fleeting and theoretical for the sake of experimentation. Thus, the game has reverted back to a malleable state while I reevaluate its potential in the market, so please don't expect any permanence just yet.

I really appreciate your patience. 😀 Now, onto the news!

Rise of the Gods News

FOCUS ON THE CORE

I introduced these core elements of Rise of the Gods in February: the spatial relationship between realms and managing shrines to power-up your godsends. Simply put, these are the roots from where most design grows. This month, I have two (and a half?) revelations about these core elements to share.

Sanctuary v Outlands

Up until now, you could summon followers to your sanctuary freely, but summoning to the outlands required you to play domains there first. However, during recent playtests, I've realized that the domain requirement is not usually worth the work and is too limiting on player agency.

When you boil the realms down to their essence, the sanctuary is a "safe haven" where followers can't be targeted by attacks, while the outlands is "dangerous" because now they're exposed. Thus, you're confronted with tension anytime you choose how to arrange your followers. Do you want to keep them back to block or push them forward to be more aggressive? Yet by adding requirements to summon in the outlands, I was over-complicating this dichotomy. 

Going forward, I want to test the game without a summoning threshold in the outlands, which means you may summon followers in either realm with no inherent restriction. Immediately, the reliance on domains for decks that otherwise wouldn't want them is eliminated, which then allows me to explore new design space for domains as an independent game piece.

 

Summoning to your sanctuary means followers are safe from enemy attacks and can block. Summoning to the outlands is a bit riskier, but tends to grant bigger rewards.

Shrine Deflation & New Mechanic

Before, you had three shrines located in your sanctuary where you could cache offerings (labeled left, center, and right). Then, depending on the shrine and the number of offerings there, a corresponding godsend would become usable. (One offering for the central shrine's godsend to turn on, and three offerings for the left and right shrines.) This worked at first, but eventually it became clear that three shrines was too many to manage.

Why was that? Well, the first offering cached at the central shrine was used to turn on your basic godsend, but any additional cached there were "wasted" since you only need one. This contradicts with the Hoard effect, which encourages you to cache multiple copies of the same offering to get more powerful effects. To fix the problem, I eliminated the central shrine altogether, leaving just a left and a right.

Now, the basic godsend's requirement is to have one offering cached at any shrine, regardless of location. Then, the two stronger effects turn on when you have three offerings at either the left or right shrine, respectively. This change allows you to decide what shrine you want to focus your attention on early, allowing you to adapt to different match-ups between games, while still having that basic and weaker effect available every game.

 

Do you want to focus on your left or right shrine? The choice depends on what godsend is most valuable to you that game.

But that's not all!

I've felt that the shrines and godsends aren't culminating into anything exciting. As a core element of gameplay, that's leaving a hole in the player experience, so I'm currently working on a new mechanism I'm calling Ascend. Essentially, after enough activations of your godsends, you'll get to Ascend one of your followers on the field into your god's Champion, upgrading its stats and giving it new effects.

I still haven't settled on the threshold for when you can Ascend, or how much it will cost, or the differences between each god's Champion, so expect updates in the next newsletter. Or heck, by then the name and concept might be radically different. Time will tell how married I am to the idea, so stay tuned!

WRAP UP 🏁

Thanks a lot for reading! What are your thoughts on these new ideas?

As always, I love to hear your feedback, so send any comments or suggestions to me at derekconrad@dragonwattgames.com!

Take care,
- Derek

Twitter
Copyright © 2021 Dragonwatt Games, LLC, All rights reserved.


Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp