Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest Development Update #2

The new development update for Ctrl Alt Ninja’s upcoming RPG Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest highlights some of the things the team’s been working on as of late. Those include tinkering with the game’s story, polishing the first act, and revamping the user interface. Check it out:

In the last Dev update, we told that we started working the game synopsis into a script and that we also split the game into acts. The acts will help pacing the game, but they can also help the development: We can focus on them one at a time as they are sort of isolated entities and each has its own theme going on. We’ll do a pass on all of them to get the basic structure of the game complete with the story and gameplay elements blocked in. After that it’s an iteration after iteration until the game is done. Past couple of weeks we’ve been working on Act 1 and it’s pretty much playable right through. Of course it still needs a lot of polishing and balancing but it’s already really fun to play. We get to meet new party members, monsters and at the end explore the smoke scented Blimmur cave.

We’ve also done a major overhaul to GUI (that’s the Graphical User Interface) to make it work with the newly introduced party concept. The coders have been also hard at work making the GUI scalable and functional in every way. The GUI most probably will go through many changes and iterations in the future, but that’s business as usual. We’ve also tweaked the main character/s quite a bit. Well, number one: we’ve done two more main characters alongside our Druid. And two: As we added “cinematic” cameras to the game (a zoom or pan to frame a character that is doing something interesting), the characters need to hold up the closeups, so they needed an extra layer of detail as they were initially designed to be only looked at from top down perspective. Though it was a lot of work, it really helps bring the party members alive and show their different characteristics. Don’t worry, we’ll introduce the new party members in some other post.

Like stated on the last Dev update, the new party concept spawned various issues related to the dying mechanism and reincarnation concept, so there’s been a lot of thought and work put on them. Most of the problems concerned characters involved in story elements, but we’re drawing close to a solution that we’re happy with. We’ll cover that in a later post in more detail as it’s still work in progress and too big subject to discuss here in detail.