Age of Heralds
Devlog #9: A (more) playable demo is finally out!
Happy, happy holidays! After a period of festive decanting, the next version of Age of Heralds is out that's even more playable without supervision! (The text still looks kinda blurry when played on Windows desktop though. I'm working on that.)
Again, it's still in demo stage so if you have played it and have more longform feedback to provide, please reach out to eddie at lionbark.com (and I can add you to the beta-test section in the credits!).
1 Progress
Starting with what hasn't changed much: the music and the art. I've addressed some of the more egregiously placeholder parts, e.g. extending some tracks, but there isn't a significant change in style or quality. Doing a proper pass on these would be candidates for v0.3.
I have addressed feedback that Helen's looking a bit too young to be assumed to be Daphne's mother, and also tidied up some of the portraits which I had hastily done.
Figure 1: Retouched Daphne and Helen
I've added in a few cute interactions, and in fact the overall theme of this release is fleshing out the world more with expositions and interactions, and polishing up the overall UX.
Figure 2: Tasty Gluel. Good for the environment too(?)
1.1 Gamedev
The most noticeable addition to the gameplay is one more puzzle, bringing up the total number of puzzles in the game to 1.5:
Figure 3: How will we progress!? A grave predicament
1.2 Storytelling
I realised I wasn't making full use of NPCs and adding lore; a lot of them were just speaking briefly and generically, a-la early-gen Pokemon.
I ended up using an 'exposition board' to keep track of what was being talked about and where.
Figure 4: Exposition board
1.2.1 Visual Expositions
I also got (slightly) less lazier in encouraging talking to NPCs in the scene of Daphne's birthday; instead of re-using the exposition mechanism from an earlier scene (wanna turn off the TV to progress the story? Too bad - talk to people to get batteries for the remote!), I changed it to asking people if they wanted a canape instead.
When doing earlier drafts, I had come up with tables of how much remuneration heralds were going to get at different levels, but never found a good place to insert it somewhere other than the appendix. Now remembering I had more than text to work with as a medium, I added these into interactables found around the bunker.
Figure 5: A city map with transport costs
Figure 6: A leaflet with the various herald ranks
1.2.2 More monologues
I think I've smoothed out Daphne's emotional changes throughout the act and made it clearer why she's being so obstinate on opting in.
Liam also gets a nice speech at the start of Daphne's birthday.
Patrick gets to show off some of his worldview and some repartee instead of just being an Daphne exposition vehicle.
Figure 7: Patrick: Not some sort of psychopath (TM)
Helen's mostly stayed the same, but I added another visual cue to support her feelings towards Daphne.
1.3 UI
I've added to the hint system so hopefully it's harder to get stuck in places, e.g. while using FreeDraw, you can get a hint that the colours need to be matched as well as the pattern.
1.3.1 Tutorials
These went through an overall as there is now a character to denote who/what you're controlling. They also show up again after the minigame resets in case you've forgotten the controls, and the countdown time was lengthened from 3 to 5.
There is also an onboarding screen at the start now before jumping into a new game:
Figure 8: The first test
1.3.2 Scene Select
I tried to make it clearer where you were in the story (as well as stating the expected playtime at the start) or at least demarcate it into chapters. Previously the scene select was just using how I had broken down the act internally, which was also confusingly called 'scenes' (roughly corresponding to a chunk of set design in the bunker, or a Babelverse world).
Now, I've got it divided into three player-facing chapters:
Figure 9: New scene select
Internally there was also work done to make sure you could start midway through a scene, which meant exposing some of the dev methods I'd been using to fastforward up to the point I wanted to test.
1.4 Tooling
I whipped up another quick Krita Export batch script to handle another workflow, which is to achieve the progressive hiding or revealing of layers in an image without having to do too much of it in Godot's AnimationPlayer (and instead I do it programmatically).
Figure 10: Layers are batched according to their prefix and then additively revealed from 0
2 What's Next
It's satisfying getting through so many story edits, bugfixes and quality of life changes for this pass, but also bemusing to still have so many things I'd want to improve. What feels keenly missing (which shows where my priorities and expertise are lacking) is a more custom looking UI (right now, apart from the colour scheme, it's still pretty generic), and also giving the music and art a proper go.
But for now, hopefully the story still hits, and I'm definitely welcoming feedback from a more general audience.
Age of Heralds, that's the name, that name again is Age of Heralds: https://lionbark.itch.io/age-of-heralds
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