April has gone by rather quickly. Being cooped up inside with little else to do certainly helps speed up development. This month was mostly map design and getting the game's progression nailed down. Over 90% of the dungeon maps in the game are now complete!

Dungeons

While not technically a straight dungeon-crawler—there are multiple discreet dungeons and an overworld—I've been calling it that because there's a heavy enough emphasis on traversing the dungeons in this game for me to feel that it's an accurate descriptor. There are a total of nine dungeons in the main game, and there's a variety to what you can expect from them. They're not just excuses for more battles! There are areas focused entirely on solving puzzles, areas where the dungeon itself is the enemy, and giant sprawling areas where you'll be lucky just to see the light of day again.

I really wanted to make the maps part of the game's story. The key to this was making their designs visually distinct. Just by looking at it, you should be able to tell if a map is an organic or a man-made location. One of my favorite dungeons to design involved stuffing as much as possible into a tiny area to make it feel larger than it was. I hope you enjoy going through the dungeons as much as I enjoyed designing them!

Nonlinearity

One of my goals is to make gameplay progression as open-ended as possible. A decent amount of the main quests are optional, and you can even end up skipping entire dungeons if you wish to do so. The order you can visit areas in is generally completely open as well. Reaching mid-to-late-game areas extremely early on should be possible given enough persistence and knowledge of what you need to do.

I thought this nonlinear structure would impact the story negatively, but having a plot where things slowly get revealed piece by piece ended up fitting pretty well. Please do forgive me if I keep mentioning the story in passing without mentioning specifics! I don't want to give away too much, and sharing updates on the story with that restriction in mind is fairly difficult.

What's next?

I'll be switching gears and working on finishing the last 10% of the dungeon maps, polishing up dungeon mechanics, and adding a few more towns.

Until next time!