MAGWest 2024: Postmortem

Hey all, it's been a bit. MAGWest concluded last week and we've been hard at work getting your feedback for all who played! Thank you all if you visited the booth over the weekend and thank you all who continue to support and play our game. This weekend was particularly fruitful for us and we want to give a special shout-out to all the other devs who played our game and gave us feedback as well, you're all equally awesome!

There's a lot to unpack here so let's go over everything one by one.

First off, as I mentioned before, thank you all for playing. All your feedback was especially helpful and all the feedback we got multiple reports of, whether it be bugs, clarity, or just changes you'd think you'd like to see, we looked it all over and implemented the most common feedback. All your feedback, even if it wasn't implemented immediately, was still helpful in knowing what direction we needed to go.

Also, special shoutout to MAGWest as well! You guys were awesome last year and you were awesome this year. We hope the following year you guys will be awesome as well!

Secondly, playing all the other awesome games in the room made us realize we've got a long way to go before we're ready to ship. As this project reaches the two year point next month (still crazy for us as devs to think about), we realize we're barely on the cusp of the vertical slice, let alone feature complete.

This game started off as a small Game Jam project and it's spiraled into something more and we're truly appreciative of all the support we get from everyone.

Now let's talk.

Where to go now? Evaluating our Vertical Slice

A Vertical Slice is when we believe we've gotten most of our core game features in the game and while we feel like we've made leaps and bounds since our last successful showcase, we've learned there's still some ways to go.

Our game is nearly there for vertical slice, but there's a large emphasis on nearly as we're missing one of the most core mechanics we could ask for in a game we're advertising as an RPG: Leveling up. We've mentioned it multiple times in our advertisements, but leveling up and experience as mechanics are largely absent in our game at the moment. It'll be the next big thing we look into before we can actually evaluate if we're at our vertical slice point.

As we plan on getting leveling up in the game, it'll surely be a great amount of effort from everyone to get all the moving parts just right. We want to make sure the way you level up and grow stronger in this game feels good, as we know sometimes other RPGs can sometimes shoehorn RPG mechanics in just for the sake of having them. Stat confusion and bloat often times can be confusing so we want to be succinct in our ways of letting the player know you're doing better than when you started.

All that rambling aside, it's safe to say this is our biggest next step.

Continuing to Improve

Another big thing we want to look at is improving what we already have. While we got a lot of good feedback about this, we still have a lot of things many people may have overlooked or ignored we want to do. While we implemented barks a while back, they don't really feel like anything rather than a bit of fluff. We're looking to improve how dynamic they are and increase the situations where special barks can happen, just so you can feel like the battle is evolving around you.

This also goes hand in hand with our Special Tiles. People seemed to enjoy them, but there's also a lot of work left to be done in making them feel like they're doing more than just disrupting the flow of the game. We plan on making some things clearer as well (The Fire tile seemed to cause a lot of trouble for people).

As for the rest, we're going to make sure things feel good to play, as always.

What Else?

There's a handful of things we still need to get in. While we may be getting closer to Vertical Slice, feature complete is another story. Since we only have a demo of a campaign right now, we're not even offering you the ability to continue your adventure where you left off, or even giving you opportunities to grow your army.

With all that in mind, for the future we're looking to implement features like Recruiting and a Shop. While these features seem pretty basic and self-explanatory, we're hoping to draw from successful similar games in making them feel like they're integral to our game. In the house of Strategy RPGs, we know that these topics are generally very integral. Games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Triangle Strategy, and Fire Emblem all make use of these mechanics in different ways, but they all lead to the same thing. We hope to be able to mimic those mechanics in a way that feels good in our game.

We also have something in mind for Relics as well... As this feature hasn't been talked about and the word varies from game to game, we plan on making powers and abilities that are reusable within the game that have cooldowns, long or short. Think about items or hero powers from other games. All of our ideas that don't fit into the confines of a generalized Piece can be thrown into a bucket where we can transform them into something else, giving power to the players and also giving our devs dartboard ideas a good place to evolve as well.

And Lastly...

Apart from everything, we're just hoping this crazy Game Jam project continues to grow and receive support from everyone. We're in the process of growing not only as a game, but also as developers and as a company. Our team name is informal but one day we hope to leave our mark with our name and maybe even one day pitch to publishers.

When we reach that point, we hope you'll continue to support us and allow us to create games that we want to make for you. And as always...

Go Team Checkmate!