I have some news. About four months ago, I quit my job to work on BONES of the LOST GOD, and, after a few mis-steps and prototype dead-ends, it’s now nearly finished. I’m really pleased with it and the work I’ve done.
However — I need to go back to work and start earning some money, and so I’m taking a full-time devops role at an e-commerce company. However, I don’t start for three weeks which should give me time to finish off, do a little refactoring, and get the game into a position where I can more easily add further content on evenings and weekends.
I’ve got four main things left to do:
- Re-balance combat and the monsters. Monsters (and combat with them) doesn’t scale very well at the moment as you level up; in particular attack quickly outstrips defence, and combat is a bit swingy at low levels, which can feel frustrating. So this needs looking at, and I have a big spreadsheet of numbers on the go at the moment.
- Improve procedural generation of dungeons. This works, but the environments it generates are not very interesting. I want to improve the environments it generates, add more dungeon templates (forest, cavern, dungeon, caves etc.), and make delving into dungeons a more rewarding experience.
- Implement merchants and account-wide storage. So far there’s no UI for buying or selling items, and no UI for long-term storage and retrieval of items. Both of these are going to share some UI and behind-the-scenes work, so I’m bundling them together.
- Character retirement and account-wide progress. Right from day one I’ve envisaged BotLG as an idle/incremental game, and the one key genre mechanic that’s missing is the idea of prestige; that is, giving up all your current progress for a long-term bonus. I’ll be implementing this by allowing player characters to retire, at which point they will provide resources periodically based on their skills.
I don’t regret doing this — I’m incredibly proud of what I’ve created — and similarly I’m not sad about going back into work; I’m looking forward to it. If I get everything listed ticked off, the game will contain all the major mechanics I envisaged, so I can’t complain.
I’m going to keep the Patreon campaign open until the end of February and then close it; it seems a little disingenuous to take monthly pledges for something I can’t hand-on-heart say I’ll be working on most of the time. If you want to continue to support BONES of the LOST GOD, I have a ko-fi donation page up and I’m going to try and use that a little more.
This is definitely not the end of the project! There’s still a tonne of content to implement (on top of the things listed above) and I have a feeling I’ll be updating and supporting this for a long time to come. Thanks for sticking around.
