Something’s been bugging me about Cardinal Quest 2 for a while. Yesterday I fixed it.

Gender and skin tone are now customisable.

The concept I’m trying out is that you can have an explicit choice of gender in character creation without the outcome necessarily having an explicit gender. See, it’s a single player game. You know what your character’s gender is – you picked it! If the sprite itself is ambiguous, that’s fine. The characters don’t need to be strongly coded to one gender or the other… I’m thinking they just need to be different, so you can tell you’ve made a choice and the game’s acknowledged that choice.

So I’ve gone for a mix of character designs where some have strong gender signifiers and some don’t, roughly in line with their culture or needs. Practical Fighters slip on bulky, figure obscuring armour; weapon-despising Pugilists, their physiques a defining part of their identities, prefer to travel light; flashy Wizards wouldn’t be caught dead in a muddy field looking like commoners. And so on.

This is perhaps a bit experimental. Choices in games tend to have obvious consequences, so one which has less obvious consequences than it could have might be interpreted as broken rather than making a point. I think I’m OK with that though.

If you’ve got any comments on the character designs re: gender or skin tone let me know. This is something I really want to get right and I’d appreciate pointers. 🙂

I’ve been redoing the New Game menu sequence.

This started off as a necessary Chapter Select screen to let you pick between the three chapters of content the game will have. It ended up absorbing a bit more functionality; I needed to rewrite the character selection screen, so I threw it in there. I also realised I’d lost interest in the idea of Bastion-style extra challenges – so I’ve gone for three tiers of carefully calibrated difficulty instead.

It took a while to figure out a new flow that incorporated all these decisions while providing you with the necessary information without feeling overcomplicated, but after fiddling around a ton I’ve finally settled on something. When you hit New Game now, here’s what you see:

There are three acts. Each one is about hunting down and murdering an evil tyrant in the FACE.

The stuff in the bottom corners is the difficulty you’ve cleared that act on with each character. This is important.

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I’ve been updating CQ2’s lighting model! I’m quite happy with how it’s come out. Here’s a video:

It really does make the whole thing look nicer. I think I’ll keep it. <3

Just for fun, here’s a disco floor shot from halfway through coding the new lighting model:

Apparently I hadn’t covered this guy before! He’s one of the classical three classes as seen in CQ1 – along with the Fighter and Wizard – who’ve received the CQ2 skill tree treatment.

The Thief is a jerk.

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The latest complete class is THE RANGER, who is totally my favourite of the new classes. Though really that’s down to this fella:

See, stuff gets way more tactically interesting when you’ve got a semi-autonomous allied character to control and look after. You have to worry about flanking, line of sight, managing two health bars and so on. It makes the game a bit slower and more involved, but I think that’s okay for one class! It’s a fun change of pace.

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I’m a huge believer in visualisation when it comes to system design. I’ll walk through some I’ve been doing over the past week and how it’s helped.

I recently doubled the number of items you can find in CQ2, using some sprites we had lying around (and filling in a few of the gaps). This led to a few issues. I mean, if you want ten items in any given category then you need them all to be unique, right? At the same time, if you use too many different statistics for items in a category, choosing between two items can involve 4 or 5 statistics more often than not. To avoid that I wanted to mostly stick within three core stats for each item category and two for weapons (since they have damage as well).

So it’s a matter of creating as much item diversity as possible with as little diversity as possible. That’s a job for a feature matrix!

I charted this stuff out to help me make sure all the stats get some love and that no two item categories are completely redundant in terms of the trade-offs they ask you to make. The results aren’t totally balanced – I’ve kept some quirks/redundancies just because they work thematically, like most armour providing defence and intelligence/faith/magic resist generally clustering together.

I then drilled down within each category with the same approach. Weapons were the messiest – there are 15 weapons now and that demanded careful attention to ensure they each felt unique.

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Recent events, in brief:

• The Indiegogo campaign stalled at about 10% funded after the first few days. I was working all hours to try and keep it going but it wasn’t enough.
• Once it became clear the campaign wouldn’t hit the target, well, it took a lot more out of me than I thought it would. I couldn’t really face working on it for a bit.
• I took a break and then did a few weeks of contract work which would bring in money instead.
• I’m now back on CQ2 full time and will be posting regular updates again until it’s released in the near future.

Like this one!

I’m currently adding a whole bunch more items and overhauling the random magical enchantments you can find items with. Each kind of magical stat boost now has its own set of prefixes, so you can find Hopeful Iron Boots or a Warding Short Sword. It gives things a bit more character, I think.

Adding a whole bunch more items has raised the interesting problem of giving each and every one its own identity. Thing is, if items in any given class are too diverse in terms of the stat bonuses they provide, the comparison cards end up with four or five rows of stats to compare every time and picking items gets way too messy and involved. I’m still trying to find the right balance there, but it’s an interesting challenge in terms of making things as varied as possible but not too varied.

I know, I know – I’m avoiding the awkward but necessary task of figuring out a final feature set and release date. Still, item variety is the thing beta testers wanted the most; it seems like a good place to start. 🙂

Cardinal Quest 2’s Indiegogo campaign has BEGUN.

As part of that, I’ve put up the first public demo! You can get it from the Indiegogo page; give it a look and see what you think 😀

The opening weekend of Greenlight has passed – and it was pretty great!

Fifteen thousand people have checked out Cardinal Quest II. It moved up to 1% early on, which was awesome (only a handful of projects have risen above 1% so far, so it’s a big deal!). It’s also been included in almost two dozen collections – my favourite of which is IndieGames.com’s top Greenlight picks, if you’re curious.

I want to write about another collection here though. Dan Griliopoulous started a collection of colour-blindness-friendly games on Greenlight, aptly named Redlight: The Accessible Collection. I’d read about supporting red-green colour blindness before but had let it slip my mind while getting the game ready. Still, with Dan’s reminder I spent a few hours going over a whole bunch of little things like this in the UI:

…and now there’s no information conveyed purely through red/green colour coding. Dan’s confirmed it’s totally playable – I strongly suspect it wouldn’t have been before.

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Just a quick update today, since it’s been a while and I FEEL BAD ABOUT THAT

That’s a super early snapshot of CQ2’s “high score” system. You’ll notice the total absence of a score. Right? Truth is, though it’s a system set up to reward skilful play, it’s first and foremost set up to do what I reckon people really want from roguelikes – a permanent record of the awesome or stupid stuff they did. It comes with a loose and vaguely intuitive ranking, but it’s mostly there to provide history. History like “how often you died carrying a healing potion”. 😀

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