Development for The Story of Draden is now complete! For our final week, we've focused entirely on visual polish, professionalism, and gameplay balance. Visuals:
- Mining section of town now made visually distinct.
- New grass sprites to fill in the town.
- Tower now has 4 different sprites to visually show damage.
- Title screen visuals.
- Trank will now wave hello if you come to his shop!
Professionalism
- Pause menu allowing players to go to title screen at any time.
- Improved our cutscenes' visuals.
- Improved some transitions.
Gamplay balance
- Tweaked almost every aspect of the game in terms of stats like HP and ore economy.
- Added continue option on game over, resetting players to their current day with an appropriate amount of resources.
- Gave the tower I-Frames upon losing a quarter of its health so it should be harder to accidentally lose your tower to the bandits.
Misc
- Trank will send you messages through a toast system.
Since this was our final week, we didn't want to risk too much with adding new content. The only content we might've added was a final boss, but we decided the 3rd day is hard enough as is. Previously, a lot of balance decisions were made around us developers playing the game. Since this is going to be a game at our school's showcase, we decided to balance the game around the average showcase player, who hasn't played the game for hundreds of runs like we have. In summary, the game is a bit easier. Other than balance, we added the final visual polish to the game. Some of this like the tower is for guidance and immersion, and others are to make the town seem more town-y like grass and the mining section. As well as this, there are very many QoL changes like the pause menu, Trank toast messages, continue buttons, etc. This is the end of development! We're really excited to finally release and showcase the game!
Itch: Draden494.itch.io
Game Jolt: Gamejolt.com
