Two Years of Travels - Death, New Areas and New Events
about 1 year ago – Tue, Oct 31, 2023 at 07:34:11 AM

Dear Traveller

Time certainly flies - it’s October already! We hope that you're enjoying your autumn season and are playing lots of good games. How is it going on our end, I hear you ask? Well, we’re making good progress on Book of Travels and are hitting a new milestone very soon! This month marks our second anniversary since we launched the game into Early Access on Steam, and we have some exciting news to share with you today.

In celebration of this anniversary, today we’re releasing the biggest content update of the year for Book of Travels.

Firstly, we have 15 new achievements for you to work towards as well as 8 new events that will lead you to new areas and introduce you to new characters and merchants. Amongst these new areas are the update’s 5 new locations; the Cistern, Knalla Tunnel, a mysterious shipwreck, a dark outhouse and the Siram Watchtower. You’ll also find several new items that will aid you on your journey in Braided Shore.

Another exciting ingredient to this update, which we think lines up perfectly with the Halloween season, is the reintroduction of death in Book of Travels. Braided Shore is a place of magic and spirits. Here, death doesn’t have to be permanent. If you find yourself slain by bandits, or poisoned by blowfish, your spirit will not find rest. Instead, you will traverse the realm beyond death, and search for the passage back. You took a risk and gambled with your life - now, you may risk it all to return from beyond the grave.

There’s also a reward for fans who venture out to Traveller’s Meadow, where (for a limited time of two weeks) there will be an encounter that upon completion gives you a flower crown. It’s made from the petals of the flowers found in Traveller’s Meadow, which fans will remember was covered with one flower for every individual Kickstarter backer - so we consider it very special.

This anniversary marks a milestone, as we’re now moving ahead with a steady release cycle of new content - moving closer to exiting Early Access and entering 1.0 release. Our focus is on expanding the game world with new locations, encounters and storylines, while we, in parallel, work on polishing old features, as well as introduce completely new game mechanics. Our goal during this time is to realise the full vision of the game, and make sure that every core feature of the original design is represented.

The team and I think you’ll enjoy what we have to offer with this update but we’re not done yet, as there are things still on the horizon to look forward to. We’ve mentioned previously that we are actively working on redesigning combat, and soon we will have something to show for our hard work. Within a few weeks time, we will publish a Preview of combat, separate from the main game. With this, you will be able to test the system itself. It will still have placeholder UI, UX, audio and animations, and you will be limited to only using a sword for the time being. Over time, we will update the preview with more combat features, and we invite you to offer feedback on the system - this will be your chance to make your voice heard. If you want, you’ll be able to follow along on Preview as we finalise this feature, but if you’d rather wait until it’s complete, you’ll find it in the main game soon enough.

Further ahead you can also look forward to more Southern locations, new mystery areas to explore, a complete inventory redesign (that lays the groundwork for several features that are dependent on easy item management), the beginning of survival gameplay like cooking as well as new combat encounters and skills.

Also, you may know we’ve been working on getting a merchandise store up and running. We’re happy to announce that it will launch in time for this holiday season. We will get back to you with the details when it’s live but we can say that on day one, our stock will include t-shirts, tote bags and teacups - with more kinds of items coming further down the line. Here’s a small sample of our initial offerings.

Lastly, we’re glad to announce that we’re launching our Book of Travels Lore Page today as well. On it, you’ll be able to read up on the ins and outs of Braided Shore lore, straight from the source. We know that there are lots of lore fans amongst you and we expect that a site with all of that juicy information will tickle your fancy. Click here to visit the page, and do let us know what you think!

All in all, a lot of stuff is happening in MaD land. We’re excited to hear what you think of all this when you've had time to get your feet wet!

Until then, may your tea never grow cold.

Oliver Thulin
Community Manager, Might and Delight

Book of Travels; The Legacy, the Present and the Future
over 1 year ago – Thu, May 25, 2023 at 07:16:10 AM

Greetings Khelim!

Since our last community update, our team has expanded quite a bit, and we have been hard at work on many different parts of the game. As you all know, there have been technical challenges for us to overcome, and we’re slowly but steadily reaching a point where our work is not just happening on a systems and tools level that is mostly out of sight to our players, but where we can actively put out new gameplay content, and expand the world of Braided Shore.

We are now at a point where we have a wonderfully diverse team of engineers, artists, writers, user experience, level and audio designers, and this has enabled us to work on many features and events in parallel. For now, we will focus on the work that’s been done in recent months, but know that you’ll get to know more members of our team soon!

We have put a lot of work into our backend, development tools, and improving the game performance overall. This work has enabled us to finally inch our way to opening the gates to not only Kasa, but other new areas in Braided Shore as well. Right this moment, there are ways to sneak into the locked city, and as the mysteries of Kasa develop, you will find new stories to pursue, and new areas to explore. There are both technical and narrative reasons as to why we’re rolling out the city in these “chapters”, but we’re confident that the slow burn will be worth it, and we hope that you’ll find the new adventures rewarding.

Before we get into some of the other features being worked on, we have a note from the narrative team:

Greetings from the scholars of Braided Shore!

Kasa is a city with a long history. With parts stretching beyond even the Asken Folk’s arrival on Braided Shore. Even though parts of its history happened many ages ago, it can still be felt in her inhabitants and current events. A dire incident has recently closed down the city, and has impacted not just the ones stuck outside, but also the ones trapped within the city walls.

With the helpful recent addition of a new Quest and Flag system, we now have a lot more tools to work with in order to design more reactive, varied and branching events. With these new tools we have been hard at work, writing and designing events and quests for the recent addition of Kasa and beyond!

Just the Old Town district of Kasa has currently surpassed the Event count of the town of Crossings, with more being worked on and added in coming updates. It may take many trips into the locked city to uncover all her secrets and lore. Expect to meet Moonsoakers, Alley Grocers, Visiting Historians and more.

Other parts of Braided Shore have also received new events with new items, along with updates to older ones. A Mystical Gravedigger, an Old Travelling Smith and a Fall Gem Searcher are just a few of the additions and updates to the outside.

To complement the new fishing update that we rolled out a little bit ago, we have also included 20 new fish and fishable creatures to the waters around Braided Shore, with many Prize Catches hidden in certain out-of-the-way locations for the brave and talented Fisher to discover.

-Simon, Narrative Designer

As you can tell from this update, many of the features being worked on overlap in some way. The fishing update ties into a bigger collaborative effort to introduce cooking to the game. This work is not limited to only the cooking itself, but includes a complex system of recipes that are culturally significant to the inhabitants of Braided Shore, as well as inventory updates to support the feature.

Similarly, many disciplines have come together to design an in-game journal. Since many of the Book of Travels developers are also active players of the game, we’re well acquainted with the habit of keeping a notebook on your desk as you play, to take notes on both areas that you’ve explored and interactions you’ve had on your travels. Our goal is to create a journal in-game, and that we can update it with new features overtime, so that you have proper in-game tools to chronicle your journey.

But wait, there’s more! (we say, as if we were a peddler found at the outskirts of Crossings, trying to trade you overpriced umbrellas on a sunny day)

For the past couple of sprint cycles, we have been able to focus on combat once more. It’s a long process of reviewing what we already have, redesigning some of it, and creating completely new animations and ways of fighting. It is also very rewarding work, though, and it’s bringing us one step closer to finalising the vision that we set out with back in 2019.

We’re very excited to show you the things we’ve been working on during the first half of the year, and as we get closer to releasing these completely new features for the game, you can expect in-depth looks at them, both through updates such as this, and videos.

Until next time, take care, fellow travellers, and may your tea never grow cold.

Best wishes,
Eira & the team at Might and Delight

The Difference Between Features and Content
almost 2 years ago – Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 09:01:23 AM

One of the frustrations often expressed is “new content when?”. As our community knows, we have spent several months looking at the tech in use in the game, rebuilding systems etc to hopefully improve the general stability and performance of the game (we are aware some people still have an FPS drop). As we have been doing this we have continued to work on new content but we have not yet shown that new Content. To this end we feel its worth taking a look at exactly what is meant by “Content” and what we have been doing.

The DLC Plan:

During our Kickstarter we released a Roadmap which included different Downloadable Content packs and the order they would be released in. With this map you now get some ideas of what areas of the game world we will release in each DLC pack. This takes us to what is meant by Content, as for a large number of players content = maps, and this is a very misleading way of looking at games. Often on our reviews we see people say “there is nothing to do” and yet we know there are players who have played for hundreds of hours. This is because content is often layered within each area, and until you dig past the first few layers you don’t find the content that is hidden underneath. We realise that being unable to find that content is our fault, and that is why we needed to re-write some of the features to make it easier to reach the content.

During development and Early Access the general process is you create some “features”, people use the features and the number of features in an area reflects a level of content. When people ask for more content, pushing out more areas with features that don’t work just leads to more things not working. An easy example is our fire creation system. You can build fires anywhere, but we have some prebuilt fires you can just light yourself. If that is broken, having 20 zones with 20 broken fires makes little sense. So, it is important to make sure features work and are robust and useable before you use them at a large scale. With a quest creation system, if its broken and thus delivers broken quests, adding 20 new quests just leads to more broken quests and a higher level of frustration with our players that we don’t want them to experience. Changeable clothing is a feature, 20 different cloaks are content. If clothing is broken having 20 different cloaks does not mean anything.

This is why it’s important to us to get Features working correctly as and when we release content. This includes changing the way we explain features so the existing and new content we have already added around starting quests and exploring can be experienced the way we want. As we released new achievements, new storylines and quests are starting to be uncovered. Over the coming weeks the layers of content around the changing storyline will start to be unlocked. Some of it is already there, and some of you have found it. We have enjoyed seeing people piece together their theories and examining every piece of junk they find hoping it reveals some dark secret – there is more to come...

Until then,

Joe, COO

Community Storytime
almost 2 years ago – Wed, Dec 14, 2022 at 04:38:50 PM

Good Wednesday to you, dear Traveller!

Today I'd just like to share our latest video, Community Storytime. It's entirely based on first hand experiences that you have shared with us. It's our way of highlighting our wonderful community and their stories, and I personally think it came out really nice.

Watch on Youtube: 

That's it for today, but you'll hear more from us soon. Thank you very much for your continued support, your passion and for playing Book of Travels. You are a big part of what makes our game special.

Best wishes,

Oliver & the team at Might and Delight

Content Drop: 1 Year EA Anniversary Digital Goodies
almost 2 years ago – Fri, Dec 02, 2022 at 09:40:24 PM

Dear Traveller,

We hope you're having a fantastic holiday season. As you know, it's been over a year since we launched Book of Travels into Early Access and the world got to explore this world of Braided Shore that we've worked on for over half a decade. And even though there's been bumps in the road we are still fully committed to making Book of Travels the best game that it can be. More importantly, we see how much you - our players - share our belief in our vision for this world.

 We appreciate you very much. And as a small token of that appreciation, we're releasing piece of downloadable content that we call 1 Year EA Anniversary Digital Goodies.

A Bundle of Book of Travels Art

This free fan kit art bundle includes a collection of pieces of art, music tracks, wallpapers and more. It’s a small token of our appreciation of your continued support and passion for Book of Travels, and something to hold you over while you wait for the next big in-game content drop.

2 BoT Cover images, Digital art (HD):

The First Cover.png
 The Second Cover.png

3 Hand painted Forms, Digital Art (HD)

The Crested.png
 The Goodward.png
 The Veiled.png

4 Hand painted Digital Art (HD):

Kettem Rajh.png
 Kettem.png
 Maisu.png
 Saida the Sea Fury.png

1 Timelapse video:

Painting Ketten Rajh.mp4

Music:

Two free songs from the Soundtrack as MP3
 Paths (Main Theme).mp3
 The Elden Road.mp3

1 Map:

A new map of Braided Shore (Updated artwork, HD)
Wallpapers for desktop and smartphones - a selection of beautiful and hand painted art from the world of Book of Travels: Maps, art with forms and creatures you can play or meet in the game, items, clothes, food and much, much more:
 14 x 1080 x 1920 (smartphone)
 7 x 1920 x 1080 (desktop)
 7 x 1920 x 1080 (desktop)
 5 x 1920 x 1200 (desktop)
 6 x 2160 x 1920 (desktop)

We hear from a lot of you that you'd love to get some high definition Book of Travels art in bulk, so we hope that this will come as a nice little surprise. Again - thank you for being with us as we continue to grow and improve Book of Travels. You'll hear from us again soon! Here's the link to the Steam page. And if you can't download it on Steam, here you can just download a zip file with the contents.

 May your tea never grow cold!

Best wishes,
 Oliver & the team at Might and Delight