Early Access Game World and Chapter Zero
over 5 years ago – Sun, Nov 01, 2020 at 11:15:27 AM

Hello Backers!

We’re so pleased with progress on the game world of Braided Shore, and today we’re excited to reveal just how much of it will be yours to explore in early access. As you can see, this western land mass is cleft by rivers large and small and there are many bays and inlets to explore as well as larger settlements, such as the northern city of Myr. New areas of land will be added throughout the early access period, extending the region across The Verve to the east and south and opening up more land, lore, levels and scope for adventure. 

Wilds, waterways... and a bustling trade city

At the south-easterly edge of the early access map lies the gem of the region - the city of Kasa. A huge old harbour city to the south of Braided Shore, Kasa owes its status as the land’s key trading city to its deep waters. The image above offers a glimpse of its outskirts as it looks now (these aren’t final graphics), and in our next post we’ll be sharing more screenshots and information about the city.

Starting with Chapter Zero

Book of Travels' early access period marks the start of Chapter Zero, the first in a sequence of chapters that will frame the evolving story of Braided Shore. Once early access levels up to full release, Chapter Zero will close and give way to Chapter One. Each new chapter will mark a new phase as the overarching storyline unfolds along with multiple small plots and event chains.

Chapters will also involve unique gameplay features and items which will be exclusive to the lifespan of that particular chapter, a design which we hope will enrich the experience of long time players over the game’s long life span. 

We’re still working on this concept and we’ll share more in a future post once we have more details in place. In the meantime, we’d love to know what you think about it, so please do post your thoughts below! And if you'd like to get these posts on Steam, join us there where you can also comment and follow our other studio news.

Best Wishes,

Helen and the Dev Team x

What is a TMO?
over 5 years ago – Sun, Oct 18, 2020 at 01:00:10 AM

Dear Backers,

Our update today explores the concept of a Tiny Multiplayer Online. You might remember this to be something Art Director Jakob talked about briefly in our Kickstarter video. We thought we should take a look at what it means for the game, as both a player and a designer. 

We’ve been really pleased to notice that for some, the Tiny Multiplayer format is one of the game’s biggest attractions. While it’s not exactly a genre, we think it works pretty well to describe a game where the amount of online players is capped. The result is that meeting other players is not commonplace and therefore, something a bit special.

It all began with Meadow

Might and Delight’s first networked game, Meadow, was something of an experiment, bringing the style and ambience of the Shelter series to an open game world where small groups of players can bound around together in animal guise, unlocking magic obelisks and communicating with emotes. The response we had from players was incredibly positive - they loved the magic of sharing wordless adventures together. Four years on, we’re proud to say that the Meadow forum and Discord channel is filled with stories of special moments of meeting and connection. (If you haven't played Meadow yet, remember that you have a key waiting for you in Backerkit!)

Find the Few

Feedback on the emotional impact of these connections took us by surprise, and we soon knew that the TMO experience was something we wanted to explore further. Players of Journey will know exactly how moving it can be to chance upon another player, especially in a non-directive, non-linear game world. In Journey, the multiplayer aspect is pushed to the limit of its definition: meetings with ‘companions’ being as few as one per game (and make for a truly sublime emotional beat). In Meadow up to fifty animals share a grove, and in Book of Travels we’ll be using our Early Access period to experiment with player numbers.

The game design challenge

While this isn’t entirely new ground for us, we know it's going to be a challenge. There are many table top roleplayers in the Book of Travels dev team, and they know just how important player interactions are in bringing adventures to life. So, striking a balance between rich roleplay and sparsity of player meetings is the challenge that we now face! We’ll be counting heavily on your feedback and the help of beta testers to finetune that balance.

Help us in our Endeavours!

What games have you enjoyed where player meetings are infrequent? Do you love RPGs? How do you feel about fewer meetings? We’d love your input, right here in the comments section. Thanks again for spending time with us!

Best Wishes,

Helen and the Dev Team x

Discord Dev Parties are Go!
over 5 years ago – Tue, Oct 06, 2020 at 11:45:29 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Watch Book of Travels Gameplay Snippets!
over 5 years ago – Sun, Oct 04, 2020 at 07:20:40 AM

Hello Backers!

Today we’re really excited to begin our fortnightly programme of updates with this video of gameplay clips. For many of you, this will be a first glimpse of the fully functioning game world - we hope you like it!

These clips were recorded on a single player server, so they give a sense of the game world without the presence of other players. We hope they give you a glimpse of some of the areas, environments and features that we're currently working on. Book of Travels is a TMO and we're looking forward to sharing more about how you'll interact in those occasional player meetings at some point in the future. Our next video update comes in November, when we'll be sharing longer, uninterrupted gameplay footage.

As always we would love to hear your thoughts, and the team will be checking in to answer your questions, so please ask away! And if you have something about the game that you want us to talk about or show, let us know right here in the comments section.

Best Wishes,

Helen & the Dev Team

Gameplay video coming soon! + New roadmap + Free game
over 5 years ago – Sat, Sep 26, 2020 at 12:18:44 AM

Dear Traveller,

We hope this update finds you well! It’s been a strange summer for us all, and during its course the team realised they needed to make a new schedule for Book of Travels. We’re sure you've heard how other studios have suffered the same setback owing to the various constraints of life under lockdown. Here at Might and Delight, we managed the reconfiguration quite quickly, relocating team members and their kit to their homes and keeping our workflow systems as tight as possible. 

But while playing-together-apart has saved us this summer, working together apart doesn't make for ideal coding collaboration. We were glad to have delivered the closed beta in June, but it was a smaller version than we'd have liked and it revealed to us the extent of the work ahead. We also have Shelter 3 in production and a happily thriving world of Meadow to maintain, so in the end we had to take stock and revise deadlines - early access is now scheduled for Q2 of 2021.

Our first gameplay video drops in November

As you can see in the graphic above, we’ve scheduled a gameplay video along with a major update in November. We’re REALLY looking forward to this and we think you’re going to love seeing the progress that we’ve made!

Fortnightly game dev updates

We know that you’ve been waiting patiently, and your enthusiasm and anticipation really have been like soul food for us through these trying times. The good news is that we'll be more present in the coming months. With our new schedule in place we’ve been able to make space for a new series of regular, fortnightly updates that will tell you where development is at and how the game is shaping up. They’ll start on October 2nd. 

We’ll continue to talk and listen to you here and through our social channels as well as in more focused ways – backers of Nomad and above will be able to join us at one of our Discord Dev Parties in September and we’re hoping to hold another, shorter beta with a bigger slice of Braided Shore at some point in the new year.

Later in the year we’ll be continuing our series of insights into different aspects of the development process in our Ask the Devs videos. We’ve enjoyed meeting many of you in Meadow and we hope that those backers who haven't used their key yet can hop in and say hi, not just in Meadow with emotes but to chat in words on Discord.

Merch coming soon

We’ve also heard your desire for merchandise and will soon have an Art Station store. We’ll be adding to this store as artwork gets finished and polished (and we’ll send an update to let you know when that’s live). 

A little game gift

Finally, we've added our notoriously tricky and hypnotically ambient Pid to every backer’s account as a free extra, just log in to Backerkit to get your key. Can you beat it?! Let us know how you get on! (If you've lost your survey link you can get a new link here.)

Once again, a huge thanks for your encouragement and kind words these last months. Do stay in touch! 

Best Wishes, 

Helen and the team at Might and Delight