Gameplay Update - The Omnipresent UI
almost 6 years ago – Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 01:40:20 PM

Dear Backers,

Thanks for taking the time to connect with us during these troubling times. The following update was written before we found ourselves in such troubles. But as we wrote previously, production continues and we must pedal along as best we can... So we really hope that you enjoy this latest update from Jakob and the team - probably the last we have time for between now and launching the beta in just a few weeks' time. Stay safe and be well! And don't forget to leave your comments! /Helen 

Designing the UI for Book of Travels

One of the most crucial parts of any RPG is the interface: your inventory, your character screen, your skill book. Today we want to share the progress that's been made and invite you to look, judge and comment on this omnipresent factor: the UI!

Conventional, but with a difference

The interface is probably one of the more difficult parts to develop in any game, mainly because it comes with so many expectations. Its core purpose is functionality, but it’s also a vital visual component - one that appears on your screen almost the entire time you are playing.

Our idea is to make a somewhat classical interface that leans on many conventional solutions found in other games. But we also want to do it our way, adding flavors from the game’s ethos. One example is that we are using a lot of icons and symbols instead of text - not everywhere, and not only, but often. Together with inspiration from classical pen and paper roleplay, the style makes for an interesting mix of traditional and new.  To get around the annoying inconvenience that symbols can entail, one can always press the question mark to read about a particular UI-screen or use mouse over to write out the name of symbols. 

The look itself is inspired by paper and cards. Items and Skills are presented as cards and when creating your character you get to choose between different background cards that tell the story of your character. Being able to bring life to your character through its personality is vital for us, and we have added in many options to write your own custom information besides the choices of traits, origin and other factors that you must choose. 

HUD options

Skills and emotes are two major focal points of the ingame HUD and to always have access to these is very important. Their importance needs to balanced with the often large space of the screen they cover. So we've implemented functions that allow you to shrink, expand and hide individual parts of the interface - or hide it all together. Besides skills and expressions, energy and stamina status is visible in the top left corner, along with the “shortcut” buttons at the lower middle. Currently these include: Game view, Character sheet, Stats, Custom info, Inventory and equipment, Skillbook and Reagents, Map, Diary and notebook, Take screenshot, Menu/Settings.

We hope you've enjoyed this first peek at the interface. As fans of the genre it would be amazing to hear your ideas and feedback regarding the UI. Together we can fine tune this part of the experience so that it fits the game that we are creating, and the people we are creating it for! As always, thank you for your time and commitment! 

Best Wishes,

Jakob and the Book of Travels team

Beta is on track! + Another chance to join us in Meadow
almost 6 years ago – Wed, Apr 08, 2020 at 11:50:05 PM

Dear Backer,

This is just a quick update to let you know how things are in our newly dispersed studio. We want to reassure you that the Might & Delight team are still going strong and production is still on schedule. That means beta testing is still on course for May 6th. We are really excited about sharing Book of Travels with you and we we'll be sending instructions to beta testers very soon!

If you are still to do your survey and collect your rewards be sure to do that here! (This is especially important if you are beta testing for us.) 

Play with the Devs

We had a great session last week, and we'll be doing another this Thursday! That's April 9th at 15.00 CEST in Grove 5 (see bottom left of the screen to select). Hope to see you there!

Best Wishes and take care,

Helen and the team at Might and Delight

The Way Ahead + Play with the Devs
almost 6 years ago – Thu, Apr 02, 2020 at 02:53:25 AM

Dear Backers,

Wherever you are, you’re most likely reading this against a background of troubling newsreels and unusual routines, of uncertain futures and surreal conversations with friends, family, co-workers, strangers... At Might & Delight we’re working from our homes trying to manage the new demands of isolation, stay-at-home kids and ambient instability. And while we push ahead with development schedules for Shelter 3 and Book of Travels we’re taking a new look at ways to connect with you in these new times. (If you have any thoughts or suggestions, we’d love to hear them.)

As backers, most of you will now own Meadow, our online multiplayer. (You may still need to redeem your Steam key by logging in to Backerkit with the same email as you kickstarter-account is registered to.) From time to time we host a 'Play with the Devs' session. With so many at people home and alone, and with spring showing its first signs, we thought that now would be a good time to host another. In this current context there's certainly a bittersweet flavour to the connections we make in virtual worlds, and it’s with extra special warmth that we invite you to join us in Meadow on Friday.

We will be there at 13.00 CEST wearing transparent dev skins, and to add a little extra fun we thought we’d play a game of Hide & Seek: you’ll know when you’ve succeeded in finding a dev by the way the skin will transform! And be sure to come and find your animal friends on the Steam forum or Discord after the session. (For those of you in the time zones this works less well for, we apologise and we'll be looking to redress the balance sometime soon!)

It's fair to say that most of us have heads full of grey clouds right now, so let’s find some sunshine in adventuring together! We are all looking forward to it very much and we hope to see you there.

In the meantime, please stay safe and look after one another.

Best Wishes,

Helen and the team at Might & Delight

Gameplay Update 2: Skills!
about 6 years ago – Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 02:42:27 AM

Hello Backers!

We are thrilled to share another big piece of the puzzle that makes the core of our game design in Book of Travels: skills! This has been one of our focal points as of late and now we’re ready to offer a deep dive into their function in the game, shedding some light on what makes them special compared to other RPGs and how they look and behave.

Firstly it’s important to keep in mind that we’re trying to build a roleplay experience that challenges many of the norms and structures that fans of the genre are taking for granted. It’s our hope that what you read here will shed light on our philosophy regarding skills and that you’ll be as excited about them as we are! 

 
The four types of skills and the four winds 

In order to start explaining something as complex an RPG skill system, we need to begin with the foundation. There are four types of skills that your character can learn. Knots, Teas, Abilities and Passives. They each have different tones, uses and gameplay orientation. What all skills share is that they are not all tailored to boost your stats or give you obvious advantages. Many skills are just ways for you to express your character and to use for roleplaying purposes in social situations. 

Knots

The tying of knots is a magical practice in the game world and allows for a variety of wondrous effects and functions. The time it takes to tie a knot depends on its complexity,  but after untying it, the effects of knotspells are often direct. 

Teas

If the knots are the “scrolls” then teas are the “magic potions” of our world. Deeply rooted in the culture of the world, the brewing of tea is a common practice both among ordinary folk and practising mystics. It requires preparation and patience but the results are often rewardingly strong and may last for long periods of time.  The only limitation is that just one tea effect can be enjoyed at a time. 

Abilities

These are skills that don’t work by magical principles. Hiding in bushes, fishing, tricks and perks will instead improve everything from social skills, world interactions to survival gameplay. Some can be used all the time, others require special conditions or even tools. 

Passives

Even if the term is common in RPGs we treat passive skills a bit differently in Book of Travels. Obviously they work on the principle of giving permanent bonuses to your character, but many of them can give you unusual and flat out weird bonuses if used correctly.  Our idea is that players can use the other categories in conjunction with their passives to create tricky chains of bonuses. An example is drinking a tea that makes you unaffected by the elements, using a knot to call for rain clouds and then having a passive skill that gives you bonuses when standing in rain. With the amount of skills we are prepping, we are quite convinced that you can come up with some pretty awesome combos. 

Winds

Besides the four types of skills there are four winds. These are a big part of the world lore and are considered divine or magical. Each skill, regardless of type, has a wind connected to it. The four winds all have their own “personalities” and they represent differences between skills. Skills of the Southern Wind are orientated towards physicality, interactions and trade. Skills of the Western Wind are often focused towards creativity, illusions, and strong magics. Northern Wind skills are cerebral and orientated towards science, protection and group aiding spells. Skills of the Eastern Wind are naturalistic, spiritual and often include animal skills and survival tricks. Each character has an affinity for one of the four winds, making skills of that wind easier to learn.

How to acquire skills

Unlike many RPGs, your character won’t learn skills per automation upon levelling up. Instead we have made gathering skills into something a bit more contextual and roleplay like (you're likely to learn the fishing skill from a fisherman, and a master at a tea house might teach you a magical tea blend). Of course there are numerous ways to acquire skills, such as learning them from NPCs, receiving them as rewards in events, trading for them, or finding them randomly in loot. A skill you write in your skill book must be activated or learned before it can be used. This is done by allocating points in the skills you want to use. Skills vary in how many points are required to learn them, and it’s up to you to balance your array of skills. Will you collect many cheaper, simpler skills, or a few more potent and rare?

Using skills

Skills all have conditions on when and where they can be used. We're not very fond of “do whatever you like” type of RPGs and will prohibit players from assembling a fireplace on a wooden deck in a tea house. Besides the conditions of when and where, skills are used differently depending on type. Passives are always active. Abilities can be used freely without cost but work as cooldowns. Knots and teas both use the same fuel: reagents. These are things that you collect in the wind that you then use to craft knots and teas. A combination is often needed to complete a knot or a tea. “Dandelion” plus a “tuft of animal hair” to give one example. In our world the magical practises are somewhat alchemic and reagents are not always gathered from nature. Coagulated engine oil and driftwood dust are amongst the things you can expect to tie into your knots.

We hope you have enjoyed this summary of skills in the game. Please let us know your thoughts about them in the comments. As always we do actually read everything and will gladly use suggested skills in the future so feel free to brainstorm!

Much love from Jakob and the team

Creating Book of Travels: painting the world by hand
about 6 years ago – Sat, Mar 07, 2020 at 12:22:25 AM

Dear Backers, 

Much has been said about the art style, our pipeline and graphical process we use in making BoT. Today we're sharing a peek at some of our most recent assets - ones that we are now implementing in the game. It’s really important that everything you see in the game is carefully handcrafted and painted manually. This takes a team of four 2D artists working full time on the project. Some assets can be painted in a day, others take up to a week for one artist to paint. Below you can see two ancient trees that only appear in one place in the game world. Their names are Kesnan and Kham and they stand tall in one of the areas on the western side of Braided Shore.  You can also see a tipping lantern, which can be interacted with via an Endeavour event and has to be created in several parts to be able to animate. 

Nerdy Art Trivia 

(Or scroll to go directly to the images)

In order to make all the painted assets of the game coherent, we've created a meticulous 2D pipeline that ensures that the style is consistent and that all things visual are in sync. We use a specific brush for all assets and never stray from it or its size (15px). We also use a tricky hatching technique for the brushwork. It gives the art more of a textured feel and adds detail and variation to each piece. Besides that, we have also adapted a rather unusual way to underlight the objects, using brighter values low and darker ones high. This was inspired by A.J Casson who’s unique style is one of our major influences. The underlight helps to create an unpredictable and odd impression that we really love. 

Once finished, our game designers can start drafting and  implementing events that take place at or near these unique props. 

We hope you’ve enjoyed this first dive into our process. We’d love to hear any thoughts, feedback or ideas about this or suggestions for things you would like us to feature here. Let us know in the comments section! 

Thank you for your time!

Jakob, Marcus, Charlotte, Olle and the rest of the team