Playing Passage in Book of Travels
over 2 years ago – Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 05:36:46 PM

Dear Traveller,

Should you ever wander into The Voices’ Tavern at night time, you may be offered a game of Passage. Passage is one of many ways to distract yourself on your travels and it’s a game of luck and strategy. For full ambiance, why not take a listen to the soundtrack A Game of Passage as you read...

A game with hidden depths 

While the game play is relatively simple, the cards themselves are said to hold deeper significance and are regarded as something far more solemn and auspicious than mere entertainment. To many, Passage cards hide a secret, and some folk are quite fixated on discerning a revelation in their inter-relations. And so it’s not only for the material losses folk have suffered that a game of Passage is taboo in Braided Shore. The game is more than a little socially unacceptable, which is why gamblers tend to play discreetly - most usually, Passage is played in The Voices’ Tavern, although Travellers may on occasion find themselves approached by a card-prone stranger.

Gambling & deck building

You’ll be able to play Passage at any point in Chapter Zero, and while gambling isn’t possible just yet, in future you’ll be able to win or lose your belongings and gamble your way to fortune or destitution. In the meantime, trying your hand at Passage risk-free will be a good opportunity to get to grips with the game in general and to learn some strategy. Then, when gambling is in place, you’ll have Passage skills enough to put to work and win!

The game will also become a deck builder, and as the world evolves, so will your cards! We look forward to sharing more about how you’ll collect new cards and what you’ll be gambling with in a future update. 

With just less than two weeks to launch we are really excited to share all that we've shown you here on this blog for the last two years! What features are you looking forward to trying out? Is there anything more you'd like you'd like to get more info on before you play? Please do drop your thoughts right here!

Best Wishes,

Helen & the Dev Team x

Releasing in October!
over 2 years ago – Tue, Sep 28, 2021 at 12:50:52 PM

Dear Traveller,

When we made the decision to delay Book of Travels back in August, we knew we wanted to make sure that we were confident that we could meet the new deadline before we announced it to you. A while ago I wrote a post in which I described a set of nasty bugs that I (un)lovingly called the Unholy Trio, and the team has since vanquished that beast. Therefore I can finally say, with confidence, that we have a release date to share with you. 

Book of Travels enters Early Access with Chapter Zero on October 11th.

Wow, that felt good to get off the chest. We knew what date we wanted to go with all along, and it has been a challenge to keep that from you until now. Especially when seeing some of you speculating that the game was delayed to next year, or worse.  But now it's out there and we can all start gearing up for launch. Thank you again for still being with us – it means the world to us! 

Growing together in Early Access

We do, once again, want to point out that this is an Early Access launch. There will be issues to be solved, there is content to be added, mechanics and systems to be iterated on and (most importantly) player feedback to be heeded. 

Chapter Zero is the first season, if you will, of the ongoing story we're telling with Book of Travels. It will last for the entirety of our Early Access period of two years and we're beyond excited to have you come onboard and be a part of shaping this into the game of our dreams.

We'll have more to share about our roadmap for Chapter Zero soon, but we can share that the first month after launch will be strictly about looking at player feedback and taking suggestions – no extra content will be added until we've taken that time to closely examine your first impressions. We want you to feel like we're actually listening to what you have to say about the game after launch, and part of my job will be to make sure you do.

Exciting times, indeed! Once again, thank you so, so very much for your support, patience and passion. We're less than three weeks away from our maiden voyage, and we can't wait to have you with us in Braided Shore!

Best wishes, 

Oliver & The Dev Team xx

Four New Forms for Building Characters
over 2 years ago – Thu, Sep 16, 2021 at 02:29:50 PM

Dear Traveller,

Some time ago we took a look at the Book of Travels character creation process in a post that explains how character creation is one of the ways in which the game will allow you a wide range of personal expression in your roleplay. (You can get a video insight with Programmer, Game Designer and Discord hero Arvid right here on Youtube.)

Today we’re excited to be sharing four new Forms, and just like last time there will be Discord roles available for each one, so if you haven’t joined us there yet, please do dive in and get roled up! It’s been really cool to dip into Discord chat these last few weeks and hear your thoughts and ideas about our dev insight videos and reasons for our final date push. It’s also becoming clear that choosing Forms is something of a topic - and not always easy! So it's good to know that you’ll be able to create many characters in the game, and it’s not too early to start thinking about yours - this is a game for creative souls and character creation is just the beginning. We’d love to hear your ideas here or on Discord. And please know that while the Forms represent a kind of archetype they are only the starting point and it’s up to you to develop personas and backstories with as much detail, complexity and nuance as you see fit. We hope you like our latest additions! 

The Crested and The Ribboned

While The Crested shows no vanity, they are naturally dignified and uninhabited about their sophisticated ways. Their ease and clear mindedness finds them accomplished in many arts and well placed to succeed in all kinds of company. The Ribboned’s love of home and nature manifests a spirituality that makes profound connections with all things living. Home and community are where The Ribboned is most energised, but their grounded, centred soul means they take both in heart when travelling.

The Larker and The Veiled

Likeability is not The Larker’s goal but merry times are in the offing when The Larker is around. Adventure comes in many forms and are rarely serious - so long as leisure and idle times abound, a Larker’s day is as it should be. The Veiled is at once inconspicuous and remarkable, holding to the edges of activity where they absorb goings-on from a place of detachment and stillness. But obscurity comes with mystique, the allure of which makes this solitary watcher an enigmatic type with a quiet penchant for power.

-------

Finally, we’d like to say a word about what has been termed our ‘indefinite postponement’... it is not indefinite! With every day that passes we get closer to securing our new release date, and while we’re not yet ready to reveal it, it really isn’t far away! It’s so important to us that we have your trust and that means that we want to be sure that the date we give really is the date we release and not a day later. So when we know for sure, you will too. Book of Travels is coming! Stay tuned and stay in touch!

Best Wishes,

Helen & the Dev Team xx

PS. To see all eight Forms so far revealed, head to our Steam post

How We're Doing & Where We're Going
over 2 years ago – Sat, Sep 04, 2021 at 12:40:14 AM

Dear Traveller,

When you last heard from us, we made the announcement that we wouldn't be able to hit our previously set release date of August 30th. Today we would like to give some more insight on why this decision was made and where we're at in development. But first things first: on behalf of the entire team at Might and Delight I would personally like to thank every one of you for the amazing understanding and support that you showed us when we announced this delay to you.

It was clear that many of you were disappointed, just like we were, but the overwhelming majority of you still voiced your support and faith in our decision and it's hard to explain how comforting that was to us. So, once again, thank You so much for still being with us!

Now, onwards...

The Unholy Trio

As we described in the delay announcement, it was thanks to the feedback and data provided by our beta testers that we realized that we weren't in a releasable state. And while there are many things that could use some ironing out, it was mainly three issues that we felt absolutely needed to be looked at before launch. Since I'm so cool and edgy I've been calling this set of bugs "The Unholy Trio".

The Unholy First, and probably the most annoying out of the three, is a severe case of rubberbanding. This would have our players click to move somewhere, only for the game to slingshot them back to a previously occupied location and it made travelling take much longer than it should. Obviously this would be a problem in any game, let alone one called Book of Travels. Worse yet, it didn't only affect the player, but also things like NPCs and our combat system.

The Unholy Second made it so that things started spawning in places where they shouldn't. Events would appear in the wrong positions on the map, forest animals could be seen in densely populated cities and enemy characters would pop up into tea houses. Is there any place more inconvenient to be ambushed in than a tea house? The Unholy Third is simply making NPCs invisible to the player, which happened randomly here and there.

We can't have that, now can we?

Blessings in disguise

Now, I'm happy to report that the team is very close to fixing all three of these issues so that none of the players jumping in on launch day will be haunted by them. 

Of course, since we are launching into Early Access, we do want to emphasize that the game will have issues like bugs and balancing issues on release. It's just that these particular bugs were too prevalent and too detrimental to the general play experience for us to just roll with it, despite the fact that Early Access titles aren't expected to work flawlessly right out of the gate. The Unholy Trio needed to go.

Besides polishing work, there's another upside to the extra time that we've allowed ourselves. The team is currently deepening the experience further than we would've had time for previously, with more quests and dangers for the player to dive into. Additionally, we are making new areas that we'll add to the game world early in the Early Access period. We will have a more detailed roadmap of what is to come after launch soon.

We're not announcing the release date today, but we have decided on one and it's not as far off as some of you have been speculating. We're so excited to start this journey with you, and that's what it is going to be – a journey. That's why we're doing the Early Access period, because we want to shape Book of Travels together with our players. The game we envision in our dreams wouldn't be possible to make without you and we're so appreciative of every one of you who wants to be a part of it.

Until next time,

Oliver & The Dev Team xx

We need more time…
over 2 years ago – Thu, Sep 02, 2021 at 12:43:06 PM

Dearest Traveller,

Thank you for being excited for Book of Travels, and tagging along on our journey with us – whether it’s in the comments on Steam, replies on our various social platforms or with a pledge to our Kickstarter campaign. We can’t properly express how much your support and interest means to us, and how invigorating it is.

We’re giving this project our all, and have been doing so for years now. It feels strange to be so close to “the finish line” that is the Early Access launch and have all of you be able to experience our game with us.

However – we aren’t as close as we like to, or even thought we’d be. This became apparent to us during the course of our closed beta, as our wonderful testers sent their reports to us. So we made the difficult decision to postpone the launch of the game once more. The team simply needs the time to stabilize it.

We want to be able to deliver an Early Access game that we can stand by. But believe us when we say that we don’t make this call easily, and we understand that this will disappoint anyone who couldn’t wait to jump into the game this summer. At the same time we also believe that we owe it to the game, to ourselves and – more importantly – to you to make sure that Book of Travels meets our standards.

Therefore we won’t give you a new release date today. Instead, we’ll nail that down when we are in a position of confidence that we can actually hit the new deadline.

Again, we understand that this isn’t the news you want to hear. We crave for You to be able to play our game too! Right now, though, we can only hope for your understanding and patience. It won’t be long before you’ll hear from us again.

Thank You.

Sincerely,
Oliver & The Dev Team xx