Finish Your Game Jam 2025

Hail and well met, adventurers!

It’s Year Three for The Wyndfinder in PIGSquad’s annual FINISH YOUR GAME Jam, and it’s become a really important milestone for tracking my progress with the game.  Looking back over the devlogs, it’s really come a long way.

Year One:

https://catlords.itch.io/wyndfinder/devlog/641988/november-23-update-finish-your-game-jam

Year Two:

https://catlords.itch.io/wyndfinder/devlog/839537/finish-your-game-jam-returns

Man, so many things in that Year Two post made me freak out - has it already been a YEAR since I did that?  WILD.

I’ll get to writing the Year Three post shortly, and I think there are some equally cool things that have happened in this push to get to a big milestone - Alpha!

What does ALPHA mean to me?  First, it’s a statement of intent - I think that the majority of features that I wanted in the final game are now present.  The newer ones are going to need a lot of iteration, and it’s possible that they don’t all quite make it by the time the game ships.  But the full vertical slice of the experience is now intact.  This means that I am ready for playtesting - beyond the showcases and short hands-on sessions, this build will be in the hands of a close group of friends and family.  It’s time to see if this thing has legs.  After I get some time to work on feedback from this round of playtesting, I’ll be opening things up to a wider group, in what hopefully will turn into a lot of free QA from my friends an active back and forth with play testers.

The build is set up to represent what I hope to ship next summer as a demo on Steam.  One demo is the story mode, in which the player can experience character creation, or just right in with a premade character.  The prologue and starting town are fully playable, with about an hour of content.  Second, the Combat Demo - with a premade level 5 party, the player can dive right into the turn-based combat system and take on a dragon.

Features added during the Finish Your Game Jam:

• Crafting System re-designed away from the SRD definition (where the player is proficient in Crafting Tools like “Sewing Kit”) into the Skill system (where the player can be proficient in the “Tailoring” skill).

• Refactored the Status Effect system, something I've been putting off for over two years.  Scaling the system into an expanded spell book, magic item inventory, cool monster abilities, and so on, will be a lot simpler.  Due to the initial implementation, this also has had a nice effect on performance.

• A Recipe Book where crafting recipes are stored.

• By moving crafting into the Skill system, it gets to draft off of the Dice Rolling mini game mechanic for free.

• Expanded and redesigned a full suite of custom character backgrounds

  • Some leverage the new crafting system as a diverse set of crafting jobs

  • Some add martial proficiencies to characters regardless of their class (I see you, wizards with swords, go ahead).

• Tavern Rooms and Meal buffs

  • In addition to allowing for a richer set of backgrounds, the new crafting and recipe system unlocked the Meal system.

  • When camping, the player can choose from a Meal in their inventory, which will give the party buffs until the next long rest.  Characters with the Cookery skill can make meals from ingredients found in the world or in shops.

  • At Taverns, players seeking a long rest must rent a room, but those come with buffs also, and you get what you pay for.

• Further refinement of the Combat UI to make the action economy clear

• Expanded the set of tutorials to cover the new crafting, camping, and tavern implementations.

• Some classes I’ve neglected forever (because they are the most deviant from the base rules) got some love: Sorcerer and Warlock feel a bit more like they are supposed to.

There are three major systems that need work before I’m done-done.  The spellbook needs to be fully baked in terms of what’s in and out.  I have a really good design in place and will be jumping into that once the first round of playtesting is over.  

Second, getting all classes implemented up to level 12, with custom subclasses.  I would say that I am, at best, 20-30% of the way there on subclasses.  The base SRD subclasses are all there for at least their first set of features and spells.

Itemization has been waiting to get the rest of the power systems in place before I dive in. With the spellbooks and classes defined, and the crafting system dialed in, I can go deep on building out a rich set of custom magic items that add depth to the game world.

Meanwhile, I haven’t pushed content forward in about six months of active systems development.  So, before I get into all that, I’m going to get back to implementing Act 2 of the game.  Only one area is fully defined, the rest is grey boxed.  By midyear I expect to have the game playable from start to the end of Act 2, which would mean I’d be on target for the 4th year of FYGJ - Beta Edition.  It’s happening!