PRGE 2025 Update
What a weekend! I can’t thank my friends at PIGSquad enough for all of the amazing work that they do for our community of indie devs. I also can’t get over just how many really good games are in development by my friends both new and old. After 7 hours of watching players try Wyndfinder non-stop, I came away with a list of 49 bugs, features, iteration, and writing to work on as I try to get a build into playtester hands over the next two months.
Pictured: Your humble gamedev rolling a 19 on a stealth check.
Honestly, I could not wait to get to work on some of the ideas that came from conversations with players. Either directly or indirectly, several hitches in game play that had eluded me for a long time were cracked during the event. I’ve already tackled 28 of the 49 tasks that were documented during the playtesting, and it’s had a big impact on game play.
The Action Economy: Simple icons with specialized colors allow the player to quickly grok the cost of each item, ability, or spell. Furthermore, action bar sorting was changed from Type (item/ability/spell) to Cost (action/bonus/reaction). Clean, easy to read, adds to the cause of reducing friction. Additionally, players didn’t seem to grok that the up/down arrows in the UI next to the action bar were for paging through all of the abilities and spells available to that character, so that’s now being made explicit in the UI as well.
More Dynamic Combat Camera: The camera during combat can now opt to smooth towards the center point between the attacker and the target, depending on the context. For ranged attacks and spells, for example, this works really nicely to create a more dynamic feel, with the added benefit of ensure at least some visibility on the results of the action. Needs some iterating but it’s a simple solution that does a lot of work.
Party Movement: All selected party members would move at the exact same time when a movement location was clicked. The new method, while still needing some iteration, feels much more natural, with the lead or selected player moving first, and then their teammates moving at random intervals shortly after. Gives the feeling that they are following the leader. When I get to Barks later in development, they’ll fit right in.
Simplified Tutorials: Overall the reception to the new tutorial system was pretty great, folks who gave feedback on them felt the writing was succinct and well done. But the interactions with the interface always looked a bit awkward, and folks still missed things that the tutorials were there to articulate. Rather than ask the player to scroll down in the UI, I switched the system to use Pages instead. In this way, the UI now clearly articulates just how much content the player has access to, while also clarifying how to close the UI when that’s the goal.
To add on to that, I refactored the new Lorebook system to include Tutorials as well, so now Tutorials are added to the Lorebook when they are encountered, so if/when the player needs a refresher, they’ll know where to look. Even if the player has tutorials turned off, they will still see them get added to the Lorebook.
There were several more bugs and small implementations done this week as well, but those are the big ones that feel to me like the biggest impact. I will continue to whittle down the remaining issues this week, as I work on my current goal: Getting the demos used in the Expo sessions ready for a round of friends & family playtesting.
I’ve made a recording of a run through the current Combat Demo, in which I hope you can already see the difference those few changes have made on the game. Getting close to Alpha!
Scott