The Red Market Dev Log #4 (October 2018, Part 1): Building the Foundations, Contracting Diseases, and Turning Back Time

A very quick update today as this sprint has been 100% boring ‘building the foundations good and strong so those nice decorative columns don’t collapse the moment they’re built’.

During this sprint I’ve been essentially rebuilding the game from the ground up. As I’ve said before, I learnt a lot about using Ink, and general game design while making the The Red Market prototype. And after I finished I looked back and saw a bunch of little mistakes I’d made that, while not affecting the game in its current state, would most likely cause headaches further down the line.

So, for this and the next three sprints I’m going to be focusing on (a) rebuilding the game from the ground up with an eye to keeping everything nice and clean and future-proof, and (b) building and testing all the game’s new mechanics and systems. These new mechanics and systems are:

• a completely revamped party system, with NPCs in the player’s party able to be injured or killed, or receive Scars and Boons that affect their abilities.
• a completely revamped, and much more in-depth Challenge system that takes into account various Scars, Boons, Relics, and Treasures.
• Scars and Boons – semi-permanent buffs and debuffs that the player character, or NPC party members can gain, and that affect their abilities. Expect to encounter and contract such ordinary illnesses as St. Ernestine’s Tar, Butter Lung, and Profound Enervation.
• an expanded set of Treasures and Relics, including the Chthonic Scrimshaw, and the Febrile Shirt.
• the game’s various endings, and the all-important game-reset time-travel mechanic, alongside the mechanics that let players skip quickly through already-seen content (more on this in a future post).

After that (which should take us through to the middle of December, at which point I’ll take a holiday), I’ll get to work on implementing the new monsters and storylines. These will take up the bulk of the rest of development, and we’ll start with The Bishop-fish – a fabled fish-bodied, man-faced sea creature with the power (but not necessarily the inclination) to grant wishes.

Until next time – thanks for reading!

Nick