The Red Market Dev Log #6 (The Bishop-fish)

(for more regular updates on The Red Market, you can follow me on Twitter here, or read my fortnightly dev logs on my blog here.)

The Bishop-fish Update:

It's finally here. The newest member of The Red Market - the Bishop-fish - is finally here.

In this update you'll be able to purchase your very own river-horror. Purchase it, and much more besides:

• Research it in dusty tomes.
• Talk to it
• Watch it die
• Bake it into a pie
• Eat the pie
• Don't do the above three things. Instead:
• Sell it to an unsuspicious collector.
• Release it into the sea.
• Cajole it into granting you wishes.
• Find some more weird secrets.

Create your own story (and hopefully make a profit) with your new friend The Bishop-fish. (friendship not guaranteed)

The Next Few Weeks of Development:

In the next fortnightly sprint I'm going to focus on some back-end changes to the game that will (a) make development smoother and definitely not cause big fires in the code that destroy days of work, and (b) get rid of a fair bit of faff on the part of the player.

Among quite a few extremely un-sexy changes, I'll be changing the way items work in The Red Market. Whereas before items could be purchased by players, and then used up when interacting with monsters, (feeding offal to a hungry beast, using pencil and paper to communicate with a captive mouthless soul-eating horror, etc.) now they'll last forever. Players can buy items at the market, and use them again and again without every exhausting their supply.

Originally I made items limited-use to discourage using every item on every monster just to see which interactions were useful, but in the current text-based game it leads to a lot of boring busywork for the player (try to feed monster offal, realise you've run out -> navigate to market -> buy offal -> navigate back to monster screen -> feed monster offal), and for me as a developer.

I think in the full, non-just-text version of the game there'll be a timer system to encourage discovering secret interactions through clever thinking, rather than simply spamming all the items on all the monsters. In the meantime, I'm playing around with a few ideas on how to discourage this boring 'use all items to see what happens' style of play.

The End of This Post:

This new update should be live either at the end of the next fortnightly sprint, or the one after that. After that, I'll be starting work on the next new monster for The Red Market. (hint: it has no mouth and it must eat human souls)

Bye for now!

Nick