Rhetorical greeting question! It's me again. We've been in need of catching up with blog posts, and whilst many of you have gotten the opportunity to play with Chiseling, and now I thought I'd discuss how fun new ideas come to us from how the community plays.

A Township Tale is a game that very much builds itself. We created some rules, and for us to give value to every aspect of it, we knew they had to coincide with each other. This is what makes the current mechanics in the game so intertwined, they are part of a single loop, but compound on each other. Your weapon could be made from the timber you and your friends hustled to collect or trade with someone, a blade from a mould you scoured the dark for, and this weapon saved your life against your fight in the deep regions of the caves.

Prior to the Chiseling update, you had to find every handle you wanted to use, and it was simply more loot to collect. We quickly knew that we had to give this control to you, so that you could go through the process mostly off your own hard work, or in combination with others. The natural order of the game demanded this be a thing, and for the most part that’s quite easy to predict.

When we first started out, we immediately wanted blacksmithing in the game. But before that, we had to make mining, and caves and etc… Then once we came up with our crafting system, we had to give you a source for all the key components. That is, a tip/tool end, and a handle by which to hold it with.

This philosophy applies to every aspect of the game, and from there we can plot out the ‘scope’ of a game. We know it has to have many things, and as long as they are not ridiculously specific, they can fit along the roadmap. That’s how we keep focused, and don’t get scope creep. At many points, we can close a loop, and the game can ‘survive’ without being incomplete. So, the question begs as to what may come next. At the point of this blog, if you’ve played the game, you’ll have seen our hunger/health rework. I’ll go into the details of that later, but it leads to an obvious next step that’s been missing.

Every now and then, we have some changes that undergo in the game, which open up a new plethora of possibilities. Redoing health and hunger gives us more value for what may come in the future. This happens for every profession, every mechanic and system in the game. This makes quite the exciting future for the game, especially as we start to look at how the players have been going.

The amount of social interactions, structures, norms and ‘hacks’ we’ve seen from players is really amazing. And it leads to us trying to support that in different ways. For one, we knew leaving ‘breadcrumbs’ of light in the caves would find some form, but seeing it being used so frequently, we support it coming next update with stakes that get planted. These are also quite lenient as to where you can place them, letting you put the on walls, and at steep angles. But players also inspired some other things for us to consider. Like how we desperately need a way for players to ‘clean up’ easier. Maybe the game needs a Janitorial role? I’ve long dreamed of holding a broom in the game, getting some headphones on and ignoring the comfort of other players as I sweep around them. Saying that, we can also explore mechanics to support other social constructs we’ve seen. For example, we don’t need to make a ‘Mayor’ profession, but making it easier to organize the townsfolk is something we can do. We don’t need a court jester, but maybe a ‘stage’ for anybody willing to perform their acts.

As we go, you may see more things be added to support ‘social’ professions, and then we’ll likely discover something to push the envelope even further for those!

Anyway, thanks for reading. Here’s a teaser.