I've been wanting to post more for a while, but I haven't really had much going on to actually talk about other than work, if I'm being honest. So fuck it! I'm just gonna talk about work! I'm really proud of it, after all!
Last September we released our lesbian road trip RPG Get in the Car, Loser! (Steam and Itch) after having been in development for four years. It's been a really exhausting project to work on, but also a really fun one that's been a really big learning experience for me. I'd never worked on any kind of game with combat in it, let alone a full RPG-ass RPG, so I ended up learning a lot of lessons about things like balance, progression, but most importantly, how to make "pressing a button and watching something happen" feel satisfying.
I keep wanting to say that we've spent the past year working on DLC, but that's not quite right—in the months after release, we ended up having a ton of bugfixes and balance patches. Some of these were just very unlikely edge cases that slipped through the cracks of user playtesting, like what if you successfully kill an enemy that's already being killed by Zantetsuken; technically possible, but the timing on this is really hard to do! And of course, lots of small balance changes, tweaks to the encounter rate, and so forth.
Here's an example of a pretty big change that we ended up shipping post-launch. GITCL has the ability to use items in battle at any time for free, which I thought was pretty well-balanced given that you have to use up the item in the process. However, some playtesters ended up grinding way more than I thought and accumulated huge stores of items—which is great, that's something you can do in RPGs! But there were two problems here. First off, we originally didn't have any item stacking, so it ended up being a UI nightmare if you had pages upon pages of items. That was an easy fix, at least.
The second problem was a lot harder, though! It turns out, if players have a huge stockpile of items that they got from grinding... they feel kinda bad about using them? Like it's just cheap or overpowered to pile them on? So the player's got this hard-earned reward I hadn't considered they'd go so hard on, and they're not even feeling good about it.
(Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns, 2013. Incidentally, one of my favourite games of all time. Ask me how I feel about it sometime! I can talk about its design decisions FOREVER.)
During development, I had considered having a Lightning Returns style inventory system, where you only have a small number of item slots... but using items in battle is still free.
Ultimately it felt too complicated for an unnecessary restriction! But I came back to the idea after watching streamers with too many items feel uncertain about using them up, and decided that actually, if you had just a little bit of a restriction on it—you can only use six items per battle, and you gotta pick them ahead of time—then it wouldn't quite feel like cheating, since the game's clearly kept in mind! In practice, six items in battle is actually kind of a huge number. But I think it's the feeling of it that makes the biggest difference.
Anyway, that's just one of the bigger features we added into the game over the past year. But most of our time has been spent working on a new piece of DLC, a story chapter called The Fate of Another World that's about a quarter of the length of the full game, that synthesizes a lot of the design lessons we've learned over the past five years of working on GITCL, and also delves deeper into some of the themes I thought were most interesting during development. I'm gonna talk about it more soon, but you can also learn more now on its pages on Steam and Itch. If it sounds cool to you, it would really mean a lot to me if you wishlisted it! And if you've got any questions about either the DLC or the past year's worth of patches, I'm happy to answer them in the comments!
