Citan

Works in Progress, or, The Summer Doldrums

Hi, I’m srand, Citan's partner and more-or-less second in command. Citan is unavailable at the moment (although I think I hear muffled curses coming from his subterranean lair), so I'll be delivering the dev blog today.

In previous dev blogs, we've talked about our iterative style of development. During alpha and beta our goal has been to get something out the door every two to four weeks. But it's been twice that twice that since the last update, and we're still a week or two away from the next one. So what's going on? Is the game dead? Is Citan dead?

Nah, it's nothing like that. (See my note above about the muffled curses.) But the pace of development has slowed down this summer. I could blame the summer heat here in Florida (96F today!) or the lingering effects of our hard push to Steam earlier this year, but no ...

No. It's mostly the damned casino.

The next update revolves around a casino run by the Red Wing mantis gang. If you follow our Twitter, you may have seen a screenshot of a match-3 game planned for the update.




The casino started here, with the idea for several mini-games like this. That might have been the whole of the casino - a big room with some mini-games - but Citan wasn't happy with it. It didn't feel like an integrated part of the game world. This casino is supposed to be a place where we can add more minigames over time, but why would people keep coming back to this place? Locations in Project: Gorgon usually serve multiple purposes, and this one just didn't quite work.

There were some other interesting features we had in mind for the casino beyond the mini-games. For example, an early screenshot on Twitter shows what appears to be a deer on a stage.




This is indeed a deer on a stage. Here Panzy is showing off an early version of the Stage Management console, a prototype of the kind of community tools we're keen on getting into the hands of our players and volunteer guides. A neat feature, to be sure, but still not enough of a draw to keep people coming back.

No, if the casino was going to be worth doing, it needed to be something more. So much like the casinos in Las Vegas, the Red Wings would strive to make their home an all-in-one, self-contained resort destination - a city in its own right. And hey, wasn't Citan just talking about a new higher-level hub city? Surprise!

Of course, building a city requires quite a bit more work than building 'just' a casino. But it also vastly increases the benefits from that work - there's a better return on the resource investment, if you will. And it goes both ways: A boring town is never going to be a good hub. (It's going to be hard enough to convince some people to leave Serbule, no matter how good the amenities at the new location.)

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of sexy new screenshots of the casino to share with you today. We're in that awkward stage where a lot of the features are working, but the art assets aren't good enough yet - not even by our lax standards for first-pass 'programmer art'.




Besides, you probably don't want screenshots of a partially-built city anyway. You want to know the details: how much and what kind of storage it will have, where the portals will take you, where we're putting the player vendors, and whether you should be hoarding the existing game chips. But you'll have to wait just a little while longer for those answers.

(Actually, for the last one Citan says: "Those chips are the rough equivalent of 'home edition' poker chips -- they aren't casino chips. The Red Wing staff will trade them in for a pittance as a courtesy, but they aren't worth much. Don't bother trying to hoard them, as Councils will spend a lot easier!")

(Discuss this blog post on the forum here!)