Developer's Diary #1
Hello and welcome to the new game development blog for Kingdoms of Immacus and Atomic Automaton. If you're reading this now, you must have gotten bored to dig this far back because I am posting this before the website is officially released to the world. For those that are interested, this is a continuation of the original development blog on my original website, that has gone a little dark as of late as I work more on this website and my new work with Atomic Automaton and Kingdoms of Immacus. Last I left off was a post about completing Phase 1 of Kingdoms of Immacus and I was moving into Phase 2 or the "Hero-refinement Phase." I suppose I am still there, seeing I am still tweaking the heroes and their respective abilities and cards. The art is finished for the hero cards, but now I am actively working on the new card's formatting, dual specs, and spell icons. This will be saved for a later post, but just a small mention of what's to come.
So what is it I plan to achieve with the new blog? Basically, it allows me a space to ramble about where I am with the game, the progress I'm making, and any insight or helpful links I can share as they apply to Kingdoms of Immacus or game design in general. This is also a great space for any wanderer to get an all-access pass to my written internalization of crippling self-doubt. As far as how often you will see these excursions into madness as I attempt to make a Sisyphean card game all by myself? I would hope to post at least once every two weeks depending on what information I have to share. In the last blog I was posting consistently weekly, but oftentimes it was more or less a monologue on the page, and not something super helpful as far as development was concerned, so unless there is something meaningful to say, I won't try and bore you with everyday life minutia.
Since Kingdoms of Immacus is in what I would consider a pre-alpha stage, there will most likely be a lot of back and forth on mechanics that stay or go. I'd hope to hammer out big changes before this reboot, but there are just some things you can't foresee until a troublesome play-test session shows you the errs of your confidence. Nevertheless, you'll be the first to know if Mechanic A that becomes Mechanic B goes back to A or becomes Z or gets cut entirely. The heroes are all getting new spells and a two specs they can choose from that may not work out, so if I contradict myself you know what is happening.
As far as measuring game progress, I am thinking about doing a "% done" meter with each post, but I'll see. I feel it may be a tool for triggering existential dread if the meter doesn't move for a while. That's it for this post, I look forward to sharing my progress with whoever randomly comes across this.
Best,
-Jonathan Flike