As a game developer, working on a project for years just to have it cancelled can be devastating. I’ve been lucky enough that it has never happened to me, but it’s an occurrence all to common in the games industry. However, having to cancel your own game after years of work is even harder. So it is with a heavy heart that I announce that I’m stopping development on Lasting Legacy. ...
In the early stages of developing a game, once I have the idea and the feelings of the game down solid, my approach is to throw everything I can think of at the game and see what sticks. My early-in-development creative process. I don’t usually bother fleshing individual ideas out in design documents because it usually takes just as long for me to implement those things and see them in the game instead. And who would want to read about an idea when you can see how it works in the game directly? During this phase I need to generate lots of different ideas because only some of them are going to stick. The more varied the better, so I like to approach my idea generation from different angles. The two most common approaches are starting from the theme, and starting from the mechanics For example, in Lasting Legacy, we quickly came up with occupations like Family Doctor or Ball Organizer from the theme, and figured out what useful things they could do in the game (heal people, and attract new friends respectively). We also came up with several occupations starting from a mechanics point of view. For example, we knew we wanted someone to increase the income of other people, so we came up with the Savvy Businessman occupation. This time around I also used a third approach to generate ideas: Isomorphism. ...
Here’s a new video showing the UI improvements and how the characters feel more alive. Apologies for the less than ideal sound and video quality. We’re working on fixing that for next time.
I haven’t written purely about tech in a long time, but this is a particularly interesting intersection of tech and game design, so I thought I would share it with everybody. Be warned though: This is one of those posts that’s just about the thought process I went through for something and the solution I reached. I’m most definitely not advocating this solution for everybody. Think about it and pick the solution that works for you the best. By now you’ve probably heard of Lasting Legacy: you’re managing a family around the 19th century through several generations, socializing, choosing good marrying prospects, and helping family members pick an occupation. Ah, occupations… ...
This week’s video covers the concept of head of the family and what exactly is legacy and how to obtain it. We’re also continuing the same family as last time. Will Fanni become the heir, or will childless Peter bring the lineage to an end? I managed to keep things shorter than last time, so this one is only 12 minutes. For those of you who prefer text updates, don’t worry, we’ll have one of those next week.
Here’s the first video dev update for Lasting Legacy. We go over the basic gameplay. It’s a whopping 19 minutes long, so I may have overdone it a bit! I’ll try to keep it shorter for future updates. Since this is the first time we’re doing this, any feedback is appreciated. Would you like to see more of these in the future? What should the focus be? Any technical issues I should improve?
You’ve read the Lasting Legacy announcement, seen some of the art, got an idea about the setting for the game, and you even know about the feelings we want players to experience. But what kind of game is Lasting Legacy exactly? Lasting Legacy is a fairly unique game, so it doesn’t quite fit in any predetermined genre. The closest category would be single-player, turn-based simulation, although the simulation part in Lasting Legacy is very light (unlike something like Sim City or The Sims), and in that respect it’s more like a board game. So it’s more accurate to say that Lasting Legacy is a blend of simulation games and board games. Intrigued? You’re in the right place. Read on. ...
When I start working on a game, one of the first things I decide is how will the game make the player feel. Different designers have different ways of driving and focusing the design of their games: some will use a short elevator pitch, some will use key pieces of art, some will let the mechanics dictate the rest. I prefer to use the way I want players to feel to anchor the design, and I flesh out the rest of the game around it. Once you have defined that feel, you can run every single design decision by it. Every game feature should support those feelings in some way, if not, they’re a good candidate to cut. And if some contradict them directly, you can veto them right away and not go down that path any further. ...
Today I can finally announce the game Miguel and I have been working on for a while: Lasting Legacy. You can read more about Lasting Legacy in the official web site. There isn’t a lot of information yet, but we wanted to announce it now so we can talk openly about it until release. We’ll definitely be revealing more information here over the upcoming weeks. ...