by PurpleSnow (Game Director)

Hello once again from the Darkbright crew!

Today is a tale of endings and beginnings, as we are happy to report that we've wrapped up our search for a Lead Engineer! This brings our trio up to a quartet, and will allow us to begin development in earnest. We're looking forward to introducing him in a few weeks, after he's started and settled in!

In the meantime, we've just successfully concluded our first run through of a Smolville paper prototype!

Here’s some teaser pics:

(note: pictures used are references and NOT representative of actual game art)

For those that aren't familiar with the term, a paper prototype is a means of developing and testing concepts without the need for them to be implemented in game. These often manifest themselves in the form of a card or board game, and seek to capture the experience holistically, or to test specific concepts.

The advantages of doing prototypes like these are many! Primarily, they are an extremely fast and inexpensive way to start building and learning about the game you are making. One of the unglamorous truths about game development is that you will always (always!) learn something new about what your game is and wants to be as it begins to come together. Paper prototypes let us start to learn those lessons in days, not after weeks or months of development!

For our prototype, we created an abstraction of one of the core aspects of our experience: sending villagers on expeditions to explore islands. We developed it as a card game that could be played on a virtual whiteboard, wherein players accrue villagers with different abilities and send them off on adventures.

Of course, things aren't quite as straightforward as they seem! Zany, random humor is an important part of the game, and that needed to be present in this prototype as well. Villagers didn't just go to islands, they were part of unfolding stories that happened there - sometimes with near catastrophic results!

In one memorable instance, a lawless pirate adventured on an island of gothic lawn furniture, overcoming the trials of a hungry sea monster... all so that he could reform himself, and find true love riding on a tandem bicycle with a princess on an island of abundant succulents.

That wasn't a paragraph I ever expected to write in my life, but seeing these unexpected stories come together gave us a lot of confidence in the potential of the world that we are building!

We've already learned a world of things - from characters, to progression, to storytelling, to aesthetics - and we're already at work developing and adapting it into a more robust and refined prototype.

We're looking forward to being able to share more, and eagerly anticipating when we'll be able to hear stories of the bizarre antics and adventures that your villagers have gotten up to!