MAY 2026 – Keep Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin’
One day early. Merry Christmas.
Progress Report
- Chapters 9, 10, 11, 12 played through to completion
- Chapter 13 95% ready for playtesting over the weekend
- Sketched out a plan for Acts 3, 4 and 5 with increasing confidence
- Plotted out entire cast (tentatively)
- Implemented framework for achievements
- Planned the three alternative endings
- Remembered my mnemonic for battle/death quote length (up to around the space in ‘Character Erase’)
It was a very productive month. And, actually, most of it was done in the first couple of weeks of this period. Safe to say that with over a third of the game complete and more and more gaps filled, DoR is taking shape.
… You philistines.
Think of the Rabbits (Which Are Not Rodents), Chapter Gimmick…
Normally, when you experience a flabby and unsatisfying chapter, you get to blame the designer. But I AM the designer. Shit.
So Chapter 9 is a big dumb rout on a big open road. In flavour terms, you’re victims to an ambush, but your new allies help counter-ambush them and eat some of the siege weapons overlooking your position; but the guys you didn’t ally with last chapter spawn in to come fight. It gives Kulesza and Jadzia an emotional moment while reinforcing the stakes of the conflict and continuing to shed light on what’s happening in Rijesca; it also highlights the weakness and unreliability of your allies of convenience. Good? Good.
So then, I play it, and it sucks.
Often the first run of a map will stall out. Reasons vary. Sometimes it’s that the map is sound but the reinforcements came in too quickly or some turn threshold struck at a bad moment, something where the debugger can’t really fix it but the map isn’t fundamentally broken. Sometimes it’s rockier, but again, you feel enough faith in the concept.
But this wasn’t that. Issues included:
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A lot of overlapping ranges that the player (it me. im player) just couldn’t really handle
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Overstatted enemy harpies (including, weirdly, outstatting the playable one by a fair margin)
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Allies getting picked off as all the reinforcements rammed straight into them
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The cliff right in the player’s face completely stalled their offensive before it could begin
There’s a flaw in the fundamental map design that I had rebranded, out of confidence or arrogance (because I failed, it was arrogance), as a challenge to overcome (which I did not). That is this: allied units squash the map. Remember that one of your key levers in map design is AI. I’m sure you’ve been told at your workplace that one of your key levers was AI there, too, but you know what I mean. A lot of your guys will be move if in range; move if in two turns of attacking; move if in squad range. Well, those ranges get a whole lot larger when allies get involved, particularly if they’re out of position. Particularly if they’re in either of two positions. This wasn’t even the more finicky version; my run was with the ogres allied, because I’m saving the harpies for when they have portraits, because I want to see how Lumi sprites harpies, so it would be pure carnage with 7-move, 10-attack range fliers on the field.
So I have a lot of factors to consider, now.
- C10 is a rout built around a prominent soft timer (the map fully ‘activates’ after a few turns – you’ll see), so C9 can’t be too similar in concept
- I don’t want to kill C9 because a lot of pacing revolves around it (it’s important to see Martyr’s Road; it’s also important to give the second half of ogre/harpy dynamism; also all the stuff I said before)
- I don’t want to throw away the sense that you’re recruiting a clan / brood in the last map, not just one guy
At the same time, this also involved factors outside just C9’s construction:
- From playing with the vanilla placeholder XP formula, it was becoming apparent that units were scaling too quickly
- The classes were overly minmaxed; it was becoming apparent that it would be healthier to pivot at least partially back towards personal bases to offset this
But it was also important to, like, not completely despair:
- The game still played pretty well!
- Other campaigns had rough patches in development too!
- I’ve been going quickly and am well ahead of schedule; a rest might not even be a bad thing. I want my rest to be June, for Reasons, and want to push hard to that point, but it’s not as though I need to be working at a breakneck pace. (Given that this was four chapters ago, well, that sense has only increased).
It did at least give a FETO throwback screenshot.
Anyway, so now I had to figure out what I was gonna do with C9. I won’t run you through the full set of options or thought process or whatever, but long story short, I realised that the map was just going to need more tightening than was possible with ‘allies appearing from any of two different places’, and also needed a more distinct identity than just, ‘your allies spawn in differently depending on an earlier choice’.
This mostly worked. The second run still wound up petering out at the same point in the map, but these were easier problems to solve; there were some painful attack range overlaps that there just wasn’t a viable way to survive outside a couple of specific solutions, and the reinforcements I’d added (good decision!) were excessive and too quickly timed.
And, you know, while I was doing all this I fixed some movement sounds, finally made non-fire bolts and blasts appropriate colours, found out that one of the attack spells had a unique effect I had to kill, and so forth.
Time Flies When You’re Adding Puns
Of course, right after all this woe-is-me shit I made two chapters in, like, four days.
(Yes, of course I’m massaging the numbers. I playtested one yesterday and one today (as of the 2nd), but you know my uneven process. Progress of a sort started on them awhile back, and C11 isn’t yet done now. But still.)
What’s the secret? Well, a lot has to do with the kind of chapter. C8 and C9 were finicky; one is a funhouse of custom events, the other had conditionals, both had ally AI to work around. C10 and 11, however, were a lot more straightforward. The first is a pseudo-timed rout, the other was a seize/rout with an antiturtle gimmick, both outdoors; a lot of it was just seeing how the enemy placements worked out, and I basically got them close to right at the first try.
C12 is also pretty straightforward… except for a bunch of events. Except those are events I already did like, a couple weeks ago, for some reason. I guess I didn’t want to work on, well, probably C8 or 9, and instead thought: hey, here’s something else – anything else – I can do instead! That one episode in Black Books where Dylan Moran’s character goes to increasingly desperate lengths to avoid doing his taxes rings more and more true by the day.
I also do just basically look like this, anyway.
Call Me Ekstraklasa Because We’re So Polish… ed
It’s also about time to add some of the finer touches. Most obviously, there’s just… layers of polish. It’s been a developing philosophy across my campaigns that I really want to sand out layers of jank. Things should feel right; there shouldn’t be a moment the player looks at what’s going on and thinks this looks stupid. Mostly this takes the form of anticipating and then patching out edge-cases, which you’ll naturally get better at as time goes by. At its most basic, bosses that have a line. Just put in the ‘if the guy is alive’ clause in first. Even if it’s very unlikely the guy is dead before his turn 2 enemy phase line or whatever, just account for it.
I might not have bothered with this back in DoW. But when an event shoves down a door, it adds some polish to have units move up or down out of its way, and to have anyone stranded behind it leave the map instead of hanging around like an idiot. It took like two or three minutes to do this for both events.
Of course, right now, this is mostly mechanical polish. A lot of graphical assets can wait, and I haven’t fully hammered down the music plans yet.
Other parts of it are items. I want a lot of secrets and items in DoR, similar to how Do5 had it, but I want this philosophy to extend to S-rank weapons. Not just getting one big set, but I want players to wind up picking them up here and there, through such and such an event, and for them to play quite differently to just ‘a very good weapon’.
And then there’s achievements, which I didn’t come up with any for Act 1 but now have one for most Act 2 chapters (so I should probably go back and add a couple to Act 1, huh?). Again, it’s something I’m getting more of a sense for as I go. Just casting my mind out for something based on challenges, or just fucking around a bit. That required like half an hour or more of scut-work, but that’s manageable and now that’s set up for the forseeable future.
As far as signposting goes, I aim for the Guide to have annoying, opaque hints, and then for the Prima Guide to outline specifics. Yes, I’m going to make another Prima Guide. I want to properly commit to this one, though. I’m talking dozens of pages. And then I’ll print it, and then I’ll scan the print.
Hindsight
5% growth rates are notoriously meaningless. Except, in the case of classes, they ramp up. If you increment everything in 5% shifts… well, in a long-running campaign – and DoR’s set to weigh in at a chunky 31 chapters – that adds up quickly. Up to Chapter 12, the train is on the tracks, but I can see it running out of road; caps are going to get rammed. Not just brute strength and archer skill. I’ve seen how promoted generics look, and it’s causing a rethink.
I’ve wound up coming crawling back to personal ID bases. I do think in most cases managing autolevels through the Chapter Editor is preferable (and I’m still doing that!), but it’s further supercharging the way that growths are destabilising the enemy experience. I want classes to have significantly different stat silhouettes, but they’re a little too extreme as things stand. And I think over the course of the next 17 chapters, as promoted enemies roll in, the situation’s going to become untenable. I need a lower ceiling and a higher floor, and I want to keep my ordering approximately as it is. I want to avoid the situation where an enemy wind rider winds up with better strength than resistance, just to be able to do its job (high weapon might ties into this).
At the same time… I’m agonisingly close to something I’m happy with in all facets. I’m already happy with them in a vacuum. And again, for unpromoted units, it works great. There’s a very clear sense of hard-counters and favourable match-ups. Triss mulches anything without high defence and then bounces pathetically off Ironclads and Gallants. Fomirach is still finding one-shots into the midgame. I can make a small, irritating change now, one that doesn’t compromise what’s already been built, and ensure the future doesn’t fail the same way.
The other reason I’m thinking about this is, again, the Prima Guide. I want the full rogue’s gallery of classes in. In general I want a more grounded tone; the DoW guide was an obvious joke (though with a couple of legitimately useful references; the affinity chart, the weapon list), but I like the idea of giving it a decent shot. Really leaning into the mid-2000s vibe.
Misc., and Other
Every now and again it’s okay to just have a character really firmly in your mind when writing someone else. The main one to date was that Sileth and se’Mori were just Jeeves and Wooster. Well, now I’ve got a The Diplomat’s Nicol Trowbridge. The Season 1/2 version, of course, not the caricature they wound up turning him into.
There might not be a June update, because I plan on going abroad for what is called in common parlance a ‘hot minute’, and I don’t plan to spend it ROMhacking. But I do plan to come home refreshed and rejuvenated, and with fresh eyes. If Chapter 14 is complete by then – and the Lindauer siblings are, at last, reunited – I’ll be happy with the pace. After that point, 16 chapters in 12 months gives me four months for polish and testing, and realistically that’s far more than enough, particularly given that I’m going to have a lot more time off in the second half of the year. Teachers get school holidays too, you know! At the cost of having to pretend we’re sick most other times we want leave, but, hey!