JUNE 2026 – It’s the Economy, Stupid
Progress Report
- Chapters 13 and 14 playtested and written
- Handful more Act 3 stuff written
- Working gradually on interlude talks – ultimately have basically caught up to the gameplay
- Lumi has sketched several unit designs
- Maxing, relaxing and regrouping
This post has been complete for several days and my dinky refurbished work laptop is really excited to try and memory leak, so I’m getting this post out of the way a little earlier just so I can close the tab.
The Meat Market
I knew last month that the economy needed a rethink. This month I started to tackle it in earnest.
I said in the opening post that boss recruitment had to be the main source both of recruits and gold. Well… the first part of that’s already fallen by the wayside a bit, just with how the first Act was structured. I wanted to establish a baseline squad of unpromoted garbage which you would then add to from Chapter 7 onwards. It turns out that if you have a baseline squad of unpromoted garbage, you can kind of ride that to the end. Part of that is the XP formula – right now it’s vanilla, as a placeholder, and it’s going to be somewhat more cruel than Homecoming’s. I want players who just use the first units to suffer. Not because those units are bad, but because they need work to reach the point where your other recruits… just sort of start from. But you’ve had Ulrike from turn 3 of Chapter 1; she’s been helping you out for all that time, and that experience had to go somewhere. Szalai, you can liquidate.
But the fact is that it’s hard to make boss recruiting truly central to the game, as opposed to kind of a garnish. Pushing the start point later was a good call, I do think, but it does mean that no individual recruit makes as much of a difference to how chapters play as, to take the least fair example, Helje in DoW. You either have a flier in Chapter 1 or you’re waiting until Saszkia – underlevelled, though with a better statspread – in Chapter 5. And Saszkia’s best support is with Helje anyway. So advantages must instead come through power spikes and, where possible, unique classes. But I want every character to remain viable to the end, so it’s looking like kind of a Do5 situation again – these units have good stats against their competition, but poor stats for their level, and will need good growths to compensate for that. We’ll see. I think growths are going to shift around a fair bit once I actually get to Chapter 31.
Anyway, right now the cast is 20 potential boss recruits and 29 from other sources; only seven (plus probably one more) join after boss recruits start rolling in. That leaves a flex slot I plan on giving to a secret character as soon as I figure out what I want, or what the cast needs, or in case I miscounted or something. But I do plan on filling it. The set of 20 is pretty neatly in stone and ends on a high note, the kind of thing you write down and then sit back and think: yeah, that’s got to be where you draw a line under it.
A Study in Teal
Sometimes you keep around certain things because of convention. Like, they’re not levers you think about. But you can actually adjust them. Completely trivially. One example is that there’s literally no reason to have an extra [A] press involved in having a full inventory and being prompted to put something in the convoy, so I’ve pruned it, and honestly, next time I patch the prior campaigns, I’m making that adjustment there, too.
So now I’m looking at the economy, and I’ve already made one change to Gems, which is… uh… you know you can just set them to instantly liquidate, right? Just use the same code as the gold drops and they’ll just immediately Become Money. Problem: if I want 5000 gold per ransom, then the numbers become very unwieldy. At first, I wound up just giving out a bunch of Ruby Gems, but I wanted bigger rewards… but they were bigger by too much. If only there was some solution to this.
Just slash the prices on Gems, idiot!
So that gives me smaller numbers and smaller increments. I already had a Loot item for 500, stuff like ‘you won’t really go out of your way for this but hey, it’s a little more incentive to hit this corner or beat this antiturtle’ (short- and long weapons, your bread and butter, cost 750 for 30 uses); Ruby being 1500, Sapphire 2750 and Diamond 4000 is just a lot more manageable, and pads out the middle of the scale from 500 (loot) to 5000 (human) in a way that itches my brain nicely. +1000, +1250, +1250, +1000!
The Iron Price
Another part of trying to focus on the economy had been a resolution to try and rein in the habit of ‘just kind of carelessly giving the player shit’. If money is to matter, then shops have to matter; in order for shops to matter, you actually need to use them. Now, part of that is going to be the upkeep of basic weapons. At its most basic, there are weapons worth 750 that are pretty good, and weapons worth 100 that are godawful. So as part of this, most rewards were monetary, particularly in Act 1. People didn’t just arbitrarily drop weapons, and there weren’t many chests or villages.
In the current version of the ROM, there’s an overcorrection. You never really get any nice toys and shops, being quite limited and quite focused on opportunities to re-acquire basic shit, mostly didn’t have very sexy items. That needs to be changed. I briefly had plans to add limited shop supply to stores, but this would require EMS, which I’m reluctant to just toss in the ROM at this point (don’t need 51+ characters, don’t want 200 supply, don’t want to lose autosaves being toggleable, don’t want to risk something exploding). So I’m just going to have to go through early shops and pepper the opportunity to buy Nice Things, because that’s felt lacking.
What’s particularly important is that OHKOs are absolutely within reach, and that some characters are very reliant on particular weapons. The myrmidon, Triss, is kind of the key example of the latter; she has my favourite combat interactions of the game, crushing anyone with light armour but bouncing off anyone larger. The Fivefinger (obligatory weak brave, sword-only) ramps up that to a still greater degree, while she obviously wants killer swords after promotion. Without either of those, she feels like a very ordinary unit. Then again – there have been plenty of opportunities to buy them, and I keep not taking them. Either way, weapons feel like they should, but the availability perhaps isn’t giving the right amount of variety.
But that’s fine. This first playthrough is largely making sure things work and the flow makes sense. The second playthrough will focus on macro and polish; things will look better, I’ll have fresh eyes for the map, and I’ll finesse my way towards the long-term approach. Third playthrough will be right before I’m ready to ship [COMPLETE], catching anything playtesters haven’t, and getting one proper experience in for myself with all assets, everything in its right place, changes I’d made off second-hand testimony, etc.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is Shaking His Head
So I am out of the country for a month and separated from my Personal Computer and, pertinently, its second screen. This is good for my personal and indeed professional development, but it’s also true that it’s affected my workflow.
So at home I have a second monitor. You probably do, too. Second screen, on the left, gets the videos. First screen, on the right, is for productivity, browsing, yapping. When I’m just futzing around with the ROM and it isn’t really fully stimulating, left screen gets a video and I can happily chat along at the same time. But Builder requires a lot of screen real estate, real estate I no longer have. Also, while I remembered to post myself the ROM – in the absolute apex of tech security, I just posted myself the let’s just agree to say patch over Discord – I forgot to bring over my save, currently parked at C14x. And deliberately didn’t bring over my controllers, so, while I wasn’t planning on testing, its’s discouraged anyway.
So now I have to pick what isn’t compromised. Well, writing has basically caught up to and in some places overtaken the gameplay… at least as far as main scenes go. But I’d been kicking a lot of base conversations with characters down the road. Battle and death quotes are quite a ways behind, too. And I can still write. I don’t watch videos while I do so, I listen to music and focus on my work. Don’t need a second monitor for that.
I also have my notebook, and that’s where all the magic happens, if by magic you mean planning. I really cannot stress enough that for probably 80+% of people the best way of scheming things is going to be on paper, and that’s an assertion backed by research; you really do remember things easier and think them through better through the friction of placing those thoughts on paper. Think about the times you were encouraged in school to write stuff down. Teachers don’t set that because it’s easy. In the age of Google Classrooms, it’s actually a massive pain in the ass by comparison. But it’s there to help you learn and, more importantly, when you don’t do it because you’re too busy losing at Clash of Clans, they give us something to tell your parents that you didn’t bother to do and offer as a cause for your failure, though often the root cause of failure is actually just that the student is a moron.
And I practice what I preach. I think I’ve mentioned before that my plotting for the game basically came together through just writing down potential plots, over and over again. Outlining the campaign, over and over. And some things stuck and some things didn’t, and then I wrote out some of one version of it, and then I killed it off but it was still an important part of the process. But that outline only gave out suggestions for certain chapter. I’m better equipped to figure out What Six Maps, Mechanically, make up a certain act now I’m at that threshold. Helpfully, it doesn’t require anything besides peace, quiet and a notebook to plot things out. I actually drafted out a chapter outline for the second half over the course of two or three sittings of ‘I show up to trivia an hour before anyone else’. One of those sessions was just written on a series of post-its I stashed in my bag. At one recent assembly, I spent the entire time looking at a clipboard, writing notes. Fortunately, because I was standing and surrounded by people who were sitting down, and were also stunted proto-beings, they couldn’t tell that I was trying to puzzle through a logical set of boss recruits and the best order for the mechanical challenges and plot beats I’d settled on.
So that’s what I’m going to spend the next month doing. Catchup, by necessity. The gameplay is largely parked, and that’s okay. 14 chapters in seven months is well ahead of schedule, considering that the first two months were largely spent establishing the foundation.
Note to Self: Remember to Go Back and Devise Pithy Headline About Battle Quotes
What is a battle quote actually for?
It can seem obvious on the face of it. It’s for letting the player lock together logical opponents and get the feedback that, yes, the developer agreed they were logical opponents, and pog, without there generally being any mechanical advantage. It might be nice to let the myrmidon kill her old mentor, but on the map, your swordreaver fighter has a much safer kill, so you’ll be okay.
I didn’t write many of them in Drums of War. There were opportunities for some I should have taken, really, but didn’t. Vanilla doesn’t have all that many, either, most of the time (Tellius aside). Homecoming didn’t have many, either; characters were a lot closer to board pieces. Exploring the nuances of Nete’s personality wasn’t really the point. You like her because she has a broad frame and oddly high skill for her class.
Dream of Five, meanwhile, was a very interconnected setting with a lot of pre-existing dynamics, and battle quotes were a natural vector for that. You pick up Lyndra in A-route Act 2, and she’s a defector from the faction you spend most of Act 3 fighting; most Warden captains know Lyndra, and she’s close to family to some. You also pick up Conleth, also a defector from that faction… but nobody actually knows him personally, so his battle quotes are more based around, ‘hey, why are you wearing that armour?!’ and the logical explanation. Hey. It’s nice armour.
Do5, bluntly, has a shitload, to the point where some legend made a compilation of every Do5 battle quote (just ‘specific guy vs. specific guy’, not even the generic ones) and it lasts like two hours. DoR is more on the Do5 side of the occasion, but there was some bloat there. Actually, much of it had to do with the lord. Rena’s battle quotes often wound up some form of ‘die, pretender! you’ll never win!’ ‘yes i shall!’, to the point where later ones lampshaded it to some extent (“I’ve heard that defiance from so many others before you…”) in a way that was hopefully cute.
But for DoR, it’s going to be even more important, in part because of the lack of vanilla GBAFE supports. The base conversations that replaced them are built into the setting and progression, and that’s a major advantage of them. Berisha isn’t just expositing about her history and by extension the role of lesser Exile knights in society, or talking about her character flaws in such a way that will be as questionably relevant in Chapter 25 as it was in Chapter 11; she’s telling you what she thinks about the current situation. When you work with the Exiles, Jadzia tells you about her mixed feelings about coming home, Asger talks about how he’s finding it difficult to hide his contempt, Szalai’s warmly anticipating the day you turn on each other.
And so the role of battle quotes, really, is to double down on that. While there are far fewer personal connections than in Dream of Five, fewer people who are related to others in some way – in large part because most of your midgame units are potentially executable, they can’t matter too much and generally won’t have existing playables begging for them to stick around – each character even more than that stands in for a societal group and/or cultural attitude. Szalai doesn’t know Rijescan loyalist leaders, and they don’t know him, but he has thoughts about them. He doesn’t want to fight them. And their continuing resistance is a threat to his own decision to surrender to something he thought was inevitable. He’s got to push back.
You’re about to fight someone specific, they’re about to fight you. In the rush of the moment, what thoughts does that give you? That’s what battle quotes are. And seeing the characters react to the events of the gameplay helps knit them into the setting. Helps reassure the player that the developer (hi) hasn’t forgotten they exist. Acknowledges and respects their continued presence.
… But at the same time, it really does have to be a little more than just ‘grr you will never stop me’ ‘yes i shall’. The more memorable ones are always building off something better. Someone trying to talk someone else down, someone saying that they aren’t just doing their duty but that they’re gonna enjoy this, someone expressing regrets or doubts. And also, it has to reflect the actual situation, which I think is a particular weakness of vanilla. Captain Dreadnought sitting on the throne, if he’s having a battle quote, is in a situation where you’ve just killed all his men. He’s probably not under any illusions he’s walking out of this alive. But he can drag one or two of you down to hell with him. It’s an opportunity to mark a contrast from the start of the map, where he had a plan and was pretty sure he was going to be the one to squash your resistance. And when most of those quotes reflect that reality, the ones that don’t become more noteworthy. When someone actually does think they’re going to carve through your ranks, either that says they’re delusional (or at least arrogant) or, with a particular self-assured confidence and the mechanical heft to back it up, that stands out.
What’s Next
Well, it’s going to take until the 10th of July for me to be back in my home space, and realistically tack on another couple of days for me to actually get re-oriented. Thankfully, I don’t really get jetlagged (edit with benefit of hindsight: lol. lmao. i fucking absolutely do get jetlagged it turns out). In theory, I’m going to be very refreshed and ready to hammer out Chapter 15 with some of the world backfilled by then. That’s base conversations and death quotes, as mentioned, but it’s also elements of visual design. I also have other writing commitments to catch up on, and I will have the time. In theory.