New Project announcement

Last week, I launched a poll to decide when and how all Patreons and contributors would be informed if something new was in the works. The result were pretty clear; the moment I had something, show it, even if it might be cancelled later down the road. For that reason, it is with great joy that I'm confident enough to show you the first workings of my new project....

Feudal growth!

What is Feudal Growth? Feudal growth is a Kingdom Management game where you follow the prince/princess of a grand fantasy realm. After an odd curse has struck the young noble, they find that their body changes with the land they must now rule. As her armies grow, so do her muscles. As her lands grow more fertile, so will she. It is up to her to figure out this mysterious curse, and rule the lands as it and she changes.

Core gameplay

Feudal Growth is a kingdom management game where the player manages a region of a kingdom that has recently become isolated from the rest. They do it by negotiating with the nobility by giving or retracting their priveleges, sending armies or agents to enforce their will, and decide what is justice in their new Realm.

The game is turn based, meaning you decide what your agents and armies are going to do and resolve events before you go to the next week. Every agent has their own stats and abilities, meaning that sending the right agent to the right task is vital. And don't forget, in these ages news spreads slowly; once you send an agent, they will be unavailable for some time!

Development

The game will borrow a lot from Summer growth. However, it will borrow them in a far more refined way. For that, we will need to talk about the development a bit.

Summer growth was started some time before it got it's first public release; 6 months, in fact. Before that, there was even an older version that never saw the light of day. The reason for that was that Summer Growth actually predates my ability to write code. When I made it, I knew no coding languages, no JavaScript, and made do with the built-in twine syntax.

This meant that Summer growth was build on shakey foundations. I'm extremely proud of what we made with it, but looking back, the game was not made to be worked on by multiple people. The entire game is stored in a single file,  the code wasn't made to be reusable. All of this meant that the more we added, the harder it got to add new elements.

This brings us to 2023. Right now, Summer Growth is almost feature complete. All the coding is in place, it just needs a lot more writing, which is being added at a good pace. There are a lot of systems we'd like to improve or add, but doing so would take far longer than is practical. So, I took those ideas and started adding them to this new project. A good example is the Visual Novel style render that I showed months ago.

While this mostly worked, Summer growth simply wasn't made with it in mind, and so actually adding it would cost months.

Meanwhile, in this new project I've been working on my own for three weeks, and development is incredibly fast. The project is set up far better, and all the lessons we learned from summer growth we can apply here.

So what now?

This is a long read. So, let me wrap it up. Summer Growth continues to be developed, and more writing is added. But while this happens, I'm working on this new project. The goal is to keep it kind of hidden, until I got a playable demo that I can release to people. Despite development going very fast, I still have to think about how to organize it, and even how to fund it. But one thing I can assure you of; it's going to be a blast. All the contributors are on board, Soviet is already planning art, and we are all hyped for this.

But this is where I need to here from you. How would you like to be updated about this new project? What do you think so far? And, do you look forward to it? You guys make this possible, so your opinion certainly counts. The project isn't announced yet; so, I'd like to ask you all to not talk too much about it. If you got questions, you may always ask here or DM me on discord.