[Restoration] Sneak Peak #2: Random Events, The Whey to Curdshire, Enlistees, and more

We're going to try and get into the habit of more frequent status update releases to make sure everyone knows what we're working on for the upcoming 0.2.X release. We aim to have the release out by the end of August.

The main features we are working on are:

A) Random Events

Random events are short, repeatable mini-encounters pop up randomly while traveling around the world, either in local maps or world maps. These will offer short experiences that generally result in some full negative results, some full positive results, or most commonly a mixture of both with some risk-reward. By themselves, these should not be enough to make or break anyone's main campaign, but we'll work on balancing them over time.

Random events include:

• Harpies flying over the party. Toss out some rations to distract them or risk having them swoop down and attack, with the risk of a party member being transformed into one

• A dwarf merchant with some essentials offers to trade with the party as a more spontaneous way to gain a few hundred gold. Alternatively, you can share a meal with him at the expense of a few hours of your time.

• Hatfellow's cane is acting up. Either you or a follower might just have a sudden return to maid-hood.

• The party comes across an empty camp. You can loot it quickly or thoroughly, risking a possible ambush.

Random events have a cooldown so the party should never experience more than one per day, aside from a few more quest-essential random events, such as for the upcoming The Whey to Curdshire quest. Each event has its own individual cooldown so once triggered, it won't spawn again until 7 or more days pass to ensure some level of variety. As the pool of random events expands, these cooldowns will likely be upped as well.

B) The Whey to Curdshire

The new quest we are working on right now is named The Whey to Curdshire which revolves around a village of humans transformed into cows by their once-guardian. The party is tasked with finding the half-human, half-fairy witch who did it and convincing her to restore the village's humanity. Of course it won't be as easy as asking nicely. Booby traps litter the village and party members may transform first into Milkmaids, then Milkmothers, then finally full-on feral dairy cows in a system similar to how afflictions worked in Exile.

C) Enlistees

Enlistees, the Patreon perk for pledging $20 USD or more monthly, has also been implemented into the game, and has even been expanded a little beyond the original vision.

Instead of just being a first and last name that can enter a recruitment pool, enlistees can now provide:

• First name (required)

• Last name (required)

• Species (required)

• Specific follower form, ie elf rover, mermaid shorewalker, demon thralltaker, etc. (optional)

• Predetermined color tones (optional)

The color tones means you can specify "they have dark skin and pink hair, green eyes, and wear an outfit of blues and greens" and whatnot. This means the follower will appear the same visually in their base form each game for any color layer requested. As long as the color exists in the game's existing color pallet for the specified layer, it can be defined.

Enlistees will appear in a recruitment pool when a follower matching that species (and specific follower form when defined) is in it. Only one Enlistee will be injected into a recruitment group at a time. They show up with a circle heart with a white 'P' (for Patreon) in the center in the recruitment grid, as well as when viewing that follower's details.

If the enlistee follower is recruited into the party, they will never show up in any recruitment pool ever again. If they are NOT recruited into the party and that recruitment group is refreshed, they won't enter any recruitment pools until the next time the game is launched to prevent double-spawning. (This may change in the future, though).

D) Other

Based on some player feedback we will likely implement a follower upkeep and payment modifier that can be set at the start of a new game to reduce (or increase) the follower recruitment cost and daily wage upkeep for players who want to gear their game more toward pure RPG and away from the party management system. The game will be developed and balanced around this features being in default settings, however.

That's it for now! As a reminder, Patrons at the $5 or higher have early access to game builds. V0.2.01 is the latest build currently deployed to Early Birds.

Happy Friday!