Reworking Shops

When we set out to make KoD, we knew we wanted to create a highly customized game, but we wanted to avoid this getting in the way of the delivery of content. After all, we know you're here for a game, not just for pictures or systems. And while we have been still doing systems and visual assets to have the game and updates feel better, some of them we could not invest enough time in and to make them as good looking and functioning as we would want to. That left us forced to decide if we wanted to delay story content for an update and finish side things. But from experience we know that people are not as excited just about UI, backgrounds, and nicely coded systems alone, as they are for story-driven content and character interactions.

Though we built the first version to introduce the game and show what we were aiming for, our quality goals are higher than that. But since we don't want to spend months and months reworking the game and lacking in other areas, we have been actively trying to commission and find outside help to accomplish this goal. It's actually taxing and hard work to find reliable workers in this industry and both of us have been working just the two of us for years now, so having someone else in that work routine does offer a new challenge.

However we were able to find and are working with two new people: Ndsferrari (a coder) and Monaco Dingo (an UI and asset artists).
Above, you can see an example of our work with them. Instead of a boring old menu, Elmy's shop is now a visual menu. Not only does this look better, the system provides information about items before you buy it, as some people have requested. We think it's a nice upgrade all around, and you'll see it in version 0.4.0. This was done with fair bit of editing and fixing to its final version, but we are very happy with the end result.

We're also trying to do this work to scale to future updates. The GUI you see there isn't just for Elmy's shop, the underlying mechanics will work just as well for every shop in the game.

Along with this, we've been experimenting with commissioning some components of the game. Once fully comfortable with this new way of doing things, it can add some time up front, but in the end it will mean we can spend more time writing, designing, and drawing the story progression, while also have Kingdom of Deception feel a lot higher in quality.