Nei Nalen
patreon
Behind the scenes, initial concept
🕑 Added 2024-08-26 04:45:17 +0000 UTCIn the beginning, I knew I wanted to make a growth card game. I explored various concepts before landing on where I'm at now.
Above is a picture of the existing cast, as they were in an early version compared to now. Style got a bit refined as you can see.
The first prototype actually was a more traditional collectible card game, where you would build your deck and fight other charcters with similar decks. Instead of controlling one character, you would have multiple champions on the field, that you would be able to grow in combat.
The reason was to directly include the growth within the gameplay. Each champion would also be able to grow however you want. Here's an early Ruby with different growth types, for instance.
Sounds cool, right? That said, there were several issues:
it only lasts one game, you can't really push the limits of what's possible over time
a lot of people don't want to have to deal with all types of growth and want to focus on one
it would be a lot of work on a lot of different characters having the same growth type instead of focusing on one character
there isn't the excitement of working for your gains
it was hard to make merging growth types interesting
Overall, trying to make it work, while making the gameplay interesting and making the growth exciting was a challenge, and it would quickly lose its panache. I also really wanted to make the growth the goal. After all, that's the reason people are playing a growth game, so let's make growing take longer, but with nothing but benefits, and let's make it the main objective.
That's how I ended up on a roguelite, with more of a solo adventure aspect, while keeping the card game aspect.
I'm pretty happy with how the game plays, but I do realize there are downsides to this. Currently, growth fetish content is limited, and I want to work on this aspect, to make it present at pretty much anytime in the game. I'm probably not going to be able to implement a lot of it for the next update, but it should pretty much be the focus of the update after that.
Comments
Twistedsky
You’re doing great Nei.
Skelly
Itd be cool if, after you beat a character's final boss, you could enable the concept chibis as "beta art" (kinda like StS)
Nei Nalen
Yes absolutely. But it all takes time and I first wanted to publish a first version to see if people would like it, as a proof of concept. Next update is gonna add stage 3 (and rework existing growth scenes), then the update after that is probably gonna focus on more scenes, interactions and events for the current stages, in order to make everything more exciting.
Greg
I agree with everything here. I'm a fan favorite of Amber and Pearl, so if you could somehow incorporate more growth with those 2 it would be awesome. I'd love to see more stages for them, up to 4 and 5. Maybe side stuff where they have random encounters in dungeons where they grow particular parts of their bodies? Say amber runs into a minotaur and beats it her legs grow (Then you show a growth scene). Just a thought but I feel like it would add a lot of incentive to keep played the game through multiple dungeon runs. Keep up the great work.
