Hello everyone!
It’s been quite some time since we last shared news regarding Ironclad’s development with you. Here we are then, with the second entry of the Developer’s Diary.
Game development
We’ve spent the last few months implementing various gameplay changes, ironing out what we felt were weaknesses in our game mechanic. Through extensive testing, we are confident that Ironclad’s game mechanic has reached the required balance and stability so that we’ll be able soon to give out prototypes to our groups of blind testers and get their valuable feedback. We’ve given our efforts mostly in making the event and encounter mechanic smooth. We are very confident that the event/encounter mechanic we’ve implemented will offer alot of replayability to the game. We’ll go into more detail later along the game’s development.
Recently we’ve started experimenting on how the game’s overall mechanism will “react” if applied on a mini campaign (with respect to the game’s difficulty). For example, in our first playthroughs, we barely made it to our final objective. But since Ironclad is a campaign driven board game with choices and persistent consequences, during our mini-campaign playthrough we had to start the second scenario battered and bruised (instead of a “pristine” Ironclad and “fresh” crew), which added significantly to the game’s difficulty and made us think twice about our actions in order to survive.
In our next entry of the Developer’s Diary, we’ll be sharing more information about the game mechanics.
Content development (or otherwise… “We’ve scaled the hill, now it’s time to scale the mountain!”)
Ironclad is a science fiction game, so you can all be sure to find a lot of fiction in our story and overall content. However, from the inception of the game’s idea, we felt it was right to have real and scientific foundations. The world where events will transpire will be our own, or, our own universe (if you prefer), meaning that players will get to explore planets, reach star systems and evade black holes already observed and catalogued by mankind. This however, requires copious amounts of research on our part. It is truly fascinating what the scientific community has already discovered (and is yet to discover) away from our home, the planet Earth. We’re studying, in the best of our ability, exoplanets, nebulae, pulsars and other amazing discoveries, which we’ll try to incorporate in the best possible way in our story and design.
Artwork
Finally, we’re super excited to share with you the arrival of another valuable member aboard the Ironclad.
Manos Lagouvardos has joined our team. He is an experienced illustrator and comic book artist and with his amazing and dynamic artwork, he will help bring Ironclad’s legend to life. He has already started work on our project with some very promising concept art, which we’ll showcase in one of the upcoming entries of this Diary.
You can follow Manos’ work on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ManosLagouvardos/), deviantArt (http://smolb.deviantart.com/) or Tumblr (http://smolby.tumblr.com/).
Stay tuned, we’ll be back with another Diary entry soon!