Hello fellow daoists!

It's been a while. I am honestly not sure if I updated the itch community but - I plan for the next release later this year in the fall. There are various circumstances which contribute to this, the most important would be the art needs. It's a costly process that takes longer than I would like.

So, while I wait on art, I decided to refine my programming skills. Over the past few weeks I've practiced making several different types of "casual" games. I learned a lot from each. Boiling down the essence of fun can be difficult - after all, we all have our own idea of what's fun. So, by trying many things I gained more insight. As a result, this process made HPC better.  Today, I'll share some screenshots from those very unfinished projects. There is no guarantee that any of them will ever see the light of day, so don't get your hopes up ^_^.

P.S. All of these images use placeholder art from various places. And, in some case, AI generated images.

Winds of Wuxia was built from scratch in about 12 days, based on feedback from players who wanted a more casual experience. I targeted the areas they disliked (namely the need to train, fight or explore). The result was a point and click cultivation adventure that has some potential.

However, this was difficult for one important reason - eastern fantasy relies heavily on those three aspects. They are sort of the bread and butter of the genre after all, how many cocky young masters have fallen to the fist of the main character - becoming necessary fodder in the process? This often happens because our character is forced to explore the world, hone his or her strength, engages in battles and ultimately emerge victorious. It would be quite difficult to separate those features from the genre - right? I thought so at first.  Winds of Wuxia taught me that it's possible and many of the features I learned to implement here will serve HPC (and some future games) very well.

Since people were adverse to training, I thought about games where the whole point *is* to train. I wondered what made those games fun or interesting and I decided to begin working on some trainer style games of my own. Generally when you mention trainers, you think of games like Princess Trainer , Four Elements Trainer or things like that. These games usually focus on the corruption of innocence from women that often posit themselves as "too good" for our player initially.

While it can be fun to play, it's not really my wheelhouse. I wanted to explore something different in terms of training - acquisition of strength.

So, I started tinkering with a thing...

As an anime fan myself, my love for Dragon Ball is unrivaled. I think anyone who enjoys the series has also entertained the idea of making a game or cosplaying as the characters at some point. I'm clearly no exception. I started working on this with the intention of understanding what can be "fun" about building a character's strengths.

I learned two valuable things from this, 1) making something *simple* can be difficult - but only if you don't understand the process behind it. I managed to boil it down to the rule of 3. No more than 3 gameplay features and none of those 3 features can be more than 3 levels deep.

With this..well, i got carried away.  On paper, the concept seemed simple and I may revisit it one day. But it took up more time than I cared to admit. One good thing was that I settled on a great method for making the "training" of your characters enjoyable and engaging.

Learning those things brought me one step closer. So with my "last" attempt, I imposed a rule upon myself. "Whatever I make, it has to be something I can put together in 24 hours or less."

While that seems daunting, it's not so bad and honestly - I almost made it (had I not gotten sick). Introducing "the unnamed trainer game".

This game doesn't have a beginning or end currently. If you were to start it, you'd not even get instructions or a story. I designed it this way for simplicity's sake. After all, if something is too confusing to pick up within a few seconds, most players wouldn't bother - right?  The game flow is >> Unlock / Recruit new characters >> Have Fun With Them >> Gain Mana >> Upgrade + New Characters >> Repeat.

This is as close as I got to making something truly "casual" and fun. Those self-imposed restrictions helped me learn a great deal.

That brings me to the final project, one that I'll attempt to release later this month - Endless Eden.

One thing I realized was that making HPC a casual game is...well...silly.  I certainly learned many things that will improve the game overall. You'll see that in the future, but HPC wouldn't work well as a casual project due to my initial concerns - how do you remove the "adventure" from an adventure after all?

With that in mind, I decided to use all of my newfound knowledge to make something specifically for players who want a casual Eastern fantasy game :

• Using the simplified features from Winds of Wuxia.
• Using the training/improvement aspects of unnamed dragon ball thing.
• And finally, using the simpler,  fun focused approach of unnamed Trainer.

Endless Eden combines all three. I've been working on it for some days now and the progress is quite nice. 

I'll announce more about it when the time comes for a release. For now, I just wanted to share what I've been up to. What are your thoughts? Which of these unfinished projects seem most interesting to you?

- My Big Little Brother