A LOT has happened since our previous blogpost! We’re very happy with how the development is going right now, but as always, when we finish one task, we realize that we still have a million other ones to do! But that’s what we call game dev!
First of all, after the demo we presented at the Games Made in France event at the end of October 2021, the team reached another milestone! At the beginning of the year, other folks at Ishtar Games playtested the game in order to collect feedback and figure out what to prioritize next.
Thanks to this internal test (or “ishternal test”, as we decided to call it 😎), we were able to identify what worked well and what needed more time and refining in order for the players to fully enjoy the game the way our designers intended to. It was also pretty exciting to have people other than the core team play Lakeburg Legacies for the very first time and see what they think of our work so far!
That said, let’s have a look at some of the new features and content we recently implemented.
The map of Lakeburg has changed a lot within the past few months: with new buildings continuously being added, it was necessary to reflect these evolutions on the village, and make sure the landscape turned from forests and rocks to a nice medieval town smoothly. Manon, the art director on Lakeburg Le gacies, tried a lot of different combinations for the different buildings, and is finally satisfied with the current one! … For now. 😅
Until very recently, villagers weren’t able to work before they were adults, meaning that players had to wait a long time before the children and teenagers in the village could start gaining new skills and improving their stats.
Thanks to Chloé, our game designer, it will soon be possible to place them under the mentorship of adults in the various production building, so they can start gaining experience and inherit traits from their mentor. Manon has reworked the UI of the buildings in order to add this new system, while Frédéric, one of our two awesome developers, has been implementing it.
Our villagers used to look almost the same from their teens until the moment they reached old age, which was pretty confusing! In order to better distinguish them from their adult counterparts, Manon spent some time giving them a more youthful appearance…including some of the lesser-appreciated facets of puberty, because even in the world of Lakeburg Legacies acne won’t spare anyone! 😅
(Of course, the whole team has helped a lot by providing her with pictures from their very own youth as reference!)
Now that the Castle is fully in place, our narrative designer Ambrune has started to integrate some of the many events she wrote lately, starting with a new type of events: the royal ones. These events will appear from time to time once the Castle is built, provided it hosts a Sovereign.
They will confront the player with a situation in which representatives from two classes of villagers (nobles, artisans or peasants) are at odds with each other and came to the Sovereign to ask for judgement.
Depending on the player’s choice, the Sovereign will favour one or the other of the classes, which will reflect on the newly-implemented People’s Satisfaction gauge in the Castle. But, beware! It is of the utmost importance to keep the people of Lakeburg at least a little happy, because who knows what might happen once their satisfaction reaches 0!
Sometimes, the Sovereign dies just a little bit too early, whether it be because of a revolt, a disease or plain old age, and leaves behind a heir or heiress who is too young to govern by themself. Thanks to Simon, they are now joined by a Regent, who will assist them in their royal duties until they reach adulthood.
In addition to working on new features, our amazing artists Manon and Justine keep fleshing out the game by drawing new background for the buildings and events. Take a look at some of them:
That’s all we can show you for now, but rest assured a lot more is coming in the following months! 👀
