Dev Journal #6 – Early game, Dating and Recruitment

If you’ve read our previous dev journals, you perhaps remember that we held our first internal playtest session at the beginning of January, with the help of our dear colleagues at Ishtar Games. Following the analysis of their feedback and data, we decided to make quite a few changes in the game, and have been working on refining our existing features as well as adding some new ones ever since. And today is the day we can finally show you a preview of some of these changes!

Matthieu, Creative Director of Lakeburg Legacies, has decided to completely change the pace of the early game. Instead of starting with a dozen villagers of varying ages and profiles, the player now starts playing with one single character and their Woodcutter’s Lodge, and has to build the town of Lakeburg and make its population grow from there. In order to keep things interesting and well-paced, it was necessary to completely rework some pre-existing systems and add some new ones… 👀

One of the main issues our playtesters encountered was that their attempts at setting up their villagers often kept failing. Some of them even couldn’t make their population grow for lack of suitable partners, and were doomed with seeing their village slowly wither and die… 😅 That simply wouldn’t do!

In order to solve this problem, the Game Designer of Lakeburg (Chloé) entirely reworked the Dating system making it much easier to understand.

After the player has selected one of the available singles of the village, Tindra the Fortune Teller 🔮 will introduce them to potential suitors from out-of-town, and help them figure out if they would be good matches. Manon (Art Director) has really enjoyed creating this interface, while Simon (Lead Programmer) did his magic and has given it life!

Finally, now that the player has selected the right partner for their villager and has got the opportunity to learn more about them, the couple is going to start dating. If all goes well, they will marry after some time, and the suitor will join the people of Lakeburg! 💒

Another way to increase the village’s population is the newly-brewed Recruitment system! From time to time, the player will have the option to recruit a character from out-of-town, in exchange for Gold. Our Game Programmer Frédéric has implemented a pool of characters from which this system will draw from in order to regularly offer new characters. By looking up information about these potential additions to the village’s workforce, the player can easily ascertain who will best meet their needs!

The people of Lakeburg attaches a lot of importance in educating its youth. Workers in the School building serves this purpose perfectly by boosting all children’s intelligence, which in turn results in faster learning when they’re put under the guidance of a mentor. Justine (Game Artist) has summoned her best memories from her elementary school years when drawing this background. 📚

When she’s not wreaking havoc in Lakeburg through the events she’s writing, or masterfully managing our localization kit, Ambrune (Narrative Designer) enjoys adding new smaller content to the game. Lately, she’s been hard at work diving into lists of medieval baby names and expanding our names and surnames database in order to make sure our villagers will be as varied as possible!

Aaaaand it’s a wrap! We’re very proud of the direction Lakeburg Legacies is taking, and we hope you’re as excited by the newest additions as we are! 🔥