Your Choices Define You. But What Defines Your Choices?

Herald of the Mists Dev Log 1

Hi all,

For the last two months, I’ve been busy trying to put out a Steam page for my game, Herald of the Mists. And it’s live! It has a Steam page and a website now. In this issue, I’ll go through how it all started, what my intentions were, and the journey ahead. Enjoy!

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How It Started

I was working on a completely different project, one I named Project Railroad. It was set in a post-apocalyptic world where the player has to follow the railroads to reach their destination. My intention was for it to be a brief, evocative third-person adventure. But a lot of different ideas kept spinning in my head.

The idea for Herald of the Mists came while I was playing Gothic. Gothic has a fantastic progression system that makes you start the game as a weak insect and eventually transform into a god. The game makes this transition incredibly satisfying, and I was inspired by that. I wondered if I could create this satisfying progression system in a very minimalistic manner, and I started working on a small prototype. I was kind of sick of dealing with 3D assets, lighting and optimization. So I wanted to make this one very minimalistic visually, with only texts and icons. So I code-named it MinimalistRPG.

I was also inspired by Knave, Grok?!, Mausritter, Warrior, Rogue and Mage. These table-top RPGs with minimalist rule systems inspired the core system behind my game. And though the visual style and the vision have changed a lot through time, the core rule system hasn’t changed that much. I’ll talk about the rule system in detail shortly.

My initial thought was that the game would be simple and fast-based. With a simple but flexible character customization system, your goal would be to kill enemies, loot, improve your inventory and attributes, and progress through a tiny story. It looked like this in the beginning:

The Progress

I wasn’t very happy with the result. It lacked the sauce, so I kept working on it. I researched similar RPGs with a minimalist approach, and I realized that I’d prefer to make a game that is focused on story and choices rather than a game that focuses on grind. That’s when I came across Roadwarden and The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante, two text-heavy RPGs with greater focus on the player's narrative choices.

I was immediately immersed in these two game’s storytelling and worldbuilding. I wanted to take a similar approach, looking for ways to implement more story and less grind. There were systems I implemented, such as minimalist dungeon-crawling and room system. I decided to remove those. They were fun but not suitable for the game’s new design pillars.

I eventually removed a large number of systems until the ones that were left felt cohesive. I kept the character customization and turn-based combat but they went through some changes as well. It took a long time for the game to find its creative direction, but it eventually arrived there.

Your Choices Define You. What Defines Your Choices?

Herald of the Mists is all about role-playing, dice rolls, and difficult choices. I define its genre as RPG/Visual Novel. As the herald of the Queen, you're tasked with unraveling the truth behind the disappearance of her lost army. You need to travel to a place called The Mists, meet people, follow clues, make sacrifices, and face consequences of your choices. The core design pillars are:

• Greater focus on role-playing & different approaches to problem solving

• Morally grey choices and consequences

• Grim and unforgiving world

• Characters and places players bond

• Classless Rule System: Characters defined by inventories

• Risk & Reward

Character Customization

As I said earlier, I was inspired by TTRPGs such as Knave, Grok?!, Mausritter, Warrior, Rogue and Mage. Just like these systems, Herald of the Mists has a very simple but flexible approach to character custimization. You have three attributes:

• Strength: Enables you to use melee weapons and heavy armor.

• Dexterity: Enables you to sneak, picklock, and use better bows and daggers.

• Will: Enables you to use spellbooks.

Each time you level up, you can choose to increase one of your attributes. It’s a classless system, so depending on how you allocate your points, you can become a rogue, a mage, a fighter, or anything in between.

Another important factor in character customization is your inventory. You have limited inventory slots, and what you decide to carry plays a very important role in defining your character and its capabilities.

Dice Rolls

Some of the choices you make will require you to roll dice. You will roll two 6-sided dice (2d6) and then add relevant attribute and bonuses (2D6 + attribute + bonus). If the result is higher than the target, you succeed. If not, you fail and face the result.

Turn-Based Combat

The game also has minimalist turn-based combat. You have 3 Action Points (AP) in your turn. Different actions can take different amounts of AP. You have four options: Attack, Use Magic, Defense, End Turn.

Enemy’s place is important. You cannot use a sword to attack enemies in the back row if there are enemies in the front row. You can attack enemies in the front row with a bow, but you'll have a disadvantage on the attack roll.

Traveling

Throughout your journey, you’ll be visiting different locations and collecting clues about the lost army. And as you expect from an old-school RPG, these places will be full of quests and puzzles, so you’ll be travelling back and forth.

Story

Diego of the Mists started a rebellion for the third time. Fed up with his insubordination, the Queen sent her army, led by Kai the Written, to The Mists to end the rebellion once and for all.

No one has heard from the army ever since.

You, herald of the Queen, have to travel to The Mists and find out what happened. All the story revolves around the mystery behind the lost army. What could have caused the disappearance of an entire army? And how far will you go to find out?

The story will have 3 acts, with the first one being the longest. I don’t want to give away too much, but since the game is all about choices, it explores the different motivations behind choices.

The Road Ahead

The game is still in its early stages, so everything you read here is subject to change. The systems are mostly done and working. There are two things missing: content and polishing (lots of polishing). If everything goes right, I’m planning to release it next year, around September. And there will be a demo once Act 1 is finished.

It’s a text-heavy game, which is not very marketable. But I know there are people out there who are interested in these kinds of games. Haven’t figured out how to reach them, but maybe I will in due time. If you are one of those people, do give it a wishlist on Steam! (It’s not available in Germany due to the content rating at the moment. That’ll change in the future, hopefully).

I’ll talk about the game from time to time, but this newsletter won’t turn into a dev log. If you are interested in reading more about the game, you can subscribe to the devlog on my website. I’ll be back with the usual game dev stuff on the next issue. Let me know what you think about Herald of the Mists. Cheers!

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To-Do List

Watch: The 100 Games That Taught Me Game Design

Learn: Design Patterns in Unity (and when to use them)

Bundles:

Epic Environments Mega Bundle: Unreal Engine & Unity

Unreal and Unity Assets Giga Bundle

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Me

Reading: Jade War by Fonda Lee, the second book of Green Bone Saga. After reading the first book two months ago, I was looking forward to continuing the series. The second book started slow but strong. Kinda lacks the tension the first book had but it’s still very gripping.

Playing: Alan Wake 2. Not a fan of switching between characters but I’m having fun with this one.

Listening:

Thanks for reading!

And that’s it from today’s issue of GameDev’s Journey. I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. If you did, please like and leave a comment. Reach out for suggestions, objections, questions, or just say hi.

But regardless, thank you so much for reading, and have a great game dev journey!