A New Website and a New Plan (Sort of)

Hey there! I'm breaking up our usual blog post schedule because of some exciting changes for Alkanaur. So uh... get excited.

First, we've launched our new website! We've know for a while that we'd need a little more functionality than the blogger format provides, but we waffled for a bit on whether we'd use a template-based web platform or simply create our website from scratch. In the end we built our own website because we love the ultimate flexibility that offers. We're still waiting for more content to fill out the site, but we think there's enough content ready to open alkanaur.com to the public. Speaking of which, we're now using the domain name alkanaur.com (which previously sent you to our blogger page) for our main site. We'll still be using blogger for our blog posts, but you can also find and search through those posts on the main site. Additionally, if you want to know about important Alkanaur developments, please subscribe to our newsletter. You can find the button at the bottom of our new website.

Second, last weekend there was quite a stir in the indie game development community thanks to an announcement from the PC gaming behemoth Steam. As a popular digital storefront, social platform, and gaming library, Steam is an essential hub for developers who want their game to reach a mass market. Steam's process for allowing new developers digital "shelf space" was called Greenlight, and you can read more about that process here in one of my previous blog posts.

Anyway, last weekend Steam announced that they will abandon the Greenlight program this spring due to oft-discussed issues with Greenlight's voting system and the veritable deluge of games pouring into Steam. Instead of Greenlight, the gaming platform will move to a program called Steam Direct. Rather than a small, one-time fee that allows a developer to place as many games as they want in the Greenlight voting pool, indie devs will now pay a single fee for each game and skip the voting process entirely. That fee is still being discussed, but Steam said the fee would be "recoupable."

So what does this mean for Rob the Sky Games and Alkanaur? Honestly, not much. While Steam Direct will likely create a big impact on the indie dev market as a whole, our plans remain the same, and we will still release on Steam. We will not have to worry about garnering enough votes to get through the Greenlight program, which is nice. If the fee ends up being extremely high (the highest number being tossed around is $5,000), we'll just make sure that our Kickstarter will cover the fee. We'll need to wait and see how the market adjusts to Steam Direct, but both our small indie company and Steam hope that we'll see fewer low-effort titles competing for visibility with great indie games (like Alknanaur!).

Dev Take Tuesday - Risk in Nuclear Throne

I recently picked up Nuclear Throne as part of this ludicrously good deal on Humble Bundle. While the bundle includes many games I’m looking forward to trying out, Nuclear Throne was the first one I installed and played. In part because I knew it would be one of the easiest games to quickly jump into, but also because I’ve learned a lot about game design and development from the makers of Nuclear Throne, Vlambeer. I was immensely curious to see some of their design decisions in action.

Nuclear Throne image found on Wikipedia

Nuclear Throne, at least based off my initial impression, does a lot of things very well. However it was one tiny design decision that really stuck out to me as I died over and over and over again (I’m not really great at “twitchy” games). Whenever you destroy an enemy, whether it’s a maggot or a mummified bandit, small little green canisters—apparently called “rads”—pop out of the enemy. These radioactive bits give you experience, which in turn allows you to level up and gain powerful mutations. Experience systems are pretty typical in gaming, so my question was: why not just gain the experience points automatically? Why force the player to manually collect the XP?

If there were no reason, I’d probably call this bad design. After all, part of the appeal of video games is that the computer can automatically do tedious things—such as tallying experience points—for the player. Fortunately, there is a reason. The little green rads disappear after a short amount of time, so if you want to collect your experience you have to go grab ‘em. And in Nuclear Throne, that means putting your character at risk. If you want the reward of additional XP to level up, you can’t always play things safe and hide behind cover. So with one small design choice (making XP a collectible instead of automatic), Vlambeer created a risk/reward system that encourages the player to take risks and move faster.

Risk is an essential element in any game. While a game maker obviously wants to reward the player, you can’t have a true reward without risk. Our upcoming game Alkanaur is a turn-based tactics game, so at first glance it might not seem to have too much in common with the fast-paced Nuclear Throne. But the balance of risk and reward has always been something on our minds while designing Alkanaur. Much like Nuclear Throne, tactics games can occasionally become stale when the predominant strategy is to play extremely defensively and inch around the battlefield. Much like the recent tactics game X-COM 2 (and of course Nuclear Throne), we will design reward systems that inspire interaction and risk to give our players the push they need to learn, adapt, and have fun.

Showcase Saturday - Diversity and class roles

As we get closer to a demo build in our new engine, we're excited to show off more content to our followers. While a lot of our mechanics are in place, we want the chance to playtest them before we start broadcasting them publicly. However, today I did want to take a bit of time to explain the basic idea of Alkanaur's combat system, which revolves around class roles. 

One of Alkanaur's overarching themes is strength in diversity. I feel that the best way to reinforce a narrative theme is by matching the game's mechanics to that theme, so I decided to try and encourage diversity through Alkanaur's combat. The combat system focuses on clear strengths and weaknesses for each type of character, pushing the player to field a team that can work together to secure victory. Every character class in Alkanaur will fill a couple of the following roles:

Tank – Tanks absorb enemy fire while fighting on the front lines. They lock down adjacent enemies and keep those enemies from approaching allies with less defenses.

Striker – Strikers deal sustained damage every turn, usually from range. As long as they aren’t locked down or killed by enemy spells, they can mow through any enemy, no matter how sturdy that enemy is.

Mage – Mages lock down enemies from afar, freezing, slowing, stunning, and otherwise harassing targets with their arsenal of spells.  They can also damage multiple enemies at once with their AoE (area of effect) spells.

Burster – Whether from afar with potent incantations or up close and personal with a wicked dagger, bursters deal impressive amounts of damage in a single turn. They generally require time to amp up their damage or prep their spells, so they might need to be protected until they can take down a vulnerable, important, and unfortunate target.

Support – Supports help their allies and hinder their enemies with utility spells. They can also provide healing to keep injured squad mates from dying.