The Rat Race

Hi all,

A few weeks ago, we welcomed a small group of players from the mailing list into the alpha.

Unfortunately we couldn't bring in everybody who applied, and we do appreciate it's been a long wait for many. There will be future opportunities, so stay tuned.

Having some new eyes on the game has been great, so lets share a little about that.

One of our recent matches stretched for over an hour! While it was fun throughout, this was far beyond our expected match time. Thankfully, it did shed some light on how we approach developing the game.

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The Tool You Reach For...

Causeway is being developed starting with the things we know and feel confident about. From my previous work on Rise of Winterchill, that would lean towards PvP combat with interesting character progression, and not so much towards pacing and objectives. (We'll learn more about those as we go.)

Because of this, the game at present has some "incompleteness". There are tools we don't provide to players, such as stuns (which we've written about before). Another example is that there's no "boots" that would make some characters faster than others.

The result is that players end up with some "problems" like "chasing enemies down" where there may be limited or no tools available to solve that problem. A similar "missing tool" problem was the cause for that 1-hour match.

This can be healthy for us! — as part of our iterative process. Where players are motivated to solve something, that's a hook for us to ask: "can it be interesting to solve this as a team?"

One of the Counsels, Rat Race, seems to have landed nicely into this category. It's a tool, arguably the only tool for chasing enemies, and it works wonders with team coordination.

We're continuing to explore in this space, and figure out what tools we can present to let players solve some of these "problems" in more collaborative ways.

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Less is More

We've also seen that some character abilities were more complicated than they needed to be.

This ran against expectations for me. I estimated a certain level of complexity that  was needed in the kits to keep them interesting, and it turns out I was placing the bar about "one mechanic" too high. That was pretty close to the right level, but I'm happy to learn that we can work with less.

Here's two abilities we've shared previously, which have had some parts removed:

We really want players to figure out their characters within 2-3 games, so they can start thinking about how to succeed with the character.

The Scavenger and Rasputin character pages have been updated with these (minor) changes. A short tooltip is a happy tooltip!

Until next time,
Softmints