Earlier this week I was writing a new design article.

While we don't do Design Articles often, I feel they provide the closest insight into the game we're making. Having them in a separate category helps keep key information from getting lost in all this blogging that we do.

Then I realised the article I was writing was unpublishable.

Not because it was poorly written, or because it gave too much away. Not because the website had broken (actually I did have to fight it a bit).

It was because writing this article about a game called 'Rise of Winterchill' (which has been the name of the project up to this point) felt wrong. Like, a complete undo to everything we just said. You couldn't pay me to publish it like that.

We reflected on what that meant, and so today we're announcing the actual name of the game we're making. Which is Causeway.

The word 'causeway' means "a raised road, usually on a mound of earth", as opposed to a bridge which crosses a specific obstacle. One of the many reasons we like it is that it's a synonym for a way, path, or lane.

Descent of Winterchill

We've been settled on Causeway for a while, and the plan had always been to announce the name with the new website and memorable branding.

Of course, plans meet reality. Branding needs to fit the product, and we had plenty of other details to figure out: Story, Setting, and Art Direction being essentials.

All of those have made progress, and are still in progress. (Quite actively so! But that's for another post...). A new website would be unlikely this side of the new year, and committing time to it would disrupt the alpha.

Then, writing this week's article showed me that 'Rise of Winterchill' is limiting the conversation around our game and vision. That's such a bad thing to have happening, and is definitely not okay to let continue.

We've long known that 'Rise of Winterchill' had flaws. Among others: it's easily misspelled, people need to hear it twice, and it's similar to a location in Game of Thrones. I transitioned to using 'Causeway' when talking about the game in-person and internally years ago.

The old name's flaws were no longer affecting me, so I didn't give much thought to how its ongoing use might impact on public perception of the project. That was a blind spot for me — hopefully I can be more mindful going forward.

So, this announcement falls less on the fanfare and polished PR side, and towards "actual things people encounter when developing games".

Changes 'Round Here

Now of course, this is being shared on the lustrous riseofwinterchill.com, and that will continue until the end of the year. It'll take time to shuffle things around, update the socials, and make sure everybody knows it's us when logos start changing.

You blog readers (wonderful people, all of you) get to enjoy a slight premonition of that future. Feel free to call the game Causeway from now on when chatting with us and others.

We will of course still refer to the old game as Rise of Winterchill. That's historically accurate — and it's still a name I have much fondness for. It has served us well over the years.

One happy change will be moving the RoW Design Articles over to Lane-Pushing Games, where they will continue as the ongoing series Crafting Causeway.

They will live their best lives on a site dedicated to game design, where design-minded people can find them. It's also a relief to have their presentation stay independent of any changes to this website.

...Wait, What's the Fuss?

Right — all this about an article? It wouldn't read well with the old name?

Go read the article. It will teach you some new things about the game.

And perhaps you will see, as I finally did, that a domineering, fantasy-riddled name like Rise of Winterchill isn't the right fit for our vision. May it enjoy a good retirement!

Softmints

Status Report: Things are going Pretty Well.

I'm enjoying the alpha process. People tell me why things are bad. I will agree, think about solutions, then we try to find a way forward.

Each time something gets fixed, another something will pop up and get in the way of fun. Sometimes it's an exploit, sometimes it's just bad UX. We rinse, we repeat.

The biggest improvement over the past months has been to responsiveness. It took a lot of directed feedback and patience from our testers, but we seem to have reached a point where new people can join and mostly have a good experience.

I don't even want to recall all the different systems we had to touch to get this to happen; it was a lengthy process. We'll have to do more work in the future, but have hopefully earned some time away from responsiveness to focus on other things.

There's definitely a couple of macro issues with the design, like how much players want to engage with map objectives, or how the game closes out when one team is in a winning position. Those are trickier.

Today I will share some thoughts on one of those macro issues: equipment design!

Kill Life Leech

There is a Counsel called Bloodletter in the alpha. It is named after an item in my old game Rise of Winterchill, and provides a simple 6 + 6% life leech. 

Early on, Bloodletter was picked up by almost everyone — which we expected because it's familiar and reliable. 'Familiar and reliable' is a really powerful combo.

However, in a previous post, we discussed how sometimes 'interesting' items can get lost in the crowd, and how one 'bad' item can poison a game. For us, 'interesting' items are ones which are biased towards any of three things:

• Teamwork
• Leadership
• Opportunities for Shared Creativity

Bloodletter connects with none of these. It has to go!

Making sure we don't have dud items is part of getting equipments right. Life leech will make its return, but not in its familiar and reliable form. And on that note...

Add and Adjust

We've had buffs and modifiers in the game for a while. Last week, we finished another pass on the system: giving them deeper integration and making the scripting tidier for actions which can be subject to many modifiers.

For example, it will be intuitive to write a modifier which causes abilities to have increased radius if the player targets a watery surface. Maybe that would be fun!

We're mentioning this because it's no secret that custom games will be encouraged on our platform. We want to be ready for player creativity!

Things have been a bit slower with the alpha itself over the past 2–3 weeks, as we've been working on business development, art direction, and on some of the earlier parts of the creation process for some new characters (before we get to their kits).

It's all good work, good collaboration and the game will be better for it. For now, it's back to improving alpha content and getting as close as we can to a clear representation of what the game will eventually become.

Softmints

Phew!

We are making good progress!

There have been a lot of challenges over the last two months. We've battled with a diverse array of crashes, both on the server and in the client. We've spent days investigating and solving unusually long compile times.

We've had to expand our back-end tools to track down some of the more elusive issues, and come up with tricks to get abilities and features to function without spending more time building whole systems for them.

It has been hard work, but it's paying off. The game's never been in a better place, and even though we're light on content I don't worry about that. The tools are good. Iteration time is pretty fast. Fleshing out gameplay will follow.

During all this fixing, we've also been iterating the game mechanics to explore what fun looks like. Here's one example that I'd like to share...

Setting Up Camps

During the various tests we've been running, I noticed that the jungle was not a fun experience.

Maybe that shouldn't have surprised me. I placed camps to test their features: respawning, aggro, leashing, and rewarding players who cleared them. I wasn't yet thinking about "designing a fun experience" in the jungle, and it showed.

So what went wrong? My approach to making camps was:

1. Pick a unit type for each camp
2. Place three or four copies of that unit in a clearing, spaced nice and evenly.

I had to reflect for a while on why this doesn't work. It's because there is no technique for players to apply.

It doesn't matter which unit you hit first, or the order in which you attack the creeps if they're all the same. It doesn't matter from which direction the camp gets approached if the units are evenly spaced.

These symmetric camps were unengaging because they didn't let players express themselves.

Natural Variation

The solution, of course, is to break the symmetry.

This lesson dates back to Warcraft III (or prior), where the design team must have realised the same thing. Having a variety of unit types in each creep camp gives the player some (simple) choices to make when approaching it. Alternatively, having a single creep to simplify the scenario can also work.

Most lane-pushing games with jungles already do this, and now we do as well.

This might seem like a really simple game design problem and solution, but it's always good to question the way things are done. If we understand this solution, we can understand alternatives!

One alternative is having creep camps with area attacks that can be dodged. Indeed, it might be better to not vary the unit types in this case as the player is already being offered a challenge.

Also, we love knockback and environmental damage, so here's a variation we might try during alpha:

Suppose we placed a couple of powder kegs near a camp, and let players lure creeps into them where they could be blown up to deal area damage.

The catch is: explosions are noisy! The enemy team will hear kegs explode and be alerted to the location.

I started coding it a little after having that idea, but figured I should get the blog updated before diving into experimental features. As always, if you have questions or want to chat our discord is the place!

Softmints

Hi all,

We've mentioned before that Advisors are part of the equipment system for the game. There's currently 38 counsels ("items") in the game. I haven't implemented Advisors themselves yet, as they're more macro-oriented (I use that term loosely).

Imagination is the limit when it comes to making new counsels. Our tech makes them dead easy to add, yet it's hard to resist the temptation to copy what works in other games. A bit like dogs eating chocolate: the wrong items can poison a game. Even a single one can be transformative: what would DotA look like without Black King Bar?

When I worked on Dota Outland, there were some interesting items that never got used because there were 10+ shops to investigate and they simply got lost in the crowd. Writing and reflecting during the Lane-Pushing Games review, I resolved that the next time I wanted players to use the interesting items, I would simply not have uninteresting items available.

It's not easy to stick to that. Allow too many passive stat-padding options (say, life leech), and players will stick with them because familiarity and self-sufficiency wins. And even if we're looking to encourage teamwork: self-sufficiency should still be an option.

Right now, I think good counsels should work independently, but work better together. Here's a recently added example:

Burnish

Increases your ability damage against enemy heroes by 20%–40% as long as you or a nearby allied hero are above 75% life.

I worry about creating too many "engines" (in the card game sense), particularly those which encourage a deathball lifestyle. The most natural way to encourage teamwork is encouraging proximity... but there are many more tests of coordination and we should aim to reflect those in the available counsels.

I think with the most recent couple of additions (I added three counsels in the latest patch) we've just hit the threshold of where build options are not obvious any more. That feels pretty good; though we'll have to see if testers agree.

Thanks for your patience everyone. Stay safe!
Softmints

Hi all,

I'm pleased to say we've been on a heck of a productive streak. I've picked out some highlights for you:

• Lane design now feels decent! The troops, their rhythm, and their rewards feel reasonable while also incorporating some mechanics I wanted to try. There is still lots to think about, but having a representative example of a lane is a big accelerant for hero design.
• Our fog of war implementation got a real polish and is silky smooth!
• We had a great moment where some tricky and substantial changes were needed under the hood on our netcode; two days of work later we try it out and it worked first time!
• Content has been steadily increasing and improving:
  • A lot of the early counsels (items) in the game were to sample the tech and show that it worked. I've been trying to steer the newer ones towards "how could this encourage cooperation?".
  • Hero design has progressed in a similar way: initially technical demonstration and now moving towards more meaningfully designed experiences. Right now Scavenger is my favourite!
• The UI has sharpened up a lot, with most of the essential lane-pushing game elements in place and working as they should.

Despite all this, we're still firmly on "old art"; models and textures are all basic asset store stuff until we get some extra hands on board to make improvements. I've worked our particle editor to the bone so hero abilities have distinct and readable effects... I look forward to being able to say the same for heroes themselves.

Tools of the Trade: An Update

For those interested in how we make games, here's a look at our current toolset:

• Notion is our primary knowledge-base, task management tool, and repository of design documents. It's super; I'm very pleased. If you have grand designs of any kind, do check it out (and the personal plan is free for students!).
• Rocket.chat handles our internal team chat, while we hop over to Discord for voice calls.
• Owncloud implements our shared filesystem for retaining screenshots, important documents, etc.
• Runbox host our company email.
• Gitea is a self-hosted, open-source github. It quite helpfully has git-lfs built in, which allows us to easily commit and share game assets as part of our workflow.
• GitFiend is a GUI for git that I actually like. I have never made this claim about any git client before.
• Cmder and its handy custom commands make it easy to run a variety of scripts from one terminal. I use these to package release builds, reload game servers, etc.
• Visual Studio 2015 is a necessity; we do a lot of C++.
• Notepad++ is my choice for all our xml scripting and other text editing. There's prettier apps out there, but it's so damn fast and deep searches directories in a flash.
• Drupal 8 is the backend for this website and also handles authentication for playing the game itself. (This is ripe to change as we scale up.)

There's a couple of others, but I think this covers the interesting parts! Thoughts welcome; maybe someone will find a tool they like among this list.

What's coming up?

First to come to mind: hero design and tech to implement new abilities is one area we'll keep working on for sure. I really want to get back to some creative direction and branding work as well.

And of course, working out the last issues that are interfering with client stability: no-one likes a crash (those do like to crop up...). Maybe we will be able to drop the 'technical' modifier on alpha soon.

Thanks to our early testers for their time and patience in helping us get this far!

Talk soon,
Softmints