Update and Introducing Death In Shards

My vacation from work is over, and with that comes the added responsibility of getting myself there and hanging out for 8 hours before I'm allowed to leave so that i can do the stuff i actually like to do. This means that I probably won't have the time to work on shards like i have been over the past couple weeks. This project means a great deal to me though and I'm not about to abandon it. As for posts on the blog, i expect to be posting here about once or twice a week with new stuff and updates.

Currently i'm working out a few details regarding the Quickstart. One important aspect of this game is player death, and it's lack of finality in the game. Basically, if your character dies, the remaining living characters can choose to push ahead at a disadvantage, or go back to a Ether Kiln (a checkpoint) and retrieve their fallen friend at the cost of also reviving all the enemies they have slain up until this point.

(This is not unlike the Dark Souls video game if you've had the chance to play those games.)

Falling in battle also causes your character to gain a point of wasting, a temporary condition that reduces the maximum health of a character incrementally each time they gain a point. To reverse this condition, the player of the character must make a connection between two pieces of fiction the players have encountered so far. This is called Linking Lore, and doing so reduces the amount of wasting points they've accrued.

So in regards to a quickstart this means there is a great deal of ground to cover regarding a topic that players are often not inclined to experience in games, the death of their character. I've come up with a few ways to introduce character death to a group of players who are new to the game, but i want to do so in a way that doesn't feel like their being cheated or scripted into something (Even though the tutorial is heavily scripted).

One idea I’m playing around with is a section of the quickstart that the players only need to reference the first time they die. In this scenario the game doesn't force the player to die, but puts them in a situation where it is highly likely, then the tutorial references them to a special section of the guide. The challenges with the approach is that after introducing the players with this situation, it also requires that the players are presented a way to overcome the challenge that killed their character in the first place. The challenge needs to be difficult, but not impossible. (Not in an Dark Souls III Iudex Gundyr sort of way either.)

Iudex Gundyr says "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!"

I'm going to have to cut this short for now, as once again, work is calling. If you have any Ideas about how to present character death in a tutorial without being too heavy handed, put your suggestions in the comments below.

Till Next Time.

-Tom K.