I'm a little sad that we broke our streak of consecutive monthly devblog updates last month, but it was quite the hectic month for us as we tried to get work done in between dodging family gatherings for Christmas (A perennial nightmare for Filipino introverts). We did get quite a bit of work done though, which I'm excited to share with you all today.
Procedural Party Animals
In the process of making Party Animals it was always in the back of our heads to make some aspects of the game procedural in order to increase the replay value of the game. The way the game is made makes full procedural impossible in the same way a roguelike might be, but there are definitely a few aspects that when randomized will change the way the game plays for you.
First off is the candidates. We guessed that being able to select your choice of animal candidate would be one of the things that players will like about the game, so we're hoping to making quite a few custom candidates to accommodate everyone's favorite animals (I've had at least one request for a giraffe, which should be interesting). The candidate's name is also customizable, as well as their traits. We haven't filled in the candidate's histories yet, but each trait will have an accompanying description alongside it. Previously our candidates had pretty set histories and traits, but we figured there was more to gain by allowing players to customize their own candidate.
Aside from choosing a candidate's history, you can also rename them, choose their home district and platform as well as selecting the staff you want to hire for your campaign. We currently only have three staff types right now but that should increase to at at least six by the time we're done.
New Maps
Some of you might have noticed that we also have a selection where you can choose the map you want to play in. New maps can definitely change the way the game is played and at the same time add some visual variety to the game. The maps will take much more effort than the candidates so we're rolling them out little by little and not announcing anything yet until we've finalized them. Previously we discussed that the Summer Island map is based on Samar Island in the Philippines. With the new maps we're hoping to interest players from around the world so they will be very loosely based on countries or continents from around the globe. That said, I'd like to introduce you to Autumn Island! It's still very rough and has none of the new buildings, but it should be fairly obvious where we're drawing inspiration from.
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