Blog - The Mission

This first blog post is dedicated to explaining the mission I'm on with my first game, tentatively titled "The Merchant of Windvale". First though, is a little background about the game.

At it's core the game is a Shop Management RPG. There are lots of interesting items to trade and craft, various creatures to fight, and a host of interesting characters to interact with.

In the prototyping phase the focus is on delivering broad strokes of the game, without adding too much polish or detail. This allows me to respond to feedback in big ways without throwing away hours of work. If play testers don't like a system, or have really great ideas, I can act on that information and not worry about the work that's already been done.

This means I am always creating a game my audience wants to play. It's a practice seen in tech startups, and I'm really trying my best to stick to it here. The trick is getting enough people to play the game and give me their honest feedback in a way that I can easily analyze it and make decisions based on it.

The mission simple: Create a game containing only things all play testers enjoy. It seems pretty obvious, but I think it's a worthy mission for a couple reasons.

1. Game developers tend to create games that they enjoy, and can easily fixate on certain ideas without an outside opinion.

2. Only allowing things play testers enjoy helps prevent things that clutter the game, or artificially lengthen it. There is no room for things people don't enjoy.

3. Appealing to all play testers sounds like an impossible task, but it really is the bare minimum. Sometimes this means adjusting our target audience.

I've never created a video game before, and I'm both nervous and excited to see where this journey takes me. I hope you'll stick around for the ride!

Check out Merchant of Windvale on itch.io!