I dunno if it's just because I'm excited to get this demo made, but something has me back to working at the pace I was at when I first started on Maids & Masters, and that means it's going to be big. The second mission is built and being tested as I'm writing this, and while my original goal was to have the first 2 or 3 missions done, it's looking like I might be able to get a whole lot more than that done.
Where most of my demos are roughly the size of Arrival in that they take 20-30 minutes to get through, maybe 45-60 minutes if you really scrounge around looking for secrets, Dawnfall's demo is roughly 15 minutes just for the tutorial, which mostly revolves around giving you the main character as he would be at the end of the game and telling you how to absolutely wreck shop with overpowered units. For reference, my personal save is roughly 40 minutes after the first mission, and that's with me skipping some of the dialogue. The addition of all these extra missions should bring the demo well over an hour in length, and that's if you beeline the missions as quickly as possible.
So, for this last post (at least for now), I'll go over the system that I haven't quite figured out how to represent visually yet - the companionship system.
Like I mentioned last week, if you're familiar with Fire Emblem, this won't be anything new to you. The idea is that if units are close to each other when they act, they gain companionship points. The closer together they are when they act, the faster they earn points. Unlike an affection system that largely only focuses on the main character's relationship with the individual love interests, each pair of characters has their own companionship score. This system means each character can have unique relationship growth with each other character that progresses naturally within the game. This plus the camp lets you see as much or as little of each individual character as you want. All of this works perfectly behind the scenes, but there's no way for you to check progress, and I want you to be able to see both character relationships and weapon mastery while at camp.
The camp is also set up to let you continue on with missions or stop to go through character events at whatever pace you like. If you want to stop in between each mission to see if any new events opened up by poking your head into everyone's tents, lighting a campfire, and taking the time to talk with everyone - you can. If you want to go straight back to the mission map to get to the next battle, you can. I've set this up so every character has a fixed progression for their non-story events, so you'll never have to worry about missing a character's events because you progressed too far in the story or progressed more with one character than the other. This might get a little messy when the game gets bigger as I try to maintain continuity between individual character events and group character events, but that isn't a concern for the demo.
Right now the only obstacle is getting all of that information into a screen so you can see it. I've tried a few things, like expanded status screens that let me add custom variables, as well as things similar to the Estate Info screens in Maids & Masters, but while my attempts so far have technically met the requirements of communicating the information I want to communicate, I'm not happy enough with any of them to call the system complete just yet. Since the companionship system won't have any real impact on the demo, the visual representation may not be present if I don't manage a breakthrough by the end of the week, but like I said up top, this demo is going to have plenty of content for you to enjoy.
If you want to get your hands on the demo, it's going out to Patrons this Friday, June 28th. It'll be available to all tiers right away, so if this sounds like something you'd be interested in, I'd appreciate it if you considered going to my Patreon page and supporting me.
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