Uniting the Realm - Weekly Progress Report (03/22/2023)
Hello, Heroes!
It’s that time again for a weekly progress report on A Realm Divided’s development (a little early, as I felt a tad better today and wanted to hammer it out incase it didn’t last!)
Hot on the heels of Update 0.4, I’ve begun work on Update 1: The Shadow Elves. This update will be quite comprehensive in nature, and is planned to encompass a variety of content and systems. In early estimates, the word count for Update 1 single-handedly may exceed 60,000, depending on the level of content that is determined in planning.
To begin. I’d like to give a summarized scope for the update, and what it’s expected to entail.
Let’s delve in, shall we?
Summary Scope (Update 1)
Update 1 will not only be the first significant piece of content for A Realm Divided but will lay out the framework for Updates 2-5 (the other 4 races). My goal is to create a unique starting experience for the game based on the race selected. As such, this takes quite a bit under and over the hood. When developing content in this manner, my development process looks like the following:
- Evaluate the breadth of race diversity based on existing lore.
- Settle upon the starting location (in this case, the Shadow Elves begin in the Kingdom of Veltar).
- Create initial story beats, setting up the show for how the player arrived, and what’s immediately next.
- Develop the opening cast. This includes their purpose, their personalities, tidbits about who they are and their appearances.
- Settle upon a branching flow of development. How do choices branch, which choices will branch, how will they eventually merge back into a main flow, and what impact these hold upon a broader plot or character development.
- Design key systems and their content.
- Begin assigning characters and developing routes in ArcWeave so I can visually witness how the storyline will play out.
- Create variable setups and theoretical system implementations in CSIDE using a variety of subroutines and test scenarios.
- Upon testing success, begin the process of merging these into proper flow.
- Begin implementing scenes individually, weaving narrative as I go in a first pass, largely unedited fashion.
- Proceed through development iteratively, continually expanding design and repeating the previous steps as I implement the update and scenes piecemeal.
As you can tell, this is quite comprehensive. While developing Update 0.4, I spent plenty of time on the side beginning to develop certain systems that would be present in initial iterations throughout Update 1. For this week, I’ll give a sneak-peek at one of them.
System Sneak-Peek: Crafting/Gathering
Estheria: A Realm Divided will feature a full-throated crafting and gathering system. You’ll be able to utilize locations along your travels to develop both your crafting and gathering skills, harvest items, refine those and turn them into something meaningful. In turn, you’ll be capable of grinding currency (within reason), and developing a community of your own (Feature Subject to a future Update). This will use an action-based system to prevent players from becoming too overpowered before continuing the storyline. Limited actions will be presented each in-game day, and you’ll have a limited number of days before the next component of the storyline must be progressed. This time frame also includes side quests, so you’ll be required to effectively manage your time. An additional snippet at features is below:
- Choose from a variety of skills to gather and craft materials, objects, and consumables.
- Develop your skills through a unique experience and buff system. Level them up, and pick your upgrades.
- Barter and trade for specialty materials that may not be available for normal gathering purposes.
- Travel to special zones for custom gathering events.
- Gain certificates that unlock special reputational quests and events.
- Expand your horizons, your experience will widen the choices available to you as the storyline progresses.
The system will serve as one of the major pillars of A Realm Divided, and will take an extensive amount of time in development.
Weekly Recap
As you may well be aware, I’ve largely spent my time this past week (aside from food poisoning, haha), on Update 0.4. My eyes are now firmly rooted on the horizon for the first major update to the game. Right now, timelines are fluid, but the community has voted to unleash the update in full at once. As such, you’ll have to stick to these updates for now. That said, I am still recruiting private testers for a special development branch. This branch will gain access to content much more often and will be designed to work out, balance, and bugfix these systems and development along the way. Please either join my Discord (linked in the top post), or let me know, should you be interested.
In Conclusion
Next week’s weekly progress report will be slightly different in timing for a specific reason: it coincides with the rough release timing of my first State of the Realm.
State of the Realm will be a major type of post, detailing larger content reveals. While this post was meatier and can somewhat be akin to a State of the Realm, I’d like to give the community a chance to poll at one of the pieces of major content revealed next week in my typical fashion. Let me know what you’d like, and I’ll see you then.
Til next time, Heroes.
~Zach
- The unveiling of the first Class.
- The unveiling of the first Gathering and first Crafting profession.
- The unveiling of the first Character present in Update 1.
