Origins

Three years ago, when me and my friends were toying around with making a card game prototype in Godot, it was all about enjoying making games together. To learn not just the technical aspects (which we already knew quite a lot of already) but to have had the whole experience.

We used to say that it didn't necessarily need to be "good" or marketable, we just wanted to explore a potential and see what we ended up with. 

Tournament Mode — Not Us' cooler cousin

When my friends moved on to better things, I had shaped the game into something of my personal obsession — complete with (perhaps) strange ideas about what would make it fun to play. 

I was still living at Spelkollektivet and decided to make a lite version of Not Us that could act as a Tournament Mode (published on my personal itch page. The card game being the only playable part in this mode (i.e. only Forage, no Camp, Alchemy or Travel). 

A points system was slapped on top of Forage so that players could compare highscores.

Not Us Tournament was organized twice, each time ending with the winner doing a little presentation on how they got such high scores.

"Why would I do that when I could make a sea-qual?"

The feeling of having released something into the real world, to have people play my game even when I'm not around, was intoxicating. I wanted to see what would happen if the full vision was realized and made into a commercial game. At this point however, the team had shrunk down to three people and only I was still working from the same office. 

Spelkollektivet was signed on as publisher — which allowed me to expand the team and focus mostly on creating content together with the original artist, a musician, a writer and a new coder who could work at a desk right next to me. Most of the code written up to this point was dragged outside and set fire to scrapped so that he could work the way he preferred. (If you don't know who The Duriel is, let's just say that he knows a thing or two about the Godot Engine...)

Getting to that big important milestone

Half a year was invested in laying the new foundation, and then another half year was spent tweaking and solving new issues. Towards the end of this time period an additional coder was brought on board, and we started the push towards finishing a pretty much complete vertical slice / demo that would comprise maybe 90% of the game mechanics (it would then come down to how many more levels we could design, more on that and the rest of the team in future devlogs, hopefully).

We're at now now

And here we are, the demo is out — now what?

Well, two things I long suspected became even clearer:

1.  The tutorial, actually the whole onboarding process, was not achieving its goal — and was dragging everything else down with it.
2. With demo release, something in my brain was unclenched (I'm autistic, long story) and I could finally let go of parts of the initial vision and let someone else implement theirs for a bit.

Conclusion: The Duriel will take a crack at redesigning the onboarding (which will have consequences for the final product that extends far beyond just the tutorial).

Where I just a few months ago would have felt deep trepidation and "brainclench" about letting someone else take the wheel, now I just feel excitement! Maybe whatever learning experience I was looking for initially has been completed?

No matter the reason, I think this game deserves a real chance at wooing its prospective player base. And I'm willing to make that bet — on The Duriel.