Caravan Experiment Newsletter #3

Hey Everybody!

Three weeks down and 13 more to go. I’m feeling… feverishly optimistic.

Thanks for reading, and please continue to reply with comments and suggestions or just give me a call. I’d love to hear from all of you.

Follow-up: Help Me Create Some Music and Ambience

Last week I asked you to put out feelers for potential video game musicians. Turns out my brother Michael knows a musician who’s interested in getting into the game industry. No better way to do that than create some tracks for what’s sure to be the next great indie darling, Caravan. Looking forward to talking with him and getting some music in the game.

Call to Action: Create a Creature

Caravan is all about its roster of strange creatures:

Each species of creature in Caravan has:

• a species name

• a sprite (what they look like)

• a set of base stat values (Health, Attack, Defense, and Utility)

• an elemental type affiliation (either ROT, EARTH, PLANT, WATER, or FIRE)

• a starting “mutation” (i.e. passive effect) that is unique to that species

Here’s an example:

• Species: Throtten

• Stats

  • Health - 40

  • Attack - 6

  • Defense - 2

  • Utility - 3

• Element: ROT

• Mutation: Skitter — When this creature deals a killing blow to an enemy, it immediately takes another turn.

This guy is a glass cannon. Its Health and Defense are quite low, but it has high Attack. If you can protect it long enough to get a killing blow and trigger its Skitter mutation, it has the potential to go on a killing spree and wipe out the enemy in one fell swoop.

There are five elemental types in the game. Each type has a set of soft rules that I follow when designing creatures of that type and what skills and mutations are available to them. I intentionally split up game mechanics and color palettes across the different types to give each a different personality:

• ROT

  • black color palette

  • gets stronger as the battle goes on

  • primary access to enemy debuff skills

  • high attack and utility

• EARTH

  • brown color palette

  • soaks damage

  • primary access to taunt skills (forces enemies to attack them instead of allies)

  • high defense

• PLANT

  • green color palette

  • enhances allies

  • primary access to area of effect ally buff skills

  • high health and utility

• WATER

  • blue color palette

  • protects allies and manipulates enemies

  • primary access to shielding skills

  • primary access to area of effect skills

  • high utility

• FIRE

  • red color palette

  • starts strong and gets weaker as the battle goes on

  • primary access to single target attacks

  • high attack

If you have an idea for a creature please email me and I’ll create a sprite for it and add it to the game! You can do as much or as little imagining as you like. Feel free to just send suggestions of words or reference images and I’ll take it from there. Looking forward to the inspiration.

New Feature: Nothing!

This week was shorter than usual because I was in Los Angeles visiting my sister on Monday and today I am leaving early to go skiing. I started on the next big feature this week (a new caravan-wide inventory system and shop dialog) but it is still ongoing. I also spent quite a bit of time upgrading my Unity version so I could use some the cool new drag-and-drop UI system. Unfortunately the upgrade came with a cascade of failures to fix. I had to change my serialization method (how the game state is written to a save file) because the old way I was doing it did not work with the new .NET version. The new system is much better though so it was work worth doing.