Feature Spring Cleaning
It has been a while since the last update, but a lot of things happened! Feature and code cleanup, rework of some of the older game systems and other un-sexy stuff.
You wont really notice much difference just looking at the game, but things are much more stable and fluid now. There are some things though which are quite visible, such as an overhaul of the case stories:
Case Stories
We really wanted the cases to feel more like the episode of a TV show having a better arc. This is why most cases are now divided into three chapters, each with individual challenges.
While the first chapter of a case might focus on identifying the victim and the cause of death, the second chapter might focus on how to find and kill a specific monster, and so on.
There have also been a lot of improvements to the case solving UI itself: There are now new highlights on the drag and drop slots, more UI feedback, new tooltips, etc. All this makes it a bit easier to keep an overview of the case story.

As you can see in the above screenshot, a case story now has three chapters, each new one unlocked when the previous one has been solved. This allows us to craft better stories without overloading the player right away.
Localization
Localization is a big topic for us since we want to translate the game to as many languages as we can, and having a robust localization system is quite important. Wayward Shadows is very text heavy, and we are trying to manage text in such a way that we can easily update and maintain everything. We worked a lot on the localization code in the last couple weeks and now have a good system in place to set up and localize game strings. Not much to see or show though, since it all happens in the code.
Steam Page Face Lift
And last but not least, the Steam page has gotten a little face lift with new gameplay screenshots, updated text, etc. There is still no proper gameplay trailer at the moment, but I am hoping well have that ready soon.
Stay tuned! 2024 is going to have a lot of great progress and much more cool stuff to show.
[ 2024-02-11 19:04:00 CET ] [ Original post ]