This dev talk is going to go over some nitty gritty details about game development and some of the issues we've ran into during 2020. This will be greatly summarized.

The Cost of Art

It's an absolute surprise to no one that better art takes more time. What we didn't realize when we first started making the art transition is that it bleeds into absolutely everything.
The 'old' art style I'm not an artist so choosing the project's art style wasn't really a choice, it was what I had a skillset in. The distinctive advantage to the old art style though was speed. I'll give you some metrics though: At its height I could whip up a new armor set in about 1-3 days. New assets like boxes or tables could be anywhere from 3 minutes to 3 hours each. At the time, I didn't really consider how much of an advantage this was. As I am also doing the implementation for enemies, I could go from a concept -> model -> animating -> implemented in 4-7 days. A fresh new enemy a week is not bad all things considering.
The 'new' art style The new art style was a choice, though one with some unforeseen consequences. Zofia's design called for six unique areas - The goal being that most had some environmental obstacle that the player(s) would have to overcome. The easiest example being a cold, snowy mountain fort that you would ideally want to wear a cozy jacket in. From a design perspective, this is a lot harder because now you have six areas you have to consider and design. What works in the snowy mountain fort probably won't fit in that tropical sea-side town. This gets doubled-down when you realize each NPC and enemy also (likely) needs to be thematically correct, so everything requires a lot more legwork. Overall this made the process of creating a new enemy from about a week to about 3-5 weeks. In the original scope of the game, estimating for every asset, and given our team size, this likely set the game back about ~2-2.5 years of development time. In retrospect - Art styles are actually quite a lot of work, and creating and refining one is some serious effort. I don't believe anyone on the team quite anticipated how much the impact of the art change would be. Looking to the future - I don't actually have a confident answer on this one. We're trying to find a better way to speed up the art process without compromising the game's design, but there may not be a good answer, at least none that we've found yet.

The Cost of Features

In hindsight, this seems a little obvious, but there is a distinctive lack of first-person melee games out there, and splitscreen as a feature is typically uncommon. I have a remarkable amount of design decisions being made entirely because of first-person and splitscreen. A big one is text. I mean any work on the UI takes a bit of wizardry to make, but getting the scale to something legible in splitscreen is a challenge on its own.
Definitely not showing in-game books The issues we've seen with first person melee combat is largely a lack of situational awareness. It's a player skill to manage handling multiple close-range enemies at a time, but this is amplified with the very basic premise that blocking or parrying requires you to look (generally) at your target, and therefore unable to assess the situation. This becomes worse on splitscreen where your screen space and field of view is limited. The other issue of course is that it can be difficult to determine how far away something is, which can result in sword strikes narrowly missing and causing a lot of frustration. In retrospect - As they say, these are challenges that come with the territory, though admittedly I didn't grasp that very well until later on. Looking to the future - These are solvable issues but they can be challenging issues, but I don't believe our melee combat has quite hit its stride.

Some other thoughts

These are smaller topics that don't quite have enough to talk about to warrant a bigger space.

• There just isn't a good place to put the drivable airship in at right now as it causes a lot of gameplay issues, but I'd eventually like to find a good place for it, if possible.
  
• It's really difficult to get swimming right and bug free. I think if I had to do this over again, I would probably not include swimming at all, or greatly reduce its complexity.
• There was a bug where wearing a set of cursed armor would make your health bar invisible, and honestly that's such a better curse than what the armor was actually supposed to do.
• I should probably do monthly articles like this rather than being silent for months at a time.

That's it, I'm hoping by my next update we'll have some good answers to things.