Hi, my name is Dillon Simpson, and I made LORED!

This post will detail my experience being stuck in what I’m calling “development hell” while developing the next update for LORED. Just today (as I’m writing this), the game was published on Steam, a huge milestone for the game. If you’re interested in developing games, you might find something useful or inspirational here!

Note that there are spoilers to be found here for Stage 3, so if you want to play LORED and play it spoiler-free, go away.

After the last public update

After the release of 2.2.27 in May of 2021, I began designing Stage 3. Unlike the first two Stages, I had very ambitious ideas for Stage 3. I envisioned many new mechanics and even lore and a story to go with the new Stage.

The original plan was to have around 6 LOREDs who were “intelligent" and could work multiple jobs based on a priority system, and would even allow for manual intervention by the player. Resources for Stage 3 would now require delivery, so a Post LORED was added who would run resources around town to all of the LOREDs.

I decided to call the dark, empty space that all of the LOREDs find themselves lost in the Void, the timeless space outside of physical reality which is just absurd and magical enough to suit this silly game about stick figures and cancer. In the Void there may be found one (and only one) city: Loredelith. If you know your Stage 2 Upgrades, you may recognize this word from the With of LOREDELITH Upgrade, which began as an obscure Dark Souls reference. 

Circe was to be the Witch of Loredelith, a new LORED. She could cast many spells and buffs to boost LORED stats and produce resources. To cast these spells, she required a casting Rune and various ingredients. She had the ability to roam for these ingredients, which included 140 types of flowers, roots, and crystals. Arvandus, the Arcane LORED, was the Rune crafter, whose Runes allowed the casting of spells. The player would be able to select which flavor of spell they would like to cast. Rage Runes, for example, increased the effect of the spells, but reduced the duration or increased the mana cost.

The code could not handle these kinds of mechanics at the time, so in the process of rewriting the LORED scripts, I discovered many other optimizations that would eventually lead to a complete remake of the game, with the new mechanics in mind. Unfortunately, this was not to be the last time I refactored the game.

Life

At this point, I was beginning to get swept up with a restaurant job in Memphis, TN. It began to consume the majority of my time, and my time home was spent mentally recovering. LORED development slowed massively.

By the time I reincorporated all of the code for the Upgrades, LOREDs, and Tasks, my plans for Stage 3 changed. I grew out of love for the concept of spells and buffs. Although I had fun creating flowers such as Retchleaf, Goograss, Pus Posies, and Splatroot, I simply could not foresee Stage 3 being good. I understand that some of the more cooked gamers out there can have fun playing any old shit, but I'm not one of them, and I won't release a game that I wouldn't play.

Then I got bronchitis, the effects of which I am still dealing with 2 years later. In my constantly ADHD-driven mindlessness, I didn't notice the black sludge dripping down my window unit air conditioner in my apartment. For over 24 months at least, I had been sitting directly in the blast zone of black mold spores. After the 2nd week of constant coughing and sleeping upright with 5 pillows stacked, and cracking a rib from coughing, it occurred to me that I should seek medical help.

So, I got antibiotics, steroids for the inflammation of my rib cartilage or something, cough suppressant, and an inhaler which I could have fallen in love with had it any breasts. The medicine made such a noticeable improvement that I went back a week later after I ran out of drugs and asked for some more! They offered me this: "Do you want a shot of antibiotics?" I was like, holy shit, of course I do!, but I only said, "Yeah!"

Well, the nurse entered the room with a sick-ass needle, and she said, "Okay, lower your pants and lean over the table."

I said, "Huh?" I thought it was going in my arm, like every other shot in my life had! Well, I sucked it up--this was modern medicine, and we are humans, and it's all right. I'm no child! So I took one in the ass for my health, and it hurt on my drive home.

Ever since then, my spit has a different appearance (which I won't get into),  and I very infrequently get into a coughing fit which takes me right back to the worst days of having bronchitis.

Look, I don't even have a girlfriend to fuss over, let alone education or kids, and I still am too busy to work on LORED! Of course, I eventually found my way back to developing it.

Well, I was cutting what didn't work from the version of Stage 3 I had, but by that point, I was attached to Circe--I didn't want to let her go! So I thought of a great idea on how to keep her: make her an anthomancer, a healer who used flowers to heal! Into Stage 3, I built a combat system in which you played as Circe, healing the ill or injured, fighting time and managing your mana, cooldowns, and ingredients to keep all targets alive. If you have ever played Mini Healer, you'll be familiar with the vibe of gameplay this would introduce. Along with this, I added a really fun story, where you learn hemomancy--blood magic--which is considered dark magic, but it's 10x more powerful than anthomancy. Arvandus (now the antagonist of the story) confronts you and forbids you from using hemomancy, but you use it anyway cuz it's fuckin sick, and then you attract a Preta--a demon--who loves Blood and you start doing shit for him and yeah it was awesome as hell

Yeah, it was a really fantastic idea! But, wait, hold up--what kind of game is LORED again? I built a completely non-idle mode into the game. It was fun, but it didn't just didn't work with LORED. It became clear to me at this point that I was floundering in this thing called development hell. None of my ideas were working and I was wasting a lot of time implementing and polishing systems which would never see the light of day.

By this point, I had remade the game again with my most recent programming concepts in mind. I'm the kind of player who, after having quit a long RPG game, would restart the entire RPG instead of picking up my old save. I was never reluctant to restart development on LORED if I thought it would serve the game. Every time I remade the game to be more performant and have cleaner code, I had to incorporate all 200+ Upgrades which I had added for Stages 1 and 2. This was a massive time sink.

Honing in on what makes LORED fun

A few months ago, I began to work full time on LORED. Using the many lessons I learned during this hell of mine, I decided to limit the scope of the game, and lean more into what was fun about the game: leveling up LOREDs, and buying fun Upgrades.

I want a player to see an Upgrade, to understand what it will do, and to want to purchase it. I came up with this simple checklist for Upgrades which I want them all to adhere to:

1. Be unique.
2. Be fun to purchase.

An Upgrade must check one of these boxes. The best Upgrades will of course check both of them.

There, then, was a problem with the game: many of the Upgrades you could purchase in Stage 2 did not check either of these boxes. Upgrades such as 0.9x to the Glass cost of X LORED, or 0.95x to the Axe input of Y LORED (there's a lot of these in Stage 2). These Upgrades, when combined with the multitude of other like Upgrades, eventually result in a noticeable effect, but I don't want a Cookie Clicker-like Upgrade system in which you gain 1% here and 2% there--I want every click of the mouse on an Upgrade to make the player splurge with joy.

In Stages 1 and 2, there are a total of 36 LOREDs. Each LORED has his own Autobuyer Upgrade. Stage 3 introduces 37 more. For the first few Autobuyer Upgrades you purchase, they are new and exciting. If you've played the game before, ask yourself this: Were you excited when you purchased the Autobuyer Upgrade for the Galena LORED? What about the Wood Pulp LORED? These are not key LOREDs whose Autobuyers you particularly care about, and I wouldn't be surprised if people forgot about those LOREDs altogether. So, there would have been 73 Autobuyer Upgrades, bloating the Upgrade count and becoming more of a chore than something you have fun doing. (I found a simple solution to this for the update).

There were also many Upgrades along this vein: Output +1 (base). After a handful of these, you start to lose track on how many Upgrades you purchased for each LORED which affected their base Output. And then, while we're talking about Upgrades which have obscure effects, there was this one: Each Upgrade which multiplies Haste by greater than 1 but less than or equal to 1.1 will have its effect increased. There is absolutely no way to know without a spreadsheet the impact this Upgrade will have before purchasing it.

With these thoughts in mind, and considering how many Upgrades in 2.2.27 were boring or had obscure effects, I decided to cut them all.

So, the time came to remake the game for the third or fourth time (I genuinely lost count), this time leaving behind all of the previous Upgrades. I will still bring over some of the more notable and fun Upgrades, but, overall, progression has been completely changed, and Stages 1 and 2 are new Stages.

I am also not adding back in the Tasks system, wherein the game told you to obtain X amount of resources (determined by the output of your LOREDs). There were "Quests" which were Tasks I created myself which led the player through the game. Don't need em. They're boring. I am allowing for the best aspect of the game--Upgrades--to lead progression. Upgrades will unlock LOREDs, Stages, Upgrade Trees, and every other mechanic in the game.

Free from the burden of re-implementing 200+ Upgrades and a Task system for the third time (I didn't even discuss the Wish system which didn't make it either), I am now able to make the game be the best version of itself, quickly.

My plan moving forward is to keep LORED a casual idle game that any sufficiently autistic person will enjoy, and to never remake it again.