itch.io

Thanks for the kind words and support.

Obviously the game is very complex, and also fairly different from any other game I've played, since it really focuses on political NPCs and their interactions, so in many cases I'm just trying stuff to see how it works. There was a previous version of this game which I released a few years ago, which varied massively over its year-long development cycle, and tried out a number of the things you've mentioned. As a rule, the game is trying to balance complexity and understandability. Too complex a game leads to the player rapidly becoming overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information to follow, but there's always the urge to add more, and always gameplay areas which feel lacking.

1) I've dug up my old graphics tablet, so more art can be drawn up. As a programmer, I can't draw faces (hence the characters having none), but I can put more flowers on heads.

2) Multiple noble enthralled lead to an incredibly complicated UI system at times, and make it very hard to inform people of which votes are available where. Even with only three enthralled, it was a mess of "vote options now available". It makes it harder for the player to follow their society's political structure, including the nobles' interpersonal relationships, which I'd like to see play an important role.

On-the-map agents were tried, with some success, but I didn't particularly like how they played out. The game's main mechanics are political, and the agents were outside of this system for the most part, they couldn't interact with it in a way which I felt 'worked' as a mechanic. Instead, they're replaced by powers and buildable colonies.

In terms of expanding the amount of stuff to do, I would probably expand the amount of actions you can take on colonies, to make them more involved, and city-builder-like, rather than add any new agents and complicate things further.

3) I'm not sure I agree. The nations here are entirely political driven. They all start as independent cities, and can merge and split arbitrarily, entirely based on politics. Having them forced to exist in certain ways would go against the organic growing process which shapes the map. Partly answering 6 already: The game is NPC-driven, and nations grow and split based on their decisions (which are based on circumstance and some random chance). If you leave the game running, it will slowly stabilise into large empires after a few hundred turns, but if the player disrupts these then entirely new political landscapes will form. With very minor changes (such as random character death from old age) the map would remain permanently dynamic, and constantly generating new nations as civil wars tear apart old empires.

4) This is true, and we should fix this. We'll add it to the list of tasks.

5) We intend to release a new version on Thursday, which introduces "names". These are somewhat similar to "gods" in That Which Sleeps, in that they are groups of powers which fit together thematically, except you pick two per game, rather than just one. One of these is designed to be more straightforward, with more obvious strategies for the player. In our own playtesting we found that often there is no obvious way forward, and that you'd have to just cause chaos and hope the situation improves. This is not how we wanted the game to be played, so we introduced this new way to spend power directly to achieve political aims. The more efficiently you can do so, the more power left over you'd have to spend on your second group of abilities.

6) The old version had "world panic" and "lightbringers". World panic was generated by you expending power or spreading shadow, with different levels unlocking different behaviours the nobles could take to oppose you. The lightbringers were the ultimate result of this, as nobles could turn themselves into glowing yellow people, who were immune to shadow. They would then form an alliance to oppose you, and start the "defeat timer". The more lightbringers were created, the faster the timer increased. As a result you could muck around for the first part of the game, but had to race against time to achieve victory, once you'd progressed far enough.
We intend to re-introduce a version of these mechanics, sometime soon (with game options allowing you to turn them off, if the player wants a more calm and relaxing apocalypse).

Overall, this game is hard to make, and I don't claim to be correct all the time. Which is why we're very grateful for the feedback, and why it is open source. There's all manner of different ways the game could be taken, many of them just as valid as one another, so I wouldn't want to stand in someone's way if they took what we've done, cloned it, then took their copy of the project in another direction. Would be great to one day see all kinds of That Which Sleeps games out there, all with different styles and concepts.

Hope this clears some things up, and hope the new changes are to your liking, once we can get them out the door (we've got a lot of work of our own, so game dev is slower than we'd like)