We're finally nearing the "end" of development for Zofia. There are quite a few things not quite in place and some stuff that isn't coming together as it should. I actually find some of this kind of frustrating and I'll talk about that here in a minute, but first I have to talk about sailing.

Most of you here on itch.io are developers, so while this is a needless analogy, please humor me for a bit so I can add context flavor.

I have likened game development to sailing. (As many others have too) You take a boat (or build your own) and attempt to cross a large river. This river is narrow on one end (which looks easy to cross, but isn't), and massive on the other end. Only large boats with entire crews can sail across the big areas.

Any game developer who has worked on a game has attempted to cross this river.

Ok, sailing analogy is over, you can breathe easy now.

Early on in the develop of Zofia, we pivoted our boat in what appeared to be a good move to dodge uncertain waters. It was understood this would change the boat's trajectory (and we assumed you can just pivot back later), but we didn't quite grasp that small changes early on would lead to a very different course.

When hammering out playable races, it was assumed that water would play a big role in gameplay. There was elemental magic, of which water is a big part of, and there was large areas to explore, which... Water would probably be a big part of.

[Pictured: 20lbs of pure terror underwater]

To date, swimming and its related mechanics have been the most problematic things to work with. I had made swimming mechanics before, but I never encountered so many physics, AI, Sound, and replication issues. Given that Zofia is a more complex project than my previous ones. Looking through notes, I still have dozens of unsolved bugs or quirks with water based interactions.

This is after we solved a huge bulk of them, early water gameplay was murky (heh) at best.

The result of this was to just significantly cull water areas out of maps, or focus on the maps that don't utilize a lot of water. Well, here we are much later with basically very little water/underwater gameplay.

We ended up pivoting away from this early on, and now we're close enough to the end that it would be likely worse to try and pivot back.

[Pictured: Untouchable water]

Let's dive (heh) into the magic now.

I haven't coined a good name for it or anything (and I really should have by this point) but the best I have come up for it is 'Surface Magic'.

If you aim at generally any surface in the game and use the 'magic' button, you interact with that surface in some way. Magic on stone erupts large stone pillars which you can use to launch yourself or others. Magic on wood surfaces creates a large wooden spike. Magic on metal will form a small metallic shield.

This is two-pronged. It turns the environment into a tool/weapon and is accessible anywhere, but this means you're dependent on what the environment has currently.

Fighting a tough enemy on stone floors is an easy time. Fighting on top of carpet means you can't use stone magic, and makes for a much tougher fight.

[Pictured: Cute little otter paws casting deadly magic]

After watching hundreds of people play Zofia (via expos and streamers), my biggest takeaway is that players either 'get' the magic or they don't.

Most players that get it will start to experiment, trying combinations of knocking enemies around with the pillars, tossing them into spikes, or using projectiles to stop ranged foes. The players that don't are content to just walk up and bash enemies as they see fit. (No judgement)

I don't have the numbers, but it looks something like this: 35% of players really enjoy the magic, while the rest don't really utilize it.

The goal was to start players with simple obstacles that can be overcome with magic and slowly introduce them to more complex problems.

[Pictured: A complex problem with a gun]

This ended up being the opposite problem. There wasn't enough players clicking with magic which made late-game very difficult. Rather than making significant changes, we just sort of... Didn't. I left it alone and worked on other stuff, hoping there would be a better (more obvious) solution down the road.

Well, we're here later and there still hasn't been a great solution.

Finally, we'll conclude with story and writing.

[Pictured: Sheila is skeptical of this description too]

I'm a very slow writer. These devlogs take a lot of time for me to create. Writing characters takes even longer. There are ~13 side quests planned and a rough estimate of ~50 NPCs. (I'm not counting them right now)

I didn't expect to find myself writing all the dialogue/quests/books but here I am, hammering away at them.

This may have been for the better because its hard to account for story changes when other stuff gets changed. Cutting an area may drastically impact the story as you may be missing a huge chunk of information, and it seems to be a little easier when you're doing the cutting and know what's being cut.

Anyways that about wraps up this dev blog and rant.

I don't expect significant changes past this point but we'll see. At this point it feels like a better idea to get the game done, take a breather and a step back, then figure out what went wrong and what went right.

Probably a safer way than making another sudden, and possibly bad, pivot right near the end.