March Dev Log 🕊 — Design Changes & Preparing for Play-Testing!

One Month In: Pursuing My Dream and Design Challenges

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Wow, time flies! It's hard to believe that it's already been a month since I started developing Wild Lantern. So much has happened in such a short period of time. Here are some of the biggest changes that have occurred:

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Pursuing My Dream: Quitting a Part-Time Job 

I quit one of my part-time jobs. It feels a bit risky, but I have never been happier than I've felt while pursuing this endeavor. Every day I get to wake up and chase after my dreams; and I’ve yet to grow bored of the work. 

Also, I am now officially a business owner! I spoke to a lawyer in GDC, and as lawyers tend to do, she made me panic at not having any incorporation or trademark for Wild Lantern 😅 So as soon as I got back home I applied for an LLC (even though it’s pretty early and I certainly don’t expect to make any money this year!). Now, I officially own a business! Ahhh! Everything feels so official now. It really feels like I’m cradling a new baby, and I’m trying to nurture it as much as possible so that it can grow.

This all just further fuels the fire and motivates me to continue to develop timely, and work towards my goal of shipping by the end of this year. Which is pretty ambitious, but I’m making sure that the scope of the game remains realistic for a solo dev of my ability. 

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Design Challenges: Making the Game Less Violent

In the past month, one of the updates were on how the projectiles work. Originally, Pippin (our little bunny playable character) used to shoot arrows and drop bombs to defeat enemies (which were other cute animals). A lot of the play testers thought these mechanics were fun, and they liked that the enemies were cute, but another piece of feedback I got was that the game felt very casual, and would be played ideally on mobile in short sessions. 

I had some trouble with this feedback, because “casual” games, and especially the mobile market, is very hard for a tiny studio like ours to pull off successfully. Think about it — most casual gamers aren’t looking to play obscure Indie titles from small studios. They usually just pick the game that pops up on their feed and piques their interest, which involves a lot of paid ads. We definitely don’t have the budget 😅 So I thought it was time for a change in strategy. I wanted to figure out if there was a niche our game could fit in neatly, and see if we could effectively organically market to it.

Not long after, I found out about Wholesome Direct, a community for a new niche of “cozy” gamers. This community really loves games that are more pacifist, and feel relaxing to play. And despite the use of arrows and bombs to get rid of cute enemies in the prototype, a lot of the early play testers mentioned that the game was super cute, and felt relaxing to play. Given those two major factors, I thought perhaps this would be a great niche for our very first game. That being said, it has presented some design challenges.

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I had to figure out a way to make the combat feel less violent. So instead of shooting arrows, Pippin now shoots slime from a tiny slingshot, which makes the enemy stick to the ground for a while, before they go “poof”. This feels a lot less violent to me, and if anything, really cute. 😂 I’ve yet to rework the original bombs, but I have some ideas in mind (more slime!). 

To give the game a cozy feel, I’ve added more NPCs and some metroidvania elements, to help encourage exploration and discovery. Moving further, I want to use the combat more as a way to break up the monotony, rather than it being the highlight. 

Play-Testing and Seeking Feedback

I’m really excited to get people to play-test and validate (or invalidate) some of my decisions.  I’m currently preparing a build for testing, so hopefully in two weeks I can start seeking people to play my game! 

If you’re interested in playtesting, definitely sign up for our newsletter (scroll down!), so you can be notified when the next round starts!

Your feedback would be so incredibly helpful for this solo dev. 💛And if you’ve read this far, thank you so much for supporting Wild Lanterns this early, and for trusting in our vision. 💛