abyssalbrews

Deckhand's Dance

Added 2024-02-29 16:00:09 +0000 UTC

Greetings adventurers!

Drunken sailors wander by my shop from time to time making a terrible mess of things and generally causing a problem. Always wanting something to cure their hangover or make their flight of fancy love them. I typically just turn them away, but on a particular day one stumbled in not looking for the typical. Instead all he wanted was something to stop the damn swaying of the ship from moving him while he was drawing up maps. An interesting request, so I decided to take it. Boy am I glad I did, these little beauties have been flying off the shelves every since!

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Design notes from Matthew:

This was not that complicated of a development process. Sometimes you just have the idea set in your head and the only need is to execute it. The basic idea was spiked shoes to make getting around on rocking seas easier. The expanding and retracting was something I threw in during the writing process to give them a bit more of an active feel rather than a passive one.

I suppose that’s something important to talk about, active vs passive design. One thing that I’m kind of against are just simple passive benefits. You can absolutely design amazing items that have only passive benefits, but I think you’re taking a bit away from the gameplay when you create in that fashion. One of the most important ways you can make a player feel connected to an item is giving them the opportunity to use it rather than just hucking it on and forgetting about it while it gives you a few boons.

Think about opportunities to turn passives into actions. You could give items two states like I did here which gives the player a choice moment to moment. Rather than having something just give a passive benefit, restrict it to twice a day and have it give a slightly more powerful benefit. Even +1 weapons could benefit from something that they let you do like engaging with it to gain additional benefits for a short time. Basically what I’m saying is prefer active over passive in your design.

We’ve started into a new theme for our One More Thing releases and we’ll be looking at more nautical settings for them for a bit. You can expect to see our latest creature come out later today and I can’t wait to share it with you.

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