Welcome to the Neighbourhood

I pushed this project's first code up to GitHub on 29th August 2022 and I am starting this post almost a year later. I have been working in games since 1999 and have always played around with personal projects but I have generally lost interest in the development over time, this is the first personal project that I've seen through to some level of completion. I think that the reason it has come so far is that all of the design decisions  I've made have been towards making a game that  I want to play. Keeping interest has always generally relied on input from others to motivate me, probably because I've felt that I was making something for someone else. This time I've been able to keep myself motivated by being my own customer.

Of course this does have drawbacks, the most apparent will be the extremely steep learning curve for the game. I pushed a copy onto the /webgames subreddit a while ago and found that most people bounced off it and the feedback I got was all negative. I guess this is probably natural if your first experience is to get beaten and not understand why. I had taken the approach that this is a little like the early rouge-likes where trial and error was the only way to discover the game's secrets. I remember the early days of playing Nethack without an internet where there were few FAQs to discover and it was only word of mouth that taught you about dipping a blessed longsword into a fountain. 

Regardless, it seems modern audiences are less tolerant of that design decision (or less charitably, absence of design  decision) and if I want to find an audience for the game then I will have to meet them in the middle. I've added an easy mode which starts the player with some equipment which otherwise takes a few turns to earn, and I've put a tutorial video in place to at least show someone how to play and win a battle. I can see that I am going to have to add to more however and show how to develop society, how to establish a decent culture, complete wonders and ultimately appease the gods. 

Why do I want to take this final step and make the game accessible to a wider audience? I guess I see it as the final part of game design and development. The industry would not exist without its audience - when I first started playing games, that audience was very small because the game developers were mostly developing games for themselves and people like themselves. What took the industry forward was individuals with the vision to see that there was an audience that was not being spoken to and that the games would have to change to reach out to them. Putting the game on Itch gives me a forum to try and make the game more accessible and try and solve new development challenges.

The game is not finished, but all of the elements that I imagined originally are present, so for this second year I'll spend a little time reaching out to players to see if I can polish the experience for a modern audience.