Dev diary - Holding court events (Patreon)

When designing the concept for Lord Goblin I knew I wanted something that would add more story and personality to the gameplay beyond just grinding stats.

In some of the early brainstorming I had the idea that you would even go out and find new maids to bring back to Greenwood - a bit like Harem Collector by Bad Kitty Games - but Harem Collector really has that covered already and more importantly I realised that in our case it would just make the game an overwhelmingly over-sized and impractical project to develop.

I knew, however, that while the heart of the game is your relationships with your servants, you'd need some gameplay that would really give you the sense of ruling the lands, as well.

Paradox-style events

Inspired by Paradox games - specifically Crusader Kings 3 and Stellaris (my favourite strategy game at the moment) - I decided to include a system of "events" which would just involve a box popping up, a short passage of text and a choice of some kind.

Over time I realised that this approach of having events when you "hold court" would also allow me to tell a lot of different mini-stories to really flesh out the world, as well as saving a lot on the workload for my team.

The sky's the limit when I can tell you stories basically just through text and a few adjustments to your stats. Honestly, that also makes them really fun to write - I've got a heap of them done already and I love any game that throws loads and loads of little stories at you all the time, like many of the tiny, imaginative side-quests in a good RPG.

Better for pacing and art production

Because of that, I've also been able to resolve some issues I had with the early story-telling in the game. I expected to need a bunch of extra characters from Greenwood to represent all the people you'd be dealing with, as well as a bunch of elaborate VN scenes to show them. That was looking like a real problem, considering the amount of art we'd need and how much it might slow down the pacing of the early parts of the game.

Instead, now I can move a lot of that to much more concise "events", which have the added benefit of giving you as the player actual interactivity. Extra story is good, but not if it becomes tedious to read through it all!

Involving the characters in the events

Another ultimately impractical idea I had was for the game to have a kind of "inventory" of things you could collect, then use for a variety of purposes including using them to resolve some events. This idea stemmed from the fact that I wanted to add extra layers to the gameplay and I had a sense that the holding court events were just happening in a vacuum.

One principle I always try to go back to, however, is asking myself "what does the player actually care about?" The answer for a game like this is character relationships. Oh, players care about the gameplay and the broader story, but in a game about romancing sexy babes, the sexy babes always need to be at least partially the focus. The problem in this case is that the characters really didn't have much at all to do with the events, so even though I could see the role for these in the gameplay, they felt like a distraction and a tacked-on addition.

Therefore, when our UI designer Flynn pointed out how impractical the inventory system was I went back to another idea that I'd already been toying with - having the other characters advise you on your choices, so that your decision would ultimately affect your relationship with them. CK3 does that and it works very well, so it was a perfect feature to steal for our game and I knew it would be easy to add in the characters on either side of the events box.

This makes the events more complex, as you might want to choose something sub-optimal for Greenwood if it pleases one of the ladies enough, or avoid being too mean because it would make you look bad in front of them. It means there's more stats involved in the choices, it puts a human face on these stories and it connects different facets of the gameplay together all at once.

I really feel like that idea - which seems obvious in hindsight, but came fairly late in development - helped make the game concept click in a way that it really hadn't before. A game about these characters and their relationships on the one hand and running the lands on the other could now have those two features integrated in another central and essential system.