First off, some news on the Key, Shovel Treasure front. I've set up a draft for the itch.io page for KST. The text certainly needs another editing pass, but the look is pretty much where I want it to be:

I first tried a monocolour background, but that was too bland. After some trial and error, I added the KST background, but then a lighter version with much less contrast. The screenshots may need replacing, since there still are one or two more things I'd like to change.

Then the marketing front. As I wrote last week, I'm not really comfortable with that. I think that asking people for attention is annoying if done often. The 'problem' is that for me, too often is not too different from almost never. Which doesn't help. And this goes even for a medium like Twitter, which is much less intrusive than an email (in my opinion).
There are some things I've grown more comfortable with by now, such as posting a link to our blog or to the Powargrid Steam page. And then I still think that doing so twice a day is being rather active and doing so four times in a single day is pushing it. Best if I never try to make a career switch to social media guru :P. As an aside, Michiel has about the same outlook in this regard.

All that is mostly a preamble to our Thunderclap. We currently have three supporters out of 100, two of which are Michiel and myself. That's not a great score in one week, to say the least. I think that a large part of that is that asking people to support our campaign feels too much like bothering people (to me at least). Which means that I'm not active enough by far in trying to recruit supporters.
We've considered spamming our friends and family to ask them to join, but that means the message would mainly be spread in the network closest to us. Also it'd feel like bothering people. Do I sound like a broken record yet? So for now, we'll let the Thunderclap rest. We won't discontinue the campaign, but it's unlikely that we'll be pursuing it very actively any more.

Which is sort of fine. For me, Key, Shovel, Treasure is for a large part about experimenting and doing new things. Something that didn't work is a datapoint too :).

On a more cheerful note, here's a new KST gameplay gif:

And then for something completely different: space colonies! This (obviously) has nothing to do with Key, Shovel, Treasure. But next to that we've been working on some other things we haven't shared with you yet. One of those things has to do with space (SPAAAACE!) and will have colonized planets. Michiel asked me to give some thought to generating background stories for the colonies.

Which sounded like a cool challenge to me, quite compatible with my current skill level in coding :). So I spent a long weekend fiddling around with ideas and writing scripts and I actually managed to produce something that generates backstories for planets. It's nowhere near finished, but it does enough to show it here. In my opinion that is ;). Here's an example of a background story as it's generated now:

Please don't take too much note of the UI design here. This is no more than a testing scene for the story editor. Michiel has been prototyping some real cool stuff for the future UI, which he'll write about in a future blog post.

In order to generate stories that differ quite a lot, I implemented three main features. First off, I separated the potential planets into five different types:

1. No atmosphere.
2. An atmosphere, but no liquid water.
3. Liquid water, but a surface that's hazardous to humans.
4. A surface that's quite benign to humans, so you can walk outside with only light protection (a small breathing apparatus and a thin protective coverall instead of a full spacesuit), but devoid of indigenous life.
5. Indigenous life forms (of the multi-cellular lush ecosystems variety).

While other types of planets or combinations of these are certainly possible, this mostly covers the angles I would like to use for the background stories. Also, five basic planet types isn't so much that there's an explosion of combinations each of which needs its own story considerations. So with these types, things should stay rather manageable.

Secondly, I created a text file for each of the planet types with a couple of colony start stories, one per line. When a story is generated, I pick a line at random and use that as the opening. I also created the same sort of text files for events that can occur in the colony, from new immigrants to a comet strike to the discovery of a natural wonder. Whenever an event takes place, a line is once again picked at random from the correct file and added to the story.
At the moment, there are only a few options per text file. This means that some story elements are quite repetitive right now. But I think that once I have about seven or eight options per file and once more event types are added, this repetitiveness should be mostly gone.

And third, I added synonym markers and variables to the text files. Whenever a word or group of words is placed between these <brackets>, the story parser will choose a synonym for that word at random from a csv-file. I'm not yet convinced that this is a scalable way to work, but for now it's quite an effective way to bring a bit more variation to the stories.
Everything I put between [square brackets] is a variable and will be replaced by the corresponding variable for the planet for the moment the story element refers to. For now, I only use this for the year and the population. But I built it in such a way that adding (a lot) more variables should be no problem.

Here are some more examples of stories this process can generate:

Also note that if the population of the colony goes to zero, it will (have to) start over.

There's a ton more stuff I'll add to this in the future. To create more interesting stories and also to generate more variables that will eventually have relevance in the game. I think it's cool to have a backstory for a colony that explains, or at least supports, the game play elements associated with the planet.

However, since the Key, Shovel Treasure release is only a little more than a week away, on November 9th, that will get most of my gamedev attention in the near future. So I expect my next blog post will be all about KST. After that, I'll certainly be back to tell more about these background stories and other new stuff we're doing.

- Willem -

​
Building the digital version of Key, Shovel, Treasure started as a learning experience for me. First for programming, then for using Unity and on to polishing the looks and tweaking the user experience. Now that I've gotten this far (of course with the indispensable help of Michiel), it's only logical to extend the learning experience to marketing. Especially since marketing isn't a part of being an indie dev I'm very comfortable with (and yes, I know that marketing is much broader than what I mean here, but I couldn't find a better word to use here).

So I've been thinking which marketing things I would want to do (or try) for KST. I came up with the following list:

• Keep on writing this blog (of course). This is something I'm pretty comfortable with by now and I'll certainly keep on writing :). 
• Set up a Key, Shovel, Treasure page on both our own website and on itch.io. The game will be pay what you want, starting at free. This was the plan all along when we decided to clean KST up.
• Set an actual release date instead of just working on the game and trusting that at some point we'll decide that it's done. We've set the date to November 9th. So it's getting real.
• See if I can find an number of people / channels / outlets who might be interested in covering a small game aimed at kids and write them a short email about KST. I don't expect any real coverage, but it's worth a shot. And I can certainly use more practice in this direction.
• Do a Thunderclap campaign. The idea behind Thunderclap is that people can support / back your campaign. If you reach the required threshold, all these people will automatically send a predetermined tweet the moment the campaign ends. I've set up a campaign, which is at the moment waiting for approval. I'll update this blog post when it goes live. [Update: the campaign is now live]

The first concept for the itch.io page is done. One of the things needed for that is a cover image, with an aspect ratio of 315 x 250. Since I wanted something different than just a screenshot with the logo on top. I created this image:

What's nice (I think) is that all the actual drawings are game assets. So putting this picture together went quicker than I'd thought and it turned out better than I'd expected :).

​Other than that, there are a few more things that changed since the last blog post. First off, the game now has real piratey music for both the menu and the game scene. Somehow, adding proper music is a big step in making Key, Shovel, Treasure feel like an actual finished game.

Another indicator that Key, Shovel, Treasure is nearing completion is that small graphical improvements now have a big impact on the entire look. There is more visual cohesion. Two things Michiel suggested have worked really well in that regard. First off, he remarked that the text colour everywhere was still dark grey (which I believe is the Unity default) and that dark brown would probably look better. He was absolutely right. Second, he suggested adding a little more padding, space around the text, to the buttons. We played around with that and eventually settled on not just more padding but also on larger buttons. Both effects do a lot of work for the look of the game.

Especially the text colour looks pretty similar at first glance, but the dark brown text fits the picture much better. To make the difference obvious, here's a GIF which shows before and after:

​Lastly, we finalized the end screen. We couldn't resist mentioning Powargrid, our turn-based strategy game, even thought it's a very different game. When you exit Key, Shovel, Treasure, you'll see this screen:

We had our doubts whether or not to add a screen like this, since people my find it annoying. And annoyance is basically the last emotion we'd like our game to convey. But eventually we decided that this  version is quite acceptable. The button to really close the game is clearly marked, so it shouldn't come across as too pushy. If we get feedback that this screen does annoy people, we'll look into changing the it.

Speaking of Powargrid: if you're reading this and haven't played it yet, you can give it a try for free. There's a demo available, both on Steam and on the Powargrid website.

That was all for now. As I mentioned, we'll be sure to let you know when the Thunderclap campaign goes live. We'll be much obliged if choose you support it. [Update: the campaign is live now.]

- Willem -

Last week, I wrote that Key, Shovel Treasure (KST) was nearly done visually. I also edited the post, since I quickly found out I was wrong. After adding the new background and the game field border, I realised there were more tweaks to be made. I'm not brave enough to claim that KST is now really nearing its final form, so I'll just run you through the changes I made.

First off, fonts. All of KST was still in Arial, the standard font in Unity. I'm pretty much immune to which font is used as long as it's used consistently, but I do know that there's a whole world of subtleties out there which can make text connect from your game if applied well. I eventually went for a font with a balance between readability and pirateyness (which shall henceforth be an actual word). It's called Lobster and looks like this in the main menu:

I'm pretty happy with the way it looks here. As a side note, I also slightly changed the background colour for the text input fields from white to off-white. This makes the input fields more connected to the rest of the menu. Anyway, back to fonts. Lobster works fine here, in the game scene and in the settings menu. The one place where I'm still doubting I should stick to this is in the explanation. Looks nice, but reads a tad difficult. For the moment I'm sticking to it :).

I also re-wrote the text for the explanation. It's much shorter now and should be easier to understand. When writing an explanation, I tend to write out the rules too much. Writing down the game rules exactly is a necessity in board games, but there's no need to do so in a video game. The computer restricts what you can do and you'll learn quickly enough just by trying. One could even argue that there's no need for a written explanation in a simple game like KST, but I'm rooted in board game design too much to let it go just yet :).

Another change is shadows behind the UI elements. They're visible in the menu screenshots, but they're easier to see in the game scene:

the strange thing with these shadows is that they're illogical (I think), since a flat piece of parchment on a table doesn't have a visible shadow and there is no reason the parchment should be floating above the table. And yet it does work visually. The shadows anchor the UI elements to the background and make the full picture easier on the eyes. This disconnect between logic and looks bugs me, but not enough to abandon what works visually.

I also gave the three buttons in the bottom left a wood texture. Unlike the buttons on the parchment, these are placed on the table and need a bit of an object-like look to them to make them fit in with the rest of the game. Small pieces of parchment wouldn't work as well, since the buttons should look distinct from UI elements that can't be clicked.

Other than that, I've made a couple of quality-of-life improvements like no longer having the possibility to access a land tile which holds nothing of interest (to prevent ending your turn by accident because of a misclick or typo).

Lastly, in mostly unrelated news, we made a new cardboard version of KST (with 'we' being my son (6), my daughter (4), my wife (I'm not stupid enough to mention her age) and me (39)). My son's class in school decided to hold a market to raise money for the island of Sint Maarten, which was devastated by hurricane Irma. During the market, my son offered people the chance to play KST with him for a small fee. He managed to explain and lead the game without any help, which I really see as an accomplishment for him. He raised 7,50 Euros this way and told me that the parents and classmates who had played with him had really enjoyed themselves. Needless to say, I'm a very proud parent :).

And that was that for now. Next up for KST are music, sound effects and decisions about when and how to release it. More on those things next time!

- Willem -

A short blog post about Key, Shovel, Treasure this week. There's not a lot of new stuff I can show, both because I've been busy with other things and because part of what I've been doing is behind the scenes stuff. But the big thing is that in my opinion KST has reached the point of acceptability. I mean that in the sense that I'm happy with the way it looks and plays and with the functionality. There are certainly more tweaks to be made, but I think the version we'll release will look a lot like the current version.

Which makes this a nice moment to look back at the visual changes since we decided that we wanted to release this to the world. So below are a couple of before and after pictures. I hope you can spot the differences ;).

The only thing I'm somewhat worried about is that I might have become too attached to the way some things look. for instance, I really like the background as it is, but Michiel has commented that a more stylized version of a table top would work better. Experience tells me that there's a greater than even chance that he's right, but I keep finding other things to do than look for another background :P. So there actually is a good change that the look of the game will actually change quite a bit between now and release. For which we haven't set a date for by the way. We should probably start thinking about that.

- Willem -

Edit:
It seems that writing about avoiding changing the background helped change the way I look at it. And / or it get the creative juices flowing. Anyway, I set about creating a background. And while I was busy I also created a border for the game board, which was another thing Michiel already thought necessary. I still have to fidget with the colours, and perhaps I won't stick to this look, but this is what the game looks like now:

Different? Certainly. Better? I'm not sure yet, but I'm leaning towards yes. I certainly like that the background now more closely resembles the simpler-than-reality style of the rest of the graphics. Also, the border adds a nice bit of definition (and it hides the waves when they go outside the playfield).

Lastly, I'd like to give credit where credit is due. I found a great tutorial video by Jester of None, on how to create a wood grain texture in Paint.net. It's clear, short and the technique works like a charm. I recommend taking a look at his video if you ever use Paint.net.

Next time I'll let you know what Michiel thinks of this change (I haven't shown it to him yet; I only just finished this and he's at a concert) and whether we've decided to keep it :).