A game is never truly done. There's always the next thing you want to add, the little detail you want to change, the obvious problem you want to solve. But we cannot work on our game forever, because we simply need to sell it at some point and, hopefully, get some money to pay the bills and the foods. Such is the weight of reality on our dreams.
So we had to just make the cut somewhere, and decide on a release date. July 31 it is! Why? We wanted to release earlier, but there was a Steam Next Fest in early June, quickly followed by the Steam Summer Sale in early July, two events during which it is not advised to release a game. We've read that releasing on a Wednesday is a bit better for indies because there are usually less games coming out. So there we ended up! (That sounds easy but it took us a while to find a date that worked well for us… )
In just 5 days, Dawnmaker will be available for all to buy, to play, and to judge. That's a terribly exciting experience, but also a terribly scary one. Because we know that the game is not perfect. We know that it has weak points, that it is lacking in some places. But we have to release it anyway, we have to put it into your hands, and we have to accept that, yes, this is the game we're going to sell.
Believe me: it is truly heartbreaking to see all those things that could have been, all the ways this game could have been better, if only we had had more time, more money, more people… We are going to release a product that is not exactly what we had in mind, but a product that is what we have been able to create in the time we allowed ourselves.
In an attempt to amuse you, and maybe to grieve these features that will never be, let's go through some of the main elements that we wanted to add to Dawnmaker but couldn't.
Scientific research
The science part of the game has always, in our plans, been so much deeper than it currently is. In the game, science can be spent in some buildings to generate Eclairium. That's fairly basic. We had much bigger ambitions for that aspect of the game: we wanted science to be spent to research new technologies. Some scientific buildings were meant to have a scientific line, each step giving a one-off or a permanent bonus. For example, a research would have improved the production of your fields, another would have made harvesting better. Some would have replaced cards in your hand with a better version.
The reason why this never happened was that it required a lot of programming. We needed to change the way the core of the game worked, to add a big layer of complexity allowing to handle these types of effects. It also required some heavy UI work, which was partly done by Agathe when she worked with us, but that we never integrated. Sorry Agathe, it is very unlikely that this work of yours will ever be in the game.
Drafting cards
Deckbuilding is the poor child of Dawnmaker. When you mix two genres like we did, you usually end up favoring one over the other. We definitely did that with the city building part, at the expense of the deckbuilding part. But I have a hunch that we could have made the cards a lot more interesting for a cost that was not too high. Here's what I had in mind, but never had the time to try.
Some buildings in the game give you a card when you build them. That card is always the same, you know what it will be before choosing to buy the building. I wanted to change that, at least on some of the buildings, to instead make them offer you a choice between 3 different cards of the same type and level. So instead of an Exploration post always giving you an Exploration card, it would let you choose a new card from three random level 1, industry cards. Sometime you would get to pick an Exploration, sometimes you'd get an Optimization, and sometimes, rarely, you would find a card that you had never seen before.
From an economical point of view, this would also have allowed us to produce a lot more content for very little cost: since our cards do not have illustrations, adding a new card to the game would just be a matter of designing it. As the game currently stands, adding a new card means adding a new building, which means creating a new graphical asset for it, which is expensive! I sincerely wished I had thought about this much earlier in the development of Dawnmaker, but I did not, and here we are not having this in the game.
Starting characters
Much like in Slay the Spire, we wanted to have a little cast of characters that you could choose from when starting a new game. They would not have been as distinct as in Slay the Spire, but would allow player to start each game with a different deck and roster of buildings. We had plans for 3 different characters, each opening a different way of playing the game.
Nomad buildings
You might have played with the buildings that give you resources when you build something adjacent to them, and thought that they were weak? Well, that's because we made them planning for another kind of buildings: nomads. We wanted to have buildings that could be moved from one tile to another, triggering the adjacent build effects each time. We think it would have added a more puzzle-y element to the game.
Smog effects
When we added the cards to represent the Smog's behavior, we knew we had an opportunity for more than just Luminoil consumption. Basically, anything that a building could do, we could make the Smog do. We wanted to have the Smog give you Curse cards, half your Luminoil stock, destroy or deactivate some buildings, and so on.
I'm going to stop here because there is a lot more small things that I wished we could have added to Dawnmaker. But the game is what it is, and we're still very proud of all the work we've done over the last 2.5 years!
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