Hey friends! This weekly to biweekly newsletter has pretty much become a monthly one by now. Strangely, there’s been an influx of new subscribers, so to all of you: welcome aboard! This newsletter is a way to keep up with whatever I’m doing, which in today’s case is an update for our silly wizard deckbuilder game.
How Am I Doing?
I’m pretty great! To combat the S.A.D. I’ve been forcing myself to go out at night more often. I take my daily walks, which always help, but I’ve been struggling to do anything outside of the house after sundown. Recently however, I’ve found out that the town I live in has a pretty active music scene, so I’ve been going around and seing shitty local bands in the weekends and it’s been fantastic.
Music has always been close to my heart. There’s no better way for me to connect to local culture than seeing a highschool punk band repeat the same 3 songs from their repertoire because that’s all they have. Speaking about events…
What Am I Doing?
So, as always, Jonas and I have been chipping away at Bibidi Bibidi! our silly wizard roguelike deckbuilding game. We just launched a new update this weekend, which we call the Eventful Update! The major feature we added this time around are events: non-combat encounters you can run into. They have these little branching dialogue options with various outcomes. Some might end up in sacrificing your cards, receiving great rewards or picking a fight with a necromancer.
We added about 10 of them and they really mix up the formula. The dungeon feels a lot more alive and it allows us to add more lore, variety and personality to the game. In addition to that, Jonas updated a lot of art, and we made some essential mechanic changes. You can check out the full change list over here!
It feels like we’re creeping closer to feature completion. In the next milestone, we’ll be adding a save system and macro progression goals, so you actually unlock stuff after finishing a run. After that, we can completely focus on adding and improving content: monsters, cards, events, the whole kit and caboodle.
I hope that the frequence of the newsletter will naturally increase as well, as we’ll have more cool new things to show than just plain old bug fixes and programming stuff.
Why Am I Doing? (this)
Usually, this segment is supposed to be some insightful reflection on why I do what I do. Instead, today I just want to talk about a cool thing that happened in the Dungeons & Dragons campaign I’m running. So in essence: the party is looking for the soul of their friend in the Feywild. The Feywild is always a crazy place to run, especially in my food-themed campaign setting, where it’s called the Souffléwild.
I had them pick a route through the place and specifically tried to imprint on them that the one they choose was the most dangerous one. Some of my players are a bit impulsive, so I wanted to plan an extremely lethal encounter with an Archfey to show they can’t just go around trying to talk their way out of everything. By some miracle however, they managed to not piss her off, though it was very close. They settled on some favors in return for her “blessing”, which was clearly a very nebulous offer.
Two players ended up taking that blessing, which turned out to be a magically binding pact. I made them lose a level and forcefully take a level in Warlock with the Archfey as patron. I truly believe D&D doesn’t do a great job of weaving narrative into class mechanics, but I do think Warlock is one of the few classes that allow you to influence the story in a cool way, both as a player and a DM.
So this completely optional, potentially party-wiping encounter turned a relatively minor side character into a villainness might haunt the story from now on. That’s pretty damn cool!
To sign off, please go give Bibidi Bibidi! a try again if you haven’t in a while. The recent updates have really improved the quality and vibe of the game and we’re looking forward to hear people’s reaction about it. Also, please tell your friends about it! Our group of playtesters is very small and we’d love to have some more passionate people to spitball ideas with.
See you next time!