GRIMOIRE Development Post #4

The last month has been an exciting one for myself as I have heard back from people playing GRIMOIRE. I received plenty of helpful feedback over the course of the development and I wanted to take a brief break in the hopes to receive more. In between some other life commitments, I am spread a little thin, so the development of GRIMOIRE has slowed, however I want to briefly describe my current thoughts on the game and what I am currently in the midst of experimenting with.

The Game Loop

I think GRIMOIRE works well as it is, however, it feels a little uninspired to me at times. A card draw dictates a prompt you respond to – it is simple and to the point. I want to make it somewhat more involved mechanically without slowing the game down too much and provide greater support for players to respond to journal prompts. My current thinking is to modify how the research action functions, incorporate the friends and foes more (or maybe drop them entirely), and finally incorporate a more explicit objective for the generated wizard.

Firstly, I have been tinkering with set collection for playing cards as a means to create spells. Rather than drawing all necessary cards for spell generation, as is the current method, players will instead be provided cards each round when they take the research action to add to their various projects that they are working on. These projects will typically be spells; however, a potential idea is to expand this to quests and the objective I mentioned.

One piece of feedback that I received was providing more support for responding to prompts to ensure that events were able to be tied together more easily. To do this, I considered adding unique types of drives per research location, however recent thoughts have expanded this idea to be an ongoing project that requires a much more difficult set to complete if I move forward with the aforementioned ideas of set collection.

Finally, the friends and foes mechanic does not occur frequently and is somewhat half-baked. I am considering dropping it entirely for now, although one idea that I could use is potentially tie it a round-by-round resource management system such as providing coin or not of which will be spent on research.

Spell Generation

Since the beginning I have been intending to change the way spell generation works in GRIMOIRE. After some research into using playing cards and books together, I came across The Word as Spell by Samaritan Burden which is a simple way of generating spells for use with other systems on the fly. It is a lot of fun and I suggest you check it out. Using ‘The Word as Spell’ as inspiration, I want to somehow utilise the suit patterns on playing cards to provide the pattern in which words are chosen from a page in a book. So far, my experiments with this have highlighted several things I need to consider for the design:

How many words should be chosen as playing cards have ranks from 1 to 10 excluding picture cards which is highly varied and would likely not work at either end of the spectrum.
The time required for looking at a page as players may become frustrated if they have too many options to choose from.
How to determine patterns from the suits – currently I think straight lines either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally dependent on the pattern depicted on the card drawn.

Those considerations aside, to ensure the spell generation relates more to the wizard and to allow the player support when creating a spell. I want to add in values as an aspect of the generated wizard. These values would likely change throughout the course of the game as players respond to journal prompts but are primarily used to interpret the words chosen from the books. They will act as a lens for the player which will inform what the spell does.

Closing Thoughts

These are my current thoughts for GRIMOIRE, and I hope it provides some insight in spite of a lack of explicit detail. It certainly helps me to write this out and log the development in some manner. Though the development has slowed, it will continue. In the meantime, download GRIMOIRE and give it a play – I would love to hear your thoughts either at itch, my twitter, or here in the comments.