After several months of work and some development blog posts, GRIMOIRE is now complete and I have released it on my itch page. Throughout the development of this game, I have learned a lot that I will take into future projects. Anything from how long it takes to write hundreds of prompts to the difficulties of layout design. The future of GRIMOIRE is promising, and I already have many more ideas to incorporate into future expansions of the game. This is a quick blog post to reflect on the development of GRIMOIRE as a way to celebrate its release.
The development of GRIMOIRE was a slow one for me as I was (and still am) completing some university studies and working full-time at my day job which did not leave a lot of time. I originally thought it would be easy to write hundreds of prompts for many different locations and include them all in the final product, but I found that it was simply going to delay the release of GRIMOIRE by far too much. To compromise, I told myself that I would release expansions of these new locations with new prompts at another time and for now that I just needed to actually finish the game. While I was editing GRIMOIRE, I noticed some patterns in the way that I wrote journal prompts so I noted these downs to help myself convey certain tones and themes consistently for new sets of prompts to, hopefully, ensure each new expansion feels unique.
Something else I struggled with was learning how to layout everything. It was not so much the manner of doing something but the sheer amount of time it took to adjust text and image frames, ensure text is readable and consistent with size and font, etc. Lots of editing. Probably more is required. I think I will sketch my layout ideas before I try creating the layout designs in the software which will hopefully encourage me to finalise the text in a program that is designed for processing text… You know, word processors. That would probably help.
Though there are likely other aspects of the development process that requires some more reflection, the last thing I want to touch on is what is next for GRIMOIRE. The first expansion will include a new set of research and quest prompts for a new location along with some new bond types. That is a given. However, one idea that I have had is to allow for a more flexible way for players to respond to prompts instead of prescriptive consequences. The more power to the player, the better in my opinion. Currently, my thoughts on this are a vague set of descriptors for how a player would respond to a situation, e.g., success with a consequence, and have types of consequences tied to those. It would kind of work like corruption already does in GRIMOIRE. I will provide these as an alternative rule set in the first expansion and depending on how it is received will implement it or remove from then on.
Overall, I am really proud of my work on GRIMOIRE, and I hope you can all find some joy with the game. I would love to hear any and all feedback which you can leave here as a comment, on the itch page, or tweet at me over at twitter.
The Bardic Inquiry 
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