Kickstarter Update: Chaos calls for Order

Greetings all,  

With the overall content of Lords of Xulima finished, we continue to work hard on two main fronts: Polish and Balance.

Not shiny enough? Keep polishing, then…

Polishing means improving various game aspects as we go, and fixing all the bugs and hiccups which spring up as a natural part of game development. For example, we wanted enemies to have better, more convincing hand-drawn portraits… so we had all 115 of them undergo a makeover.

We owe you, our backers, a sincere thanks for helping us make Lords of Xulima a more immersive game.

Here are some examples:

On the practical side, we’ve added a feature which we believe to be a must-have for RPGs with turn-based combat: an option to modify the speed of battle animations.There are going to be 3 different settings: Normal, High and Very High. This way, players will be able to enjoy the tactical combat however they like, choosing the difficulty at the start of the game and then altering the pace of combat on-the-fly.

Finding the perfect balance, or Order vs Chaos

Lords of Xulima depends on many parameters, variables and rules to achieve the right balance and keep the gameplay interesting. From how much damage a short sword can deal, to the specific Divine Resistance of a Gulfrin… all of it is contained within a single Excel document. This document is separated into roughly 20 tabs. Each of those tabs has up to 20 columns and up to 100 rows of data. In total there are about 5,000 parameters to tweak… if even one of those values happen to be slightly off, it is enough to ruin the entire game’s balance. This is what we refer to as “chaos”. However, we’re 100% dedicated to creating a memorable RPG experience, so rest easy! We take pride in our work, and slowly but surely we progress towards this sweet spot of balance that we feel LoX deserves.

Lastly, thanks to the extra content made possible by your contributions during this campaign, we estimate that the game should now offer around 100 hours of RPG goodness, for completionists. The characters will end the game around Level 50, so we’ve added even more devious enemies to keep you on your toes. That makes a total of 115 enemies, 33 of which are bosses with special mechanics.

Maybe we have gone too far on the length… what do you think? Let us know in the comments below or, if you were a previous backer, you can visit our Kickstarter update and join the discussion there.