Sovereign Syndicate Development Update

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Written by ValH on June 2nd, 2022

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Following a round of playtesting, Crimson Herring Studios brings us this here development update for their steampunk RPG Sovereign Syndicate. As a result, we now know the general areas the team is looking to improve ahead of the next playtest.

Check it out:

Hi Everyone!

Thanks so much to everyone who took the time to play our recent playtest. We had over 500 players and we’ve been overwhelmed and humbled by the quality and quantity of feedback we received, and the passion and excitement from our community for the game we’re building.

We also crossed a significant milestone recently with over 10,000 wishlists! Thank you for supporting us and sharing our content. We can tell that we’re on to something here that people are really excited about and we’re committed to making the best game we can for you.

As I mentioned our playtest generated a lot of great feedback, both positive and constructive, and we’ve spent the last month reviewing this feedback and creating a plan of action to move the game forward. Here’s an idea of what we’ll be working on over the next few months.

Adding character customization options:

While we don’t think a full blown character creator is appropriate for the game we’re building, we do think we can do more to allow players to choose their starting stats, back story, and tarot cards. We have some interesting ideas on how to do that that we’ll be iterating on.

Improving flow and readability of dialogue:

We’re working on some improvements to the dialogue panel. Increasing text size, font and colour changes, improving overall flow, and adding additional context to skill checks and dialogue results.

Game systems design improvement and simplification:

While people were intrigued by our character sheet and the combination of phrenology, skills, humours, and tarot cards, the initial design was somewhat convoluted and confusing. We’re working to simplify our approach and make the systems work together in a more cohesive and easily understandable way. Here are a few examples to give you an idea of where we’re headed.

• Removing the underlying skills and focusing on the brain regions / internal voices
• Utilizing humours as experience gauges to level up associated brain regions
• Associating dialogue choices and card decks with specific brain regions
• Using colours to thematically draw these elements together better
• Simplifying tarot card draws and moving Major Arcana to a separate mechanic

We’re excited about these changes and look forward to having the community do another playtest in the coming months. As always, you can catch us over on Discord if you want to chat and stay up on all the latest developments.

https://discord.gg/vrVrE3vBSx

Until next time, Take Care!

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