Before talking about Wild Growth, can you tell us a bit about yourself as a developer and how you first got into making games? Is this your first released project?
This will date me, but I have been making games, and game-like things since the early nineties. Cut my teeth with BASIC on the C64. Besides a few half-failed attempts in the flash scene, back when that was a thing, it was mostly a hobby.
About 10 years ago, the company I worked for wanted to shut our office and have us move to a different city. This made me finally take the plunge and start my own company. Since they still needed my help I managed to do some contract work for them, keeping me afloat financially for the time being.
I have since released two commercial games on PC and Switch. Hell is Other Demons and Lone Ruin. Both of those initially through publishers.
Wild Growth is the first game we are self publishing. It’s been a lot to learn, but also very freeing in some ways.
The team is comprised of me and my brother, Alfred. I do all the graphics and code, and Alfred handles the sound and music.
Wild Growth puts the player in the role of a healer supporting a warband. How did you decide on centering the game around healing and support rather than traditional combat roles? (It’s amazing btw…)
The simple answer is that I missed healing in World of Warcraft. I had wanted to explore the whack-a-mole gameplay for a long time. I recently found an old mockup of a healing game dating back to september 2012.
On a more emotional note, I might also believe that the worlds been in need of some “support class” lately ;)
The game blends incremental mechanics with active battlefield decisions. How do you balance idle/incremental progression with moments that require active player attention?
This has been a struggle throughout the development of the game. As well as one of the frictions we felt with players through expectation and comparisons to other games.
We initially went for a more casual feel, but the game was constantly pulling us in a more “engaged” direction. It was more fun “for us” to play when we put the pressure on and gave you a bit more to do.
We think of the upgrade and incremental parts of the game as an extended tutorial to get you up to a some kind of healing proficiency without overwhelming you with too much too early.
What were the biggest challenges in designing UI and control for frequent actions like healing and managing formations?
The UI itself was pretty straightforward to implement. There’s lots of examples of spell bars and such to get inspired by.
We used to have a system where you could equip spells in different slots which we scrapped in favour of a fixed much simpler system where all spells always are on the same buttons. It did help to simplify the code somewhat, but there’s still a whole bunch of logic around which spell to trigger when.
One concession we had to make is to have the regular heal on Release rather than Press, to accommodate for both the chain heal drag spell and a press-and-hold alternative to trigger some spells.
Sometimes i wish we had stayed vigilant on the original plan to only require one mouse button, that would have been cleaner in many ways. Maybe also it could have eeked out some innovative interpretations too.
At the same time, going for the tried and true, multiple buttons combined with modifier keys, like healers in other games are expecting, isn’t necessarily that bad of a thing.
The game has had patches and balance adjustments since launch. Can you talk about how post-launch feedback shaped features like mana balance, replay modes, or progression smoothing?
We try to stay active on the Steam forums and pick up on the most egregious pain points. People over there have been extremely helpful in voicing their concerns, and sometimes even coming up with good solutions. It’s quite hard to break out of the dev bubble and really see what players find super obvious.
One specific example was that double clicking triggers a mana devouring quick heal. In retrospect it’s quite obvious that that was going to cause people to trigger the spell when they didn’t want to. We had been playing like that for months and gotten too used to it to fully grasp the problem beforehand.
We also had some confusion around how replaying already cleared levels work. Some players felt like they regressed since they no longer could finish the old levels, and they didn’t realise the replayed levels were now endless versions that scaled difficulty up as you played longer.
/Hannes