In the Belly of the Beast
Some idiot in Research designed a new psychic-kinetic anomaly detector and the high ups decided that they needed to find an appropriate testing ground.

That’s where you come in. The Amity Estate has been abandoned for years. The last tenants were reputedly driven off by poltergeist activity that was abnormally focused and violent. The O.D.D. has listed the place as warranted for observation and quarantine but a lack of resources has meant that surveillance has not been continuous.

Your assignment is to visit the estate and determine its current psychic-kinetic activity level and its suitability as a proving ground for the new gadget.

The Elder
Despite the loss of two entire Tactical Operations Teams, operation Driven Stake has been a major success. The vampire clans have been smashed, two elders have been destroyed and those remaining have been driven into hiding.

Mop up operations continue apace and recent intelligence indicates that some minor nosferatu elements might have taken refuge in the abandoned Corvinus Manor.

Your assignment is to visit the manor and determine the nature and extent of any vampire clan activity that is ongoing there. You should begin your survey in the morning and plan to finish before dusk to ensure your safety.

I do want to talk about how the Win condition for the game is structured. In many rogue likes the final boss is always the same. That doesn’t really matter a whole lot because in some cases you could spend a life time and never reach him.   I’m not kidding.   But, while I want The Occult Chronicles to be hard and challenging, I want the end to be fairly reachable.  Like I have stated many times before, my goal is to make a board game like experience, so I needed to design both an attainable win condition and a thematically varied one as well.  I had originally toyed with the idea that Betrayal House on the Hill implemented so well, which was an ending that depended on what you had actually done in the house.  In that game, a huge variety of endings can be triggered by a particular configuration of game states and the omen card that is drawn. But I soon found that unworkable with my limited resources.

So instead, I decide to go the more traditional way, with an End Encounter set up in the basement of the mansion that varied depending on which mission you selected at the beginning of the game. It’s primarily just a way to add different thematic flavor to each game. Choosing one mission over another doesn’t change any of the mechanics in a significant way.  In each case you need to gather clues and then find and confront the final encounter. But I really like the thematic flavor that each mission adds. You see the different mission choices affect the final mission rooms i.e. each mission has a unique set of rooms where the finale takes place. You also get different random encounters added into the mix. The story text for each time a story icon triggers is different of course. And finally some of the clues are unique to each mission. i.e. you can find a set of fake robes for the Cultist Sacrifice Mission that will give you a big advantage when you try and infiltrate the Inner Sanctum and stop the return of The Great Tentacled One.

Here is the image for the first mission that you can choose along with the text description that is presented

The Key and the Gate

There have been rumors surfacing recently concerning the revival of a cult devoted to The Tentacled Ones. These creatures are said to be slumbering in an outer dimension and intent on returning to our world to assume their places as earth’s rightful rulers.

Reports of missing young women from the neighboring town have kindled suspicions that the ancient Lovecraft Estate might have new residents intent on some nefarious summoning or gate opening ritual.

The stars do seem to be right for a ritual. You have precious little time remaining before a celestial conjunction not to be seen for another thousand years could be used to the cultists’ advantage. Our analysts believe that a human sacrifice will be required.

Once I think it’s ready, I’m going to do a buy in beta like I did with Six Gun Saga.  This lets me sleep at night because some bugs and the occasional script error are not completely unexpected and players who buy in should understand that and hopefully even contact me with save games so I can fix things.  On AE and SI, I almost stressed myself out to the point of a nervous breakdown with a lot of the bug hunting.  I DO NOT expect that there will be many, but there are always things that slip by.  Some quests are pretty complex for example, with multiple options for solving them and there might be branches or interactions that I haven’t anticipated.

So, if everything goes according to plan I would like to start the Beta Buy In around late April but it may slide until early May.  I’m feeling very positive about where the game has ended up. My goal was to create something that a single player board gamer who can never find friends for Betrayal House on the Hill or Mansions of Madness would love to play.  I hope that I have done that. I think so. There are so many neat things in the game to discover.  While I’ve been testing I’ve come across a few that I had forgotten that I had made and was pleasantly surprised.

I’ve also lowered the prices on AE and SI to $14.99 each or $25 for both.  It’s a bit of an experiment to see if the conventional wisdom is correct. I’m hoping that it brings up volume and revenues. I’d still like to get them both on steam someday.  Gabe, Valve, Steam call me.

The price for The Occult Chronicles will be $19.99.  I’ll probably set up a Greenlight page once I can get a video finished. I’ll post the link here if that happens.

Thanks again to everybody who plays my games and supports my design efforts.

Best,

Vic

I decided originally that I did want some cards to hang around on the board.  I called them unique encounters and they were often scenarios where you could come back to complete a quest, or have more options after you had improved your stats or found more objects during your exploration.  Random encounters were the opposite in my mind. They popped up and you decided either fight or flight. Thematically I justified this by telling myself that the patrol of cultists or gaggle of zombies that you randomly encountered in a room moved on if you fled.  Poof. If you killed them all of course there was no need to track them. But what happens if you decide that you are not ready to handle a random encounter and you run away?

It always bothered me that they just seemed to vanish.  I was also trying to be a little more board game like and less traditional rogue like in this aspect.  I know when I play rogue likes, one thing that sort of bothers me is the goofy one step, two step dancing that sometimes happens when you are navigating, running away or trying to use ranged attacks.  I wanted abstraction and not a lot of tactical maneuvering. But I thought there was a better strategy element that could be added if the random encounters didn’t just go poof.

So, I now have a system where after you decide to run away from an encounter (and succeed in the tarot card challenge after you pick that option), the encounter can now remain on the board and actually chase you around a bit.  I’ve also created some rules so that you can actually lose your pursuer by carefully moving around the corridors and rooms of the mansion.  You get a one space head start so that it’s not right on your tail and after that if you can break line of sight from one room to the next i.e. leave a room before the encounter has trailed you into it, then  you are free.  The encounter will either wait a few turns before randomly walking around the mansion or pick a random door immediately and go through it…which may or may not be your door.  It sounds more complicated than it is but the end result is that the running away/sneaky strategy just got a bit more interesting.  And now there is more tension as well.  If you keep running away from things the air space starts getting crowded. So you have to keep that in mind as you plan your strategy out for which rooms to visit and when to push on to another level.

So where does The Occult Chronicles stand?  I’ve got one last shipment of art coming in for a final group of encounters that I really didn’t know that I needed until recently.  It’s mostly for the levels under the mansion that I had originally envisioned as a single small basement level and is now a more sprawling dungeon/caverns complex.  Yes, I gave into a scope creep that cropped up as I was testing out all the encounters on the upper levels i.e. Main Floor, Second Floor and Attic.  It took me months to first create all the data objects in text files and then create all the description text that goes along with the encounters.  It was exhausting. But since December I’ve been able to move around the mansion and test out all the encounters and make sure the bugs get fixed and the correct text comes up.  In the course of doing this I discovered that my design was a little lacking in ambition and challenge.  The game flow was thus; the player moved around the mansion and explored and encountered all the haunts, cursed furniture, demonic apparitions, secret libraries and most importantly clues and then set about going down to the basement to confront the mission finale.   But knowing that you just had to find and open the basement door and then do some minimal exploring to find the final mission tiles made the whole thing a little too predictable.

So I went back to some of my source texts for this game.  I was reading “The Rats In The Walls” by H. P. Lovecraft and the expedition beneath the Exham Priory inspired me to create something like that for this game..but with the twist that it would be more like a death trap dungeon experience to set it apart from the game play on the above ground levels in the mansion.  So I started going back over some old D & D modules like The Tomb of Horrors and The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth and had a lot of fun revisiting scenes from my childhood.  TPK style.

The end result is that you now have to search for the final mission tile area somewhere on the second sub level.  There is a third sub level that sort of acts like the Catacombs do in Dungeon Quest which is a game that I wrote about a while ago that has also inspired my design for The O.C. You can fall down into the third level in a variety of ways that I don’t want to spoil but the classic pit trap is the primary way.  Once down there you will need to grope around and find a way to get back up to the second level.  I had the most fun devising a bunch of traps that can end up insta killing the player if the Grim Reaper card is revealed during the results phase of a failed evade trap challenge.  Before you scream in outrage that it will be unfair or unfun or ungentlemanly to do this you can set the game to “Normal” mode and wake up in the foyer with a headache and try again.  The default mode is “Reaper” which means permadeath….Game Over man.  That’s the way the game is intended to be played.  I would change the name to “Care Bear” or “Wimpy” mode but the graphic for the button is “Normal” right now and I don’t want to spend the time ordering a new one.  Although I’m still wavering on whether it just might be worth it.

So things are looking good. I will try to post some more updates and maybe even a screenshot or two. The problem I have is that posting almost anything visual seems like a spoiler.  I’ll see if I can come up with some generic stuff.  I make no promises but I hope to have the game finished this Spring.  I will probably do a buy in beta (very late beta….should be very polished by then) but I still haven’t made any final decisions.

On a side note: I have been playing Elder Sign: Omens on my Kindle and really enjoying it.  I can see why everybody likes the iOS/Android games but I’m still not convinced that I can offer the type of complexity that I like on such a platform.  And I think you really need to design specifically for the touch screen.  ES:O can pull it off because the design is simple and elegant.  I haven’t beat the Cthulhu campaign yet but it’s been very enjoyable trying and I really love the push your luck aspects with the dice pools.  I find myself constantly having to make tough decisions about which items to use and how best to match the characters to the adventure cards.  It’s a fun game, the FFG art is wonderful and the theme is priceless.

Here is the Queen of Pentacles Tarot Card from my upcoming game The Occult Chronicles

I’ll have some news pretty soon about development.  I have just about finished all the data entry on all the “encounters” in the game.  I went back and created a special “Quest” card mechanic that let me link different encounters together.  It took some time but I think it was worth it.  Now you can try and communicate with some of the denizens of the haunted estate and get into some interesting situations.  I had a lot of fun thinking up ways to let you do things like play angry ghosts off against each other and beat demons at their own Faustian game.  You can always just go mano a mano with them the old fashioned way with tommy guns, spells and psychic talents if you prefer but there are some neat things to discover if you dig a little deeper sometimes.  Anyway, thanks for everyone’s continued support.  I think the wait will be worth it for this game and I’m very excited about how it is turning out.

Occult Chronicles is all about exploration so I’m hoping it scratches that itch as well as AE did.  I’ve also thrown in a what’s behind curtain #1 slot machine type mechanic.  There are no rolling apples, oranges, stars etc.  but each time you have to determine a reward or punishment you start turning over 10 face down cards.  How many you can/have to turn over depends on how well you did in the Tarot card challenge.  A rare few encounters have the “Instant Death” card hidden among the 10 face down cards.  It’s like that card that will kill you instantly in Dungeon Quest….the huge scything blade one…but you feel like you had a choice rather than just picking it from the top of the deck.  Good times.

Tom vs. Bruce