So, almost immediately after I published last week's devblog, where I said that I had figured out the Second Trial, I went over the code I wrote, and it hit me. What I made was boring. And I wasn't saying "a little bit" boring, but a straight-on, complete snoozefest. It is a wonder how one can miss such obvious flaws in design. The whole Trial turned out to be a simple stat check. It was just as simple as that. As long as your stats were too low, it was impossible to win; if your stats were even slightly over the threshold—it was almost impossible to lose. You just had to click through a bunch of choices, and you had almost no control over the results of the Trial.

So, I went for a walk and gave it a bit of thought. How do I add more tactical variety to the Trial without both making it too complicated and too simple? And I believed that I had come up with a solution. Coming back home, I sat down and rewrote some of the descriptors and edited some of the values to give a bit more weight to players' choices. Happy with the results of my work, I continued forward with the second part of the Second Trial. And what do you know? Again, almost immediately, I understood that what I did changed basically nothing. Yes, some of the choices became more punishing, and the players would need to pay a bit more attention to what they were clicking, but it was still a completely on-rails experience, mostly ruled by your stats.

Of course, I want the stats to matter in the Trial, but just like with the first one, I want players' choices to have agency—being able to come to the event with sub-optimal stats and still win by making good decisions. And of course, I also needed to add options for the players to lose the Trial on purpose if they wanted to. Yes, it is important to have this option too.

So I sat down and rewrote a bunch of options again. I changed a bunch of values again. Now I believe that I had something that at least closely resembles something that I would want to play myself. The event became much more complicated and nuanced. The balancing might be an issue, so I turned all the numbers that I used in the event before into variables that I can easily tweak throughout the whole event if I need to, instead of changing them all by hand. I will have to write more of the event and give it a good test.

Honestly, my dedication was a bit lax when I was starting to write this event. Maybe I wanted to be done with it more quickly. Maybe I was just tired of constant testing of the game and subconsciously tried writing something that would be very easy to troubleshoot. But in the end, this is one of the major points of the game, and it should feel like it. So if it needs more work and testing, that's what it's going to get.

Maybe I will even make a closed playtest with some volunteers if there are any. But that will have to wait until more of the event is written.

Until then, let this sneak peek of an artwork from Shady Two help you hold on to your sanity.

I will see you next week.
Shady Character One, out!