Frayed Knights - News From the Front

Jay Barnson writes an update on the status of Frayed Knights. He talks about the changes that will be made, quests, balance, my expeirence with it and the reason why he is making it. Here are a few snippets:

Our first beta release has gone pretty well, and did what it was supposed to do. Which is to say, it generated a lot of bug reports which I still haven’t managed to completely address. I could blame crunch mode at the day job for the last two weeks, but… well, okay, yeah, that’s a main culprit. It’s just not really possible for me to put in a 12+ hour day and then another 6+ hour evening working on FK. I’m lucky if I get two.

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There have been a several significant changes to the game that have either evolved or been deliberately put in place as a result of feedback. Most will be meaningless to you, but a few I’ve talked about here. Spellstones are gaining importance. You will want to make sure your party has an ample supply spread among the casters. Most group-based spells will require them. At least one of the merchants has an unlimited supply, and they are frequently found as treasure, so they aren’t exactly hard to come by. But putting an entire opposing force to sleep is going to require some cash expenditure.

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The answer is that, fundamentally, I want to have Frayed Knights stand on its own as a game (series), even if the humor fell completely flat. I want it to be a great game that happens to be funny. I mean, it’s a low-budget indie title, so it’s not going to win any beauty contests with the latest Unreal 3 Engine – powered extravaganza. But a solid, entertaining game doesn’t need a big budget, and so that’s where I’m focusing my effort. And for me, while a “great RPG” can mean a lot of things, in this case I wanted a game that captured the feel of the old games that made me fall in love with the genre in the first place. I wanted a game that made me feel like I was only seeing a piece of a really deep, “crunchy” world with lots and lots of detail, and that I was only scratching the surface. I wanted that detail to be as much on the system level, to appeal to me intellectually, as it was at the world level to appeal to me emotionally.