⭐Original Concept Sketches

My very first attempt at making this game was a project I started in mid summer of 2020 called "The Sun the Moon and the Stars". The player would flip cards containing either monsters or treasures and use said treasures to summon imps that boost the types and amounts of items they receive. This game got as far as a base working prototype before I realized that doing probability calculations on this sort of game would be a nightmare.

Thus I have decided to reduce probability odds to 50/50 to make the math as easy as possible on myself. Up to late August I messed around modelling a variety of bizarre instruments where an object would enter and go into one of two chambers for the player to choose from. I felt that it was important for the player to actually see the object travel before deciding where it went.

I would like to emphasize that this part of the game's development took about as long as a third of the time I spent making the actual game you see posted today.

The big breakthrough came when I decided to flip the problem of objects going into pipes and have the player themselves be the object. The player would have an impish guide and would chase after her through a cave collecting treasures and gathering research materials. My previous idea of summonable imps was abandoned in favor of unlockable guides. There was to be quite a variety of them, but that perhaps is a tale for a future devlog.

Curios and treasures were originally meant to contribute a resource called research points which didn't make it to the final version. Rather than being asked to fetch an item, you would collect research on a particular topic with possibly some sort of lewd reward or permanent upgrade at the end. A lot of the curios I've sketched have actually appeared in some form in the finished product. One of the ones that almost made it was the barrel which was supposed to fully fill all of your fonts with a random oil. The hotspring curio was an idea dating back to when the game was going to be centered around the guide. The guide was going to interact with curios you encountered along the way, quite possibly with sexy results.

The concept of treasures dates back to the game's original inception, but the role, effects and styles have changed greatly over the course of development. Back when the game was about machines summoning items, I was planning on providing a single row inventory "belt" at the bottom of the screen. The treasures would interact with their neighbors, changing their effect or merging into more rare and powerful types. A version of that idea briefly stuck around in the cave exploration game, where items could become "activated" when placed adjacent to something they respond to. Stone Bro would grow a sprout on his head when placed near plants, Bejeweled Beetles would power up when placed next to a battery. It was at this point that the idea of inventory imps struck me and fully changed the course of my development.

To find out more about how the imps and guide in their current forms have come about, please consider taking a look at my follow-up devlog.