Originally posted by Nickboom:

I was looking at the kickstarter and noted some definite more gamey elements where planned but didnt make it into the game. I was simply wondering what the reason for this was. I mean they looked fun and interesting, this isnt wasnt to say the game wasnt enjoyable but I would have certainly liked to see a survival game with this focus on the human elements of survival.

(On a tiny side note, I'm curious as to if you are going to keep updating this game with new stories and such, making other games in this vein, or perhaps just moving on. You dont gotta answer this just curious. I see a lot of potental fun with this sorta set up :) )

Hey Nick! During the evolution of Dyscourse, we realized that we'd be hamstringing ourselves by building in game mechanics that had only one type of use (for example, the action based combat system for beating up enemies). In the end, using the narrative to drive those types of combat encounters proved to open up the possibilities for interesting things to happen in the story, vs "beat up lots of enemies".

The same went for splitting up the island into zones instead of "one huge explorable island". Back in the day, we were under the assumption that one single large merged space would be the best way to allow players to explore in Dyscourse, but after building out more and more of the world and after significant testing with players, we realized that the completely open scheme of wandering the island was causing not just technical problems but felt bad from a story / design perspective. We attempted to band-aid the problem in prior builds by creating invisible walls that arbitrarily and annoyingly boxed the player into a space in order to prevent game-breaking discoveries around the island before the stage had been set for that particular interaction. It was simply the wrong way of approaching it, and realizing this error and iterating on it was exactly what was needed.

Moving forward, we want to continue to ensure bugs are fixed and players are happy. What that means, we're not 100% sure. Entirely brand new stories aren't planned in the near future but we can't be sure what else might be in store for Dyscourse moving forward. We'll definitely let players know about any big updates coming down the pipe!

Thanks for the reply. I can certainly see the reasons you dropped those concepts. Regardless I felt Dyscourse was a very interesting and fun game to play and learn about. I bought the game only a few minutes into a video about it :) I hope to see more excellent products from you guys in the future, I'll certainly be keeping my eyes out for your next game or thingy.

(Wow, just wanted to say, this is like the first time I've gotten a reply from the devs/dev/SOMEONE from the team, I know you didnt have to reply, thanks for doing so. :P )