We weren't quite able to deliver the scope of design that we'd envisioned with Freg, Fregg and Freggy - so I wanted to do a short post explaining some of the intended mechanics.

The Path Ahead, the tiles displayed on the right side of the screen was intended to be an abstraction of your adventurers choosing their path whilst out on adventure. We wanted to have a mechanic where you earn cards and can play them to alter your path. This was to tie in with the lantern / darkness mechanic, as you'd only be able to see N tiles ahead based on your lantern strength. We had ideas such as:

• highly dangerous cards that you'd want to detour around to avoid, giving you a reason to play any environment card
• playing a card of environment type X next to another tile of environment type would end up upgrading that environment. This would spawn more difficult enemies / mini bosses that would drop special items.
• a card that modified the environment, for example a "curse" card that would change woods into the "cursed woods" which make for a wider variety of environments.
• the ability to place cards anywhere on the path ahead that is currently lit, instead of the one position that we currently allow.

In our jam game, we had to really simplify things due to scope. We ended up making it so that you'd get a quest to go and kill N enemies in X environment, and that would lure out the boss of that environment. That worked well for our scope, but also it meant that the environment card mechanic was really basic. Essentially the only use of them was to: - if you are on the quest to kill enemies in swamp, you can play the swamp card to visit there. - you may want to play some easy environments in order to kill enemies and fish for some good cards.

A side effect of this meant that the unwanted environment cards end up playing an additional role: clogging up your hand. It does sort of add an interesting mechanic to the game, where you need to manage your hand (since your oldest card will be lost when you reach your hand limit, and you can't rearrange your hand). You have the choice between delaying your route to the area you're trying to get to to (by playing undesired environment cards), or risk have them bloat your hand and leave you burning away combat cards you were trying to hold on to.

I think it'd add a whole extra depth to the game if we had the time to implement the environment system we'd planned, though certainly it would add to the complexity of the game too. Thanks for reading 🎷🐸 🥁🐸 🎸🐸