One of the things that we knew we would get questions about when releasing the demo was how to use all of the options in the level editor. Once you take a look under the hood you can see that Princess Castle Quest is pretty simple in it's design. There's no scripting system or complicated logic trees (yet..) but you can still make some complicated contraptions even with the group system we have and we are always looking for ways to make more things possible.

As it currently stands we have 109 entity types and 319 total variants (excluding decorations) that show up in the pick menu in the editor. That's a lot of entities and many of them have a bunch of options that can be used to make the entity perform a large range of possible interactions. More over, we are often adding and removing options and adding new entities to the game in each update. So somehow we need to help people understand all of these options and entities while also keeping them up to date on the latest changes.

We are going to try a variety of things over the next couple of months to try to help people get familiar with the editor. We'll see how well various things work and try and double down on the stuff that is the most effective.

The main thing I'd like to try and start is a wikipedia page for the game. I think that, given the number of entities and options for each entity type, it is vital to get all of the information about each entity written up and filed in a way that is easily searchable and nicely ordered. This is going to be a large task and it's probably never going to be 100% complete until we stop making changes to the game. Much of the initial content for the wikipedia is probably going to be written by us since we've had the most time in the editor so far and know all of the options. However, as the basics start to get filled in and as people start to experiment with the options and entities we would love it if people could help contribute to organizing, writing, and updating the content. If you have experience with managing a wikipedia database for a game or if you know someone that does and might be interested please email us at PrincessCastleQuest@gmail.com

Along with the wikipedia database being hosted online we would love to make it easier to access by providing ways to get information about each option/entity/variant from within the editor itself.  There's lots of ways we might do this, the simplest and probably the first method we will use is just to have a copy of the wikipedia content shipped in the game files in text formats that can be read and displayed by the game. However, as things get larger and especially as people start contributing to the wikipedia online these files are going to get harder to keep up to date. From that point we will probably be looking into ways that we could either source the text from the wikipedia online or at the very least create some tools that help us generate these files from the current wikipedia content.

Aside from the wikipedia content we would love to spend some time making tutorials of various sorts. Tutorials take a lot of time though and are also subject to going out of date as we change things so when we spend the time and how we format these tutorials is to be determined.

We also plan to make an in-game tutorial for the editor down the road but this will likely come much later in the Early Access lifecycle as we get closer to finishing the way all of the menus look and how all of the systems work.

Alright this post is getting a bit long so I will finish it up there. Needless to say we have a lot of ideas and plans that we are looking forward to and we hope that you can bear with us as we try to make everything happen. Thank you to all those who have downloaded the demo and especially those who have started to play with the editor, despite the lack of tutorial. We are excited to see what people make and we are happy to answer any questions people might have. We hope you are having a good time and we'll talk to you in the next post!

-Taylor

Lead Programmer

Piggybank Studios