Development Diary #1 - Minimum Viable Game

In an attempt to fight the scope creep that has overtaken High Metropoly I have decided to take a step back and try to parse out what exactly the Minimum Viable Content I need in order to play the adventure of Ascent of Crystal Towers. Because I’m trying to figure out exactly what you need just to play the adventure I can figure out exactly what I need to focus on. This means I’m basically ignoring my favorite part but also the part that has had the most scope creep/bloat which is lore & world building.

I have created a list of the basic steps for character creation which is in turn is how I figured out some of what I need to focus on. I’ve pared down the playable classes to just Archer - Ranged Mundane, Cleric - Melee Magical, Knight - Melee Mundane, Warlock - Ranged Magical, and witch|Witch - Ranged Magical which represent all the different kinds of classes you can play in the whole system. I’ve also selected only three of the playable species to focus on human, gnomes, and lagomorph. I have of course a list of other species I want to have inhabit the world but keeping it to three seems like a reasonable compromise to make with myself. And I also chose to focus my minor lore and world building on only five of the deities I want to have in the systems pantheon, althos, dike,etmis,nebet,pryder.

I also greatly pared down the list of in game skills to focus more on the key skills I think every player will need to play the game rather than the cool but extraneous ones I originally created. Again all in the name of fighting scope creep and project bloat.

I’ve also decided for the sake of future playtesting to focus on creating 10 good levels for the players to go through. I realized and it shouldn’t have been a surprise really that having a never ending tower while cool and can in theory work in a video game does not work well in a tabletop game. Who would have thought?

I added Spellcrafting back into the list of Skills under the Arcane stat. However for the sake of the Minimum Viable Game I will not be expounding on how that particular skill works. Or rather the work that I do on that skill will be once again the minimum amount of work necessary for the game and system to function.

I decided to remove Gainsboro as the magical expression for Archers and make them a fully mundane class. While their advanced Job of Hunter maintains the magical expression and is converted to a Magical Ranged class. I might come to regret this choice but right now it feels like the correct move.

I decided on the various set Speeds for the basic classes in the minimum viable game for Ascent of Crystal Towers. As of right now (April 2025) Witches are the fastest off the draw class. These numbers will probably and most likely be tweaked during foe creation and playtesting.

For now I am using the term Health Points to convey the amount of life a character or foe has before falling unconscious but I want to in the future change it to literally anything else.

I also made the decision to swap out Warlock for Pugilist as one of the classes I focus on during the Minimum Viable Game phase. This as because Warlock and Witch have a great deal of overlap.

And that concludes a list of all the work done of the minimum viable game for Ascent of Crystal Tower and the High Metropoly’s system.