Staxel Reporter – Issue #21
Hey everyone, in this issue of the Staxel Reporter we update you on how Minecon went, and give you a tour of our Staxel village.
Back from Minecon!
As some of you may know, we were invited to show Staxel off at Minecon! This year’s Minecon was held in California, which was a big trip for the team members who went. I thought this would be a perfect chance to give you all an idea of how our experience was.
The three of us who went to Minecon were me (EGadd), Bart and Razz. Bart set up the booth, which turned out great! Also, we got assigned a green-coloured booth. We don’t know if it was randomly given to us or if they chose it to go with our game, but it was definitely the perfect colour for Staxel.
We had plenty of gamers (and even some non gamers) from all ages trying out Staxel. They gave us awesome feedback, and plenty of compliments too! Bart jotted down pages worth of notes for us to address post-Minecon, which we’re already working through and making nice progress.
Character creation still needs work, but it was definitely a hit with the kids!
All in all it was a fantastic experience. Having the chance to actually watch people play Staxel is a very enlightening part of the development process. It gave us all lot of feedback on what we’re doing right, and what needs improving so we’ve arrived back with a clearer idea of what needs focusing on and how to develop certain features further.
Tour of Our Minecon Village
The team built a mockup of a very small village for the gamers at Minecon to play through. Right now in Staxel you’re not spawning in an existing village, you’re just thrown into the wilderness. The plan is you’ll be starting with a run-down farm in a small village, and it’ll be your job to revitalise the farm and turn a profit.
I took a few pics of the mock up village showing an example of a more successful farm in a very small village, let’s have a look.
This house is a moderate size. The kind the player will be starting with will be much smaller and more of a fixer-upper. For example, your garden will be filled with weeds, maybe some windows will need replacing, cobwebs need removing and more odd jobs for you to take care of along those lines.
Here’s a large barn we built for the larger animals, and a little enclosure for the chickens! We’re not sure right now if the player will be starting with a barn or if they will have to build one themselves.
A partial look at the front field. We planted assorted veggies to show the players at Minecon some of the variety they can expect from crops.
The main straight that goes between some stores and houses. It climbs up the cliff to lead to a large inn and another house. There’s also an abandoned mine before the turning which you can see in the pic.
Here’s the inn and house that have been built on the upper layer of the village. The inn has a great view of the town and farm!
We were wrapping up taking the pictures when it started raining, so we decided to get an early morning fishing shot!
That about sums up the village we built! It’s a very small village compared to what will be generating in the future, but it does give you a rough idea of the game we’re envisioning. I hope you enjoyed the pictures!
That’s it for this issue of the Staxel Reporter. You can grab ‘Staxel – Seedling Edition’ at www.playstaxel.com/store.
Thanks for reading!
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