Tales From Ke Bakil: Childhood Friends
I used to do a lot more random chatter about stuff I was working on, and I thought, ‘you know, that was fun, let’s do that again.’ So today I want to tell you I put a feature in the game and now it’s already given me too many feels.
The game lets you choose a heart-friend for any character (the onu relationship that we see, most obviously, in Pearl in the Void between Keshul and Dekashin). But it “creates” new friendships organically for your characters without your consultation based on their personalities and jobs and interests. These are called ‘drift-friends’, and if those characters stick around in your clan long enough, they’ll hang out together and go from being acquaintances to best friends.
Good enough. But then I thought, ‘but what about childhood friends!’ So I put in something that allowed characters who are youths together at the same time to have a chance to become childhood friends. These friendships form with messages that persist so you can look back and think, aw, they were kids together, also based on personality (“Jeso Jeso Green Bean and Forget-Me-Not made up their own small ceremonies in quiet corners of the camp.”)
You only have a chance to form childhood friendships during your childhood, so once you’re a grown-up, you’ll start forming those drift-friendships based on more complex reasons. But I was really happy to have friendships like this in the game (and hope to put in some rivalries too, later!).
But I didn’t take into account how I would feel when I kept one of the characters with childhood friendships, but traded the other two away, and the message stays on the character sheet. sniffle
Also I just noticed her name! Hah.
Anyway, we’re up to 52 clans, and drifting upwards toward the 100-ish players I hope will constitute a good stress test on the system. If you’re interested in playing, you should join us. Message me for the link!
