Q&A How many skills do you plan to be possible to get in a single playthrough?

This is a bit difficult to predict because it depends on how long the story will be and how many choices there are per chapter. Altogether, that needs, somehow, to turn in a good balance by the end of the game. But the idea is to be forgiving and not to force anyone to have to replay the game several times because he can't get some skills. I think that’s not particularly fun gameplay.

The ideal outcome would be that a player can end the game with a total of 6 hardcore skills from opposing branches (for example, 4 cunning and 2 honorable, or 3 from each, etc). It might be that I end up missing that mark by +/- 1 hardcore skill (I hope it isn’t worse than that).

There will also be opportunities to “move points around” in a way that a player might be able to still end up with 12 hardcore skills in total, but get all of them from 3 branches and none from that 1 branch he isn’t interested in at all.

Of course this is assuming the player takes a measured approach. If he, for example, always picks the honorable choices, he will get all the honorable skills, none of the cunning ones, and ends up swimming on honorable points without anything to do with them…

Is it possible to know at what point unlocking skills doesn't enable access to more content in the current version? Unlocking a skill that has no content yet feels bad.

Yeah, that's a classic problem of "in development" games. I do say in the "skills help" section to not buy any skill before you need it to help prevent situations like that.

But, perhaps I'll also add another section there showing which skills are currently usable in the most recent version of the game. I wouldn't know how to make that info visible in the main screen when it is already quite crowded.

Another issue that might be important to address somehow is to let the players know (or at least have some hints) which skills they will need with a girl so they can work towards gathering enough points for them, without needing a walkthrough (which I'm trying to avoid at all costs - the game should provide most of the info/hints you need to get the desirable outcome the player seeks).

I'm evaluating some ideas at the moment. The next update might already have a system to help with this problem.