Why? Because I’m lazy and don’t want to cross post the devposts on several different pages and platforms. So I decided to keep it all on Steam for now. We might change it back if people give us really good reasons to do it. Do you have a good reason? Leave a comment.
(Also, did you notice the STEAM train in the scrolling text? Get it? Clever, huh?)
It’s time for a development update! We’ll jump right into the immersive world of Songs of Conquest, as we are currently working hard with finalizing our 5th edition of the lore-document. Well, actually it is Kim who is working hard and me and Carl are merely shouting encouragement and feedback. Anyhow, the document is a way for us to create a coherent world with a rich history, culture and atmosphere. It’s an important tool to create a cohesive game. And we prefer our games… cohesive. Don’t you?
It’s tricky to get a lot of details and personality in really small Wielder sprites, but I think the art team is doing a great job so far. What do you think?
Continuing on with design work, Carl has been balancing and checking a lot of the numbers in the game. He’s also worked more with skills and powers for upcoming implementation. Another big area of focus for the design work has been to create build plans for our AI so they know what to build and when. The Alpha testers are doing a great job at letting us know what the AI struggles with and where it performs well, the build plans are a way to make sure the AI is challenging enough for our players!
All of the programmers and the “Look and Feel” team have been constructing a whole new UI and flow when a player builds new buildings. The old system simply needed to be updated in order for the game to really shine when it comes to town management and constructions.
This is how the new research UI looks. It gives the user more visibility about what research is available to the faction. As well as just looking better than the old UI. Nice.
Niklas also worked on a new kingdom overview section. Showing detailed info about what you've claimed and built. And he also fixed an audio preview scene for us developers to easier check and add sounds to the map entities of the game. And on the topic of making things easier he added a "claim everything" cheat command to the dev-console. Good cheats make it easier to develop the game!
Yes, developers cheat in their own games. For a good reason mind you! Players cheating however. That’s another story!
Robin also focused on the UI Rework for the town building experience. Some of the bigger things include "sticky selection" of Wielders. Which means a Wielder will always be selected if there is one alive on the map. And he also added more hotkeys for both inventory and the spellbook. Furthermore, Robin created a very developer-esque new menu for the Global research from Large buildings. It resides under the Kingdom Overview which Niklas also worked on.
Marcus changed the AI calculation loop so it tries to respect frame rate dynamically, which will make it adapt better to different computer specs. This was done together with lots of other small optimizations that tries to reduce the time it takes for the AI to make decisions.
The two screenshots show before and after Marcus optimized the AI. Notice the freezing in the first one that's not as bad in the other (look at the wielder banner for comparison).
The whole art team has been knee deep into the sandy dunes of Barya. The artists have all been focusing on the buildings and Wielders from the desert merchant nation. All Wielders are now designed, animated and implemented into the game! Most buildings are done-ish and are now longing to be animated with the help of Eyal. Patrik also fixed some pesky tearing in the ground material, creating big black “rifts'' in the world. We can now safely say that we, and our testers, won’t have to stumble upon black chasms across the adventure map, which feels pretty good.
Anders and Kordian are dual wielding the graphic development of the main building of the Barya faction. Each time you upgrade it you’ll see a new visual representation on the adventure map. Please let us know what you think of the building progression!
Finally, some of you might have heard that we recently let 100 more people into the closed Alpha. In fact, there were around 2000 people who applied to get in. We are thrilled that so many of you want to test the game, and please know that there will be more chances. As we get nearer to release we will gradually increase the amount of testers at a higher pace!
Until next time my friends, take care!
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.
Hello friends! It is time for an update don’t you think? The game development is coming along nicely and tons of things have happened since the last post. I was actually planning to share a devblog a few weeks earlier than this, but a lot of people have been sick, including myself, so the schedule was a bit fudged. But, to compensate for the lack of updates I’m treating you to an extra long wall of text, spiced up with the occasional image just to keep you on your toes! Please remember that if you ever feel that the lack of updates is getting to you: We try to share a short game development video each week on our Youtube Channel. We read all comments and try to reply to all questions, so it is a great way to talk to us!
Here they are in their full glory, the whole Arleon troop lineup. Most of these troops have been shown before, but this is the first time we show them all off in one image, including all upgrades. What do you think?
I know a lot of you are curious about the main features of the game, like combat, town construction and the magic system. Rest assured that we will talk more about this as soon as we are ready! We are preparing videos that will show more gameplay material, but the truth is that we are still tweaking several features and changing stuff around. So for as long as we don't feel 100% confident in the design decisions we don’t want to drop videos that might give people the wrong impressions.
Moving over to check in with the tech team we’ll learn that our lead programmer, Niklas, has become a father! Drop him some well wishes in the comments won’t you? Besides getting to know his latest family member and between the diaper changes he has also gotten some work done. The biggest thing was changing how the save/load system works, basically expanding the system we already had in place. The system now also supports spaces in save names, the future is truly here!
Niklas have refactored the post game statistics and included more features. You can now toggle teams, see values on the y-axis and see where a player lost a fight (the skull shown in the image above).
David and the wider ‘look and feel’ team has done a little bit of everything! The biggest update being a new version of the spellbook, to adapt to a major rework of the spell system (more on that later!). The enemy portraits now use pixel art, instead of painted 2D images, if you attack a neutral hostile (non-Wielder) on the adventure map. It is used in dialogues and pre battle as well. Creating hand painted portraits for all 64 troops would simply be too much work, but fortunately it looks really nice with the pixel art as well!
Lots of small quality of life updates has been done, as well as finishing all the spell visual effects with the help of Mattias, our VFX freelancer.
Christian has made sure that our UI is now more readable. We have three types of text in the game; Title, Label and Lore. Each type has three sizes; Large, Medium and Small. All text in the game now has been increased in size with a main focus on lifting the Medium and Small types. We are currently trying the new font sizes with the Alpha testers to a general positive sentiment.
Ding dong, something important happened! Running a kingdom requires your constant attention, hence the need for notifications. So while you’re off fighting battles or searching for loot and artifacts, these notifications will keep you covered.
Getting back to the tech team I’ve been provided with a deep dive into the AI development by Marcus. So buckle up, because we are about to enter the Matrix!
The AI has had some large changes done to how it moves on the adventure map. When a Wielder has to walk a longer distance to reach a valuable destination, we do pathfinding at a different level than usual (usual meaning between every tile on the way) and instead look at the distance in "regions". When it has performed all relevant actions and emptied a region it will be looking for new areas to explore. A region in direct connection with the currently selected region will be weighted as more valuable than further away ones. But this decision is also weighed together with the total "need" of all the available resources and pickups in that region.
The images above illustrate several parts of the AI behaviour. Showing regions where it starts and where it moves when it has emptied the region of all relevant resources.
The AI now also does rudimentary troop trading between wielders. This is being developed currently but here's how it works for now: If two commanders are within proximity it will check who is the strongest from a battle perspective. The weaker Wielder will walk to the strongest Wielder and give away as many troops as it can.
Robin has also entered the Matrix and improved how the AI builds their towns. There is now a specific set of build plans per town instead of per team, meaning that the AI can branch development into different areas for different towns. The handling of the build plans are more dynamic and adaptable to the game situations. AI algorithms for determining the need for different resource incomes and troop production have also been improved, along with build decisions that deviate from a human made build plan.
An early view of the Rana settlements! These can be found and claimed as expansion points across an adventure map. They are in essence small towns, with less building sites but with the ability to draft troops if you construct the appropriate buildings.
Carl has been doing a little bit of everything, well to be honest, he has done a lot of everything. As we are nearing the end of the development cycle there seems to never be enough of Carl to go around as team members need to know about different aspects of the game and all campaign levels need to be wrapped up. Lately he has focused on creating a new version of the spell system along with our producer Johannes. This is very much based on feedback from the Alpha testers and we are trying to create something that has a bit more risk/reward and add more dynamic aspects to combat.
Essence is now a spell casting “currency” stored in the Wielder’s “Essence Wallet”. You gain essence in various ways: At the beginning of each battle round a Wielder adds all Essence gained from skills, special abilities and equipped artifacts as well as team-wide Essence gained from research and claimed objects on the map. When it becomes a troop’s turn to act, it adds its Essence to the Wielder’s wallet.
Each spell has a cost of one or more types of Essence, which is “paid” when the spell is cast. There is no limit on the amount of spells that can be cast in a round, as opposed to once per battle round as it was before. The “Essence Wallet” is cleared after each battle.
The layout of the Spellbook has been changed to adapt to the new spell system. It is less complicated than the previous one and in general we feel it conveys the magic system better.
More design work has been done on the towns and buildings for all factions. Many prices have changed and moved around. Most prerequisite building requirements have been removed and replaced with a higher cost of exotic resources. To build the “best” medium building you need a specific small building. To upgrade your end tier troop dwelling you need a specific medium building. To build a Rally point or similar building, you’ll need a Marketplace.
Kim is working on the campaign together with Carl. She has also rewritten our world document, melding lore snippets and short stories with informational texts about the game world. When she is done it will be version number five of the document, will it be the last though? I wonder.
Our amazing map artist Marc Moureau has finished the campaign map for Arleon. Behold the island of Arleon! Well, at least parts of it!
On to our jack of all trades - Patrik! This time he told me that there was not much to say about what he had done since the last blogpost, due to him being off sick for a long time. Oh yeah? You underestimate yourself Patrik, says I, and will without further interruption list just what has come from his desk since our last update.
Teleportation now works as intended. There is a working prototype for controllable ballistas in the siege battles. Selected objects are now highlighted on the minimap. The battlefield zone of control areas has been given some visual love. All claimable neutral map entities now have proper portraits with team colors (where applicable). Rana is starting to get proper building portraits. The artwork, localization and stats of all planned artifacts are now in-game (all 109 of them). The first frame of all Rana wielders has been added to the game! Among other things, such as improving the walls in adventure.
And that segues nicely over to Anders who has added textures, noise and improved the 3D meshes of the walls. He has also finished art for all levels and research updates for the regular buildings of Rana along with the help from Kordian. Eyal is now hard at work with getting them all animated. The Rana camp is the only one still in need of upgrades at this point.
Try wallhacking your way through this! Well, come to think of it. Please don’t.
Anders has furthermore done more work with picking optimal colours for the teams, making sure it works when recolouring the combat troop sprites. He has also continued to create more artwork for siege battles. Kordian has - besides creating first drafts of all Rana buildings - also designed early versions for all Barya buildings, as well as first frames of the full Barya Wielder line up. Martí has finished all the animations for the Barya troops and he now only has Wielders left to animate!
Our design intern Albin has been working on a new pvp map for 8 players. This is an extra large map with a concept that he thinks will be interesting. It is rich with triggers and talking hostiles that strengthens the narrative of the experience. Besides pure level design he has also been great at finding lots of weird bugs and just generally being helpful.
The Youtuber H for Havoc recently released a video about our game. Please note that the contest for Alpha keys is not active anymore. But, there will be more chances!
Finally I’d strongly encourage you to follow us on Steam if you aren’t already doing so! Following us on Steam is a great way to support the development of the game. It basically tells Valve that yes, people do care about this game. And it also means that you won’t miss out on any new videos, weekly highlights, etc. So, what are you waiting for? Give us a follow and get our eternal love.
Until next time, take care!
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.
Another devblog just two weeks after the previous? Does this mean that we are moving back to biweekly publishing of dev news? Yes. Maybe. Definitely maybe. If nothing else we aim to give you at least monthly updates. Developing the game is the top priority, but at the same time, we want to keep you updated about the production! On that note, we have upped our presence on YouTube and started releasing short video clips showing random game dev moments. If you haven’t checked out the playlist I highly recommend you do!
Handsome and clever. Hair like a sloth. Hide all your dead, it’s Aldus of Loth.
Since last time we’ve had a new intern join our ranks! Albin will help us, mostly Carl actually, with playtesting and designing levels. We are looking forward to seeing what he will produce during his internship and he will stay with us until early next year. Feel free to say hi to Albin in the comments to make him feel welcome :)
Speaking of design and development schedules: The biggest news we have to share is that we have had to reconsider the number of campaigns we can realistically develop before releasing the game. Our original plan was to create four campaigns, one for each faction, but due to time and budget constraints, we have had to limit our ambitions to two campaigns. Keep in mind that we are planning for cut scenes, custom maps, and a specially composed song for each campaign. It’s lots of moving parts and effort that go into developing a full campaign.
Carl put it like this: We’ve basically reduced the number of campaigns in order to make sure that each campaign is as polished and awesome as it can be. So he’s spent most of his time these last weeks redesigning the story and campaign arcs. Carl tells me he thinks the new stuff is gonna be really great and whenever he seems confident like that I’m inclined to believe him. We don’t see this as a failure, we see it as realistic planning. We still believe that the amount of content will be enough to satisfy people who prefer a single-player experience. Especially since we are shipping the game along with a level editor that we think will be well used and give users a plethora of user-made levels to choose from!
The programmers have really focused hard on the AI by playing, analyzing the behavior, and tweaking. Making a perfect AI is near impossible, but we are working hard to truly make it great! Niklas is currently creating better visualization tools to see what's going on under the hood.
Marcus has restructured some parts of the AI to fit in our essential debugging tools. He added more build plans that the AI uses when it plans its kingdom. Furthermore, Marcus updated parts of the AI movement logic, and currently he’s still focused on that (since we've been experiencing issues with it). One tangible improvement has been choosing the closest tile when it has several to choose from.
Marcus also fixed some unwanted behavior and tweaked how the AI mood changes over the course of a game. We can now nudge the AI a bit if it benefits the build plan we have designed for it. We have also modified how the AI builds up the need to recruit units over time. The speed can be modified depending on what the AI has seen. If it encounters a strong opponent it will start to recruit units more aggressively.
Do you have some favorite type of AI behavior or unexpected moments from other games where the AI surprised you in a good way? Drop a comment below and let us know!
We now have better tools to analyze the path of the AI Wielders. This way we can make better design decisions to improve their decision-making and movement.
The graphics team is mostly focused on Rana, even if Martí is still working on finishing the final Barya units. He’s got Rana Wielders next on his list, and judging from the few designs Kordian has done, these are going to look awesome! Placing the Frogs right next to the Human Wielders gives a lovely contrast and a reminder of the diversity of the game world.
Anders, along with Kordian, is striving to get all the buildings done for Rana within a few weeks. It is a hard task considering all the production steps. Keep in mind that most buildings need to be done in several layers due to the 3D perspective and then animated. They will also need to cater to re-coloring with team colors and look equally good in all zoom levels.
Patrik has, per usual, done a little bit of everything, including adding basic mod support to the game along with Niklas. We are very early into this work and not even sure if it will make it into release, but we do hope that we will be able to get into the hands of users as we think people could create amazing (and wonderfully horrific!) things with it!
Patrik also animated our 2D banners with some clever tech art magic and added proper UI portraits for all Loth buildings.
Yes, she’s big. Yes, she is a badass. More questions?
We’ve also done a lot of work to prepare for proper translations. Niklas and the programmers have created a font replacement system to enable translating to languages with characters that our current fonts do not support (like Russian). I’ve been making sure that we add descriptive texts that explain all parts of the game to translators, so they won’t have to guess in what context a text appears in the game. A big thank you goes out to one of our most hard-core fans, Monday from our Discord server, who has helped us with a lot of the context descriptions!
Let’s see, what more? We are recruiting a new VFX artist. The look and feel team is working on the siege UX and improving the movement interactions. The Arleon campaign map is now finally done and I just might share it in an upcoming blogpost or perhaps just parts of it. We might also just save it for the actual campaign scenes in the game. Some things are best unspoiled, right?
Anyhow, until next time, take care, my friends!
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.
We are back in action! After a well-deserved summer break, enjoying the unstable Swedish weather, we are now hard at work with the game once more. As we are focusing on the final stretch of development before release there is a lot going on, in all the areas of development. We are still targeting an early 2022 release and that means making hard decisions, ensuring that everyone shares the same vision for the final product, and generally just kicking ass and taking names.
I’ve primarily focused on the marketing aspects of the upcoming release, making sure that we are utilizing our communication channels as effectively as possible. This might seem like a boring part of game development, but for me it is kind of like an exciting metagame, where Wishlists, followers and likes are something like XP. The more you get, the better prepared you are for the final boss (release day!).
BAM! It’s hard not to notice the new level up effect.
Other than marketing I’ve looked more into translations along with Niklas. We have quite a lot of text in the game and we are both working to refine the copy (some of it isn’t used anymore, but still remains in the localization document) as well as creating explanations for all texts. We are basically trying to give translators a good sense of what texts appear where in the game and what they represent. There are a lot of details to consider in the translation process: like creating a glossary for in-game words, technical documentation, and integration with Crowdin, a community translation tool. We hope to get the actual translation work going within some weeks, focusing on one language first, as a trial translation (ты можешь угадать, на каком это языке?).
Christian has updated the UI for the online games and the player lobby. Additionally, he’s been working on the Wielder sheet with stats, active modifiers, inventory, and skills. He also supported David with the implementation of a new purchase interface for recruiting Wielders and reviving dead Wielders. David did a whole lot of tweaks and improvements besides a whole new Wielder purchase menu. The movement system has undergone a big change, where you’ll have to double click to move, as opposed to our previous single click interaction. The inventory has changed from “you can only use as many slots as we can fit into the UI” to “your backpack is a magic endless backpack, cram everything you want in there!”. David also tweaked the level-up notification, making the VFX much more visible.
Behold the new Wielder purchase screen! Compared to the old one this gives a much more detailed overview of the Wielder and allows the player to make a more informed decision (as well as just looking much better!).
Niklas got right into the online mode when he got back from his vacation. This means that we now have a much more stable game experience when we challenge each other in our weekly online play sessions of the game. One of the great new additions to the online multiplayer features is host migration, meaning that if the host of the game can’t stay for the full game, someone else can take over hosting. We’ve also had troubles with games crashing if one player gets a disconnect, but this is now fixed. And perhaps one of the most sought-after features by the development team members who prefer to play long games: Saving and loading online games. It is now possible to pick up an online multiplayer game exactly where you left it.
Niklas did not settle for only multiplayer development but thundered on with adding a basic version of Rich Presence in Discord. We have an active Discord community and we are sure this will be a useful feature, meaning that people can see when other members are playing the game, looking for an online game, or creating something in the level editor. If there are any specific things you’d like to see, do let us know! We can’t promise it’ll be done before release, but it is always good to know what our users are asking for!
The one-man-army called Niklas also changed a few things in the level editor and improved the UX on how to select and change map entity properties. And lately, he’s also been working very much on the third option when you take over a town or a settlement. Phew. You are a true inspiration to the rest of us, Niklas! I’ll consider utilizing your effective work methods for the next sprint, but I’ll just take a short nap first.
Our artist Andi has redrawn the faction banners, giving them a bit more realistic textures and patina. The flags now look like they have seen some battle action!
Robin on the other hand told me he’d almost completed the work he started before the vacation. And to be fair, he got back to work just a few days ago, while Niklas started working a few weeks ago. Anyhow! Robin focused on getting neutral enemies on the map to have a chance of fleeing or joining you if your army is much bigger than theirs. He also started working on "scouting intel", where you get differing amounts of intel about enemy armies depending on how far away they are and how good your vision range is.
Can I keep ALL the artifacts mom? Yes, son. Yes, you can.
Moving on from the coders to the graphic artists I’d like to point out that if Niklas is our one-man army I would dare to say that Patrik is our Swiss army knife, a jack of all trades! Though he recently started working he has already solved quite a few problems and quality of life improvements for other developers. Patrik has been working on almost every part of the game: everything from the AI to online multiplayer and he is now heading the art team focusing on technical art (shaders and cool stuff like that). This week he managed to solve team colors, which had been hardcoded to team numbers and wasn’t interchangeable. Furthermore, he started experimenting with allowing team colors to extend not only to buildings but also to the troops in your army.
Anders started off with going over some of the campaign maps, as well as wrapping up a few buildings that were in an unfinished state. Kordian has focused on the Barya faction buildings and we are kind of starting to figure out how they should look and fit together with the rest of the faction buildings lineup.
Martí has been producing a ton of new Wielder sprites and is wrapping up the final troops for the Barya faction. When he is done with that, ALL troops in the game are DONE. Will someone bring us a bottle of champagne and please spray it like a racecar driver in our face when we hit that milestone?
The Faey nobles are fashionable and won’t settle for just one pair of loincloths, oh no, they will keep on trying until they find JUST the right color.
Carl tells me he has been working hard on the campaigns and reworked game mechanics in general and spell systems in specific, much of it is based on the feedback we’ve been getting from the Alpha testers. It feels good to have a small crowd of people playing the game as it highlights a lot of problems and possibilities for the team!
And finally: A lot of you have asked about how we develop Songs of Conquest. What game engine do we use, how does the level editor work, and how do you combine 2D pixel art with 3D environments? Well, look no further! Besides the blog posts, we will start to share short, mostly unedited, clips from behind the scenes of the game development process. If you are curious about the development, feel free to check this new YouTube channel out and subscribe for more updates!
That’s it for this week, see you soon and as always: Comment and let us know what you think! We truly appreciate all the amazing feedback we are getting and it helps us make a better game!
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.
What is your name and what is your role at Lavapotion, in your own words?
My name is Marcus, I work as a software engineer here at Lavapotion.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up working with games?
I grew up in a small town about 40 minutes driving distance from Gothenburg in Sweden. When I was 7 years old I got to play Boulderdash on my older cousins Commodore 64 and I fell in love immediately, both in the machine itself and the games I played on it. A year or two later I got my own C64 and since that moment games have always been a central part of my life. Computer games, console games, pen-and-paper RPGs, board games, you name it I’ve played it. One of my first life goals was to get a job working with games, in my head I would get to play my favorite games all day and in retrospect I would say that I was wrong on that specific point.. Other than that it’s great!
I started to study computer science in 2006 and my university had a game design master track, that choice wasn’t hard at all and here I am 14 years later.
Except for games, I really enjoy music. I feel naked without my headphones playing something for me while I code/commute/.. Also, I fulfill a lot of programmer clichés. I can juggle, I like funny t-shirts, I like memes & my body is basically coffee.
Can you tell us about some of the earlier games you have worked on?
Before starting at Lavapotion, I worked at Ghost Games in Gothenburg where I was part of making Need for Speed Payback and Need for Speed Heat.
How’s a typical day of work at Lavapotion?
I started in the midst of the covid-19 outbreak so I’m trying to keep focus while working from home, drinking a lot of coffee.
Is the any code or features that you are particularly proud of?
I have created a way for us to visualize what decisions our AI takes over the course of a lot of games. We can also break down the decisions, i.e look at early/late game specifically and what resources it had in the bank at the time of the decision etc. You can also drill into a specific game or calculate averages/deviances over a lot of games. This is something that will help us validate that the AI makes decent choices over the course of a game, which is very complicated and time consuming to keep track of manually while playing against the AI.
What is your current focus right now?
Code and tech. I have focused a bit on audio implementation and recently I got responsibility for the AI Implementation.
Which other games are you inspired by when working on SoC?
I get inspired by a lot of games. Recently I’ve been playing a lot of Terraria. The exploration and progression is great, challenging boss fights. It sucked me in quite fast. Other recent games I played a lot recently are Disco Elysium, Faster than Light and Sea of Thieves. All great games in different ways.
Of course Civilisation plays in when it comes to turn based strategy which I’ve played in different shapes since the 90s. How to visualize data in complex systems like that is a very interesting challenge.
We have a lot of people reading our blogposts, commenting on Twitter and discussing the game on Discord. Has our fairly transparent development and open communications with the fanbase affected your work in any way?
Not more than that I get really happy and inspired when I read about people waiting for the game to be released!
Hello, both old and new friends! These last few weeks have been a thrilling ride to say the least. As most of you will know by now: We released a gameplay reveal trailer at the PC Gaming Show during E3. The feedback has been beyond our wildest dreams. Rock Paper Shotgun called it “one of the prettiest games at E3” and one Kotaku writer admitted to “losing his shit” over the game. As if that wasn’t enough, the organizers of E3 gave our humble indie game an award, naming it the most anticipated game from the PC Gaming Show! So yeah, pretty stoked about it all. The wishlists are growing daily and we hope that you will be as excited as we are when you finally get to play it! If you haven’t wishlisted the game yet, please take the time to do it on Steam, GOG, or EGS. It doesn’t pay our bills but it feeds our vanity.
Italian Spartacus is a streamer and Youtuber that was really impressed with our trailer. Not sure if we can live up to his high expectations, but we’ll try!
And speaking of playing the game. Some of you know that we currently have a small closed Alpha going and we are getting some great feedback. There are still a lot of things to work on, but it is clear that we are on the right path. It feels great to finally be able to let one hundred lucky gamers try the game out, but we will also do more test rounds during the fall. So if you missed out this time, there will be more chances. In order to get notified, subscribe to our newsletter or join our Discord server.
The team has been busy with development and despite E3 the pace hasn’t slowed down. As you might know, we have a few different teams that focus on different parts of the game. So let’s start out with team tech, who pretty much does all the heavy feature coding. Our lead programmer, Niklas, has been adding a bunch of new features to the level editor. A lot of quality-of-life features, such as preview-images of map entities as well as tooltips with explanations before you place objects in the level editor. He also found Patrik's old island generator code that we used a couple of years ago. Niklas has now modified it to work with the current version of the game and added it as a way to generate a more interesting starting point for new levels in the level editor.
Checkboxes galore! Niklas loves to add functionality to the level editor whenever he needs some relaxed coding time.
Niklas and Robin also did a thorough rewrite of the online game lobby. Pretty much making how we keep the lobby state in sync between all connected players work the same way as the rest of the game (I’m told this was a major thing!). Getting multiplayer up to speed is an important aspect of the game right now, as the AI is still not where we want it to be. With online multiplayer support, our Alpha testers can play against each other and get a better sense of the long-term experience and end game mechanics.
And on the topic of the AI, Marcus has done a lot of tweaks and improvements to it lately. The recruitment of both Wielders and Troops has been modified to force smarter decisions. Marcus also built a thinking hierarchy to allow deterministic order of some items. This allows for one AI decision to be made on the base of another, like "That artifact is on the way to where I'm heading in 3 turns. I might as well pick it up".
The CPU is now also spared a lot of strain as the AI has been optimized. This pretty much goes hand in hand with the summary of team tech, as they have all been focused on the big week of optimization™ these last few days!
T’Chyra is one of those lizards you just don’t want to mess with. Nothing good will come out of it. So just… don’t.
The look and feel team is, as always, focusing on the user-facing experience of the game, as well as marketing assets, when needed. Christian has mostly been busy with marketing aspects lately. Getting the new website up, creating store assets for our three storefronts, and doing some social media housekeeping (updating profile and header images). Thereafter he focused on the multiplayer experience and created UI mockups of the lobby.
Emil worked with wielder stats in the inventory menu (or wielder sheet, as we are tentatively calling it). He added two new sections, one for troop modifiers and one for temporary buffs. He also worked with hotkeys and added the functionality to cycle between your wielders and towns. David created some tech to support our VFX artist, Mattias. Things like teleporting projectiles and building VFX mostly. David also fiddled around with the action confirm UX and the purchase slider top-up behavior.
Look at those juicy effects. David and Mattias are working hard to make all interactions appealing and click-worthy. Go on, build and then sell those buildings!
Team design (a.k.a. Carl!) has fervently pushed on with the campaigns. He is now well into the Loth campaign and grinding away at the second map as we speak. Creating a well-paced and balanced set of maps for each campaign, where each scenario can be described with a verse in a song, can be challenging. But Carl is not the one to back down from a challenge. We are confident that when you get to see the campaign cutscenes, listen to the song and experience the full campaign playthrough you’ll agree that the time we spent doing it was worth it! (and if you don’t, please do not tell Carl!).
We are working with the talented map maker Marc Moureau to create maps for all campaigns. This is a work in progress version of the Arleon campaign map. Take that Google Earth!
Team art (a pretty posh team name when I think about it) is creating more magic under the supervising eyes of our Art Director Anders and our Tech Art guru Patrik. Whereas Anders has been prettifying the campaign maps and adding more assets to the game, Patrik has fixed a lot of visual bugs and made performance improvements. Our pixel artist Kordian has finalized all the Barya hostile units and is now moving over to their faction buildings. Thomas, who sadly is working his last few weeks, is busy finishing off all the environments for Barya, both adventure and combat.
Emil is also moving on to new adventures and the whole team wishes him and Thomas the best of luck. If they ever need an extra pair of swords and shields to join them in a dungeon run, they know where to find us!
Fancy an ice bolt to the head? No? Well, here you go anyway, it’s on the house.
As we are rapidly approaching the short but sweet Swedish summer things will go quiet for a while. Expect fewer updates and fewer blog posts. In fact, expect none. We will be back in action by the end of August to pick up the pace again. Expect a fall full of more reveals, videos, and dev blogs. Until then, take care!
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.
Welcome back to another dev blog! There has been so much going on since the last update, that I can’t possibly cram it all into one blog post. It would simply be too time-consuming and a very long read. I will however do my best to summarize the most important development leaps during the last few weeks.
Personally, I’ve really shifted over from managing external freelancer relations to focusing more on marketing. We have pretty ambitious plans for the fall, in terms of releasing more content and showing off more parts of the game. So far we haven’t shown much video, but we plan to change that and release more in-depth looks at the game and our development process. I’m looking forward to telling you more about the game in another narrative format.
We have also prepared a new trailer that shows more gameplay and… combat! Yes, it is finally happening and you will be able to see the trailer very soon. Expect to hear more about it as early as next week!
Our freelance artist Cyangmou has created some large blockers for the Arleon battle maps. These objects give additional variety and break up the organic look of the combat grid in a nice way!
The Alpha is planned to start next week, assuming we can squash all bugs before then. When we are ready we will send out an email to everyone who signed up for the Alpha with more information. So if you haven’t done it already, sign up right here. Keep in mind that we’ll have very limited access with only one hundred testers to start out with. More will be added as the development progresses and we need more fresh eyes to evaluate the game. So if you don’t get picked for the first round of testing, do not fear, more chances will come!
As far as coding goes, the tech team has recently switched focus to only fix bugs prior to the testing period. But they’ve also had time to develop more features. Niklas spent a lot of time fixing our win/lose system. It had a lot of issues that we had forgotten to take care of while focusing on other things. He also added a couple of new lose conditions, to give players many more ways to fail at the games, I guess.
Apparently, your only Wielder can’t die if you are to succeed with this mission. Makes total sense if you ask me!
Marcus changed the AI think loop to help avoid "tunnel vision" and various other AI adventure tweaks. He also updated AI build plans with help from Carl, to make sure it constructs buildings in a relevant order. The AI was also further optimized with regards to maintaining a good framerate during gameplay.
When asked Robin claimed that he hadn’t done “anything sexy”. But he did mention that he set up team factions and names for campaign maps. Making sure you could transfer wielder stats between campaign maps. And another a whole bunch of small-to-medium things. If that’s not sexy I don’t know what is Robin!
Behold the new and improved bug reporting tool™! Niklas created it to nudge people into writing more relevant bug reports and from what I’ve been told it has worked wonders!
The look and feel team, who mainly focuses on stuff like UI, VFX, and UX has not been spared from the bug hunting duties! But they’ve also managed to get more interesting work done. David helped Mattias, our new VFX artist, with getting some tech setup for spells. Things like battle wide spells, night during effects, and chain lightning. David also worked on troop VFX and updated the building portraits with pixel artwork. He also added blood to the battle scene. Emil focused on the wielder inventory where he added a section for the wielder specialization and a summary for all the equipped artifacts.
Christian was hijacked from UI work and implementation to fix things like a new landing page, marketing assets, and much more. Something big is brewing, so stay tuned!
Knowing how the artifact’s stats modify and affect your Wielder is a good thing. Emil is an avid strategy gamer and he prefers things to be clear and understandable to the player. Which is… understandable!
The art team continues just to ramp up assets for the game. We now have almost all combat troops animated on a basic sketch level. Arleon and Loth have all troops finalized and Rana is pretty close to finished as well. Patrik and Anders focused a lot on tweaking the first Arleon campaign maps, which will be a part of the Alpha test. They also got pulled into fixing tons of things for the trailer production, like setting up and finetuning specific maps and scenes. Kordian continued creating hostiles and Wielder sprites for the adventure map and Martí continued to animate them.
It’s a delicate process indeed to design a troop that will look good in both large and small scales. This troop, the Chelun, has like all the other troops one version for combat and one version for placement on the adventure map.
Carl, our game designer, has been working on game balance, story, and making maps! He has been getting some great support from our external producer Johannes, who really has a hand in almost every aspect of the game by now. We are really fortunate as a team to be working with a publisher like Coffee Stain, who first and foremost focuses on the quality of the game.
Not sure when the next blogpost will be but as mentioned, please keep a lookout during next week as we plan to announce big things! Until next time, take care and stay safe!
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.
What’s this? Another dev blog? Why yes, yes it is! We have not forgotten about you. The lack of updates is merely a sign of great things to come. The team is hard at work with the game, pushing for an internal deadline at the end of May. We are preparing to start a small Alpha around that date, which means some of you will finally get to try the game first hand!
Why keep it small? Well, we will need lots of more testing done and we figured it would make sense to let a few people in at a time. So we can gradually allow more people to try out the game during the fall when we have new features that we need fresh eyes to look at. There are over twenty thousand people signed up for the Alpha. And while we want every one of those subscribers to be able to try the game, allowing 20k users through the door at the same time won’t really help us achieve our goal of a methodical and structured testing phase. The best shot at getting into the early tests is to get signed up on our Discord, as we will handle communications with Alpha testers through that channel.
Andi is currently working on the main menu images. There are still a few more details and objects to add, but overall we are thrilled with how it’s coming along. What do you think?
Most of the team is working on design, features, and assets related to the Arleon campaign. We have also signed with an external studio to help us with the cutscenes that will take place between each mission. Carl and Johannes have been working with them to get the video visuals working together with the campaign song (that's almost finished and mastered).
Carl has furthermore been working on implementing and rebalancing the game after big changes to the research and upgrade system. It’s almost done! He also kept on with the maps, both skirmish and campaign, making sure they're working as they should.
More of that sweet Andi-art. The skills icons are now all done and implemented in the game. Going from temp-art to proper asset always gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside!
The art team is working across both combat and adventure visuals. Both the Arleon and Loth factions will be playable in the Alpha and we need to make sure that all assets for both factions are done. We also need to make sure that the maps for the Arleon campaign are looking great.
Kordian has been diligently wrapping up the production of all Loth buildings. Eyal has created idle animations for all of them and Patrik has been adding them to the game. It might seem like a small task, to add assets to the game, but due to our fairly advanced 2.5D setup, each object can take a while to get into the game. It all adds up if you have over 100 adventure map buildings and a similar amount of faction buildings!
Patrik and Anders have also finally started working on figuring out how our siege battle should look. They have come pretty far and we are now confident we can make it work in a way that makes sense gameplay-wise and aesthetically.
Thomas has been working on both unit animations and assets for the battle scene backgrounds. It has progressed a whole lot and now has more visual variety than before. The elements which block the player from accessing specific tiles are randomized in clusters to increase the organic look but at the same time make it clear to the user where it is possible to place troops or not.
It’s been on our list for a very long time and Patrik has finally had the time to make it happen: The fog of war has been getting a visual overhaul. No more sharp black lines, but instead a more organic-looking dark cloudy style. What do you think?
Our very own AI-expert Marcus has added features for the adventure AI. This new functionality will allow us to tweak and modify the AI behavior easier, without changing the code directly. This way we can suggest everything from a very strict build plan for it to follow, to a very loose one (giving it more or less freedom). Also, we can fine-tune certain general behavior, like how aggressive it will be.
Marcus also added a nifty way for it to avoid repetitive behavior, by giving it a "fading memory" of recent actions. If it is in a situation where it has very few options, it won't get stuck just doing those but might seek out other parts of the map instead.
Searching for the treasures buried by an empire long gone. Loth has a unique story twist that will shine through the visual appearance of its faction buildings.
Emil has squashed bugs and added a bunch of minor but important UX improvements. David updated the purchase/upgrade/defend UI and also made some modifications to the troops UI in various places. The troop portraits will soon use pixel art instead of hand-painted 2D portrait. We find that the pixel art reads better in the UI and also gives the users a much clearer view of which troops are which.
Our UI-guru Christian has alternated between planning and mockups of updates to make the player experience better (including “Kingdom overview”, Wielder HUD, and Drafting troops UI/UX). But he also, finally, got to go back and finish up the Loth UI. Seeing the faction-specific UI in the game is really great.
Each faction will have its own UI to give the player more immersion. It is just one more way for us to really convey the spirit of each faction, along with distinct architecture, musical theme, unique Wielders, and troops.
Our lead programmer Niklas has added a bunch of new triggers to the game. We now have area triggers, pre-battle triggers, and post-battle triggers in the game. These are valuable tools for our level editor, giving us the possibility of creating richer and more diverse game experiences throughout both the campaigns and skirmish maps. We truly expect that this is something our users will appreciate as well. The tools we use to produce the campaign are the exact same tools that will ship with the game itself. So I for one is hoping to play some awesome user-created story-focused maps when the game has been released!
David has implemented a tutorial system and yours truly has been creating copy for the tutorials. Trying to keep it short and sweet, but still informative. Long and loathsome tutorials are a huge turn-off to all of our team.
Beyond what I wrote above there has also been a lot of development on the plans for going into Alpha and beyond. We are gearing up to become slightly more public with the game and show the much-requested combat gameplay. We are still a few months away, but stay tuned and expect great things in the future!
And don’t forget, join our Discord to get the latest news first of all, as well as being able to talk to the dev team. Until next time, stay safe!
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.
You are in for a treat! Lord Querkius (Magnus) read my previous posts and asked if we should co-op write a blog post this time. I (Niklas) gracefully accepted the offer and commended him on the fantastic idea. I’m currently downloading a huge update to both Unity and our game repository, so I can’t code anyway at the moment.
And since I am the first to start editing the blogpost I’ll give you the technical updates first!
Campaign AI
Lately, with the AI, we’ve been having a laser focus on the campaign. We need to be able to get the AI to do things it normally wouldn’t do, in order to tell the story that we want to eventually tell you guys. Therefore we need ways to alter the AI behavior with settings and objects in the Level Editor. Marcus has been working on (among other things) a way for the AI to stand guard until something triggers it to do something else - like attacking the nearest wielder or start a dialogue.
It’s a lonesome task, being the designated guard.
Marcus also made a bunch of improvements to our data analysis tool. Next up is improving the skirmish AI, so he needs all the data he can get. For this we have a computer set up, that plays the game 24/7 and feeds us with massive amounts of data.
When you need lots of data, the AI got you covered. This pie chart shows which actions the AI is taking on its turns. This helps us set better values and weigh the actions that the AI should prioritize.
Mac Bug Fixes
Patrik and I also managed to solve one of those bugs again. The bugs that take forever to solve because you cannot really find the cause. This time around it was a MacOS specific bug that rendered only some of our fonts invisible on a built version of the game. It worked fine in the Unity Editor (this is why it’s important to test on your target platforms often). We had no idea why and we tried reading up on the issue for months, but couldn’t find a solution. Eventually, we got to the theory where TextMeshPro and MacOS/Metal couldn’t handle text meshes in world spaces that shared the same material with a text in the UI space. So it took a while, but now our Mac users (Patrik, Christian, and sometimes I) can read what’s going on in the game again.
Zooming is nice again
Patrik took some time to fix the zoom! It had this horribly annoying bug before that twitched the whole screen into another zoom level. Now we can zoom in and out again until our heart’s content.
Zooming in and out like there’s no tomorrow.
Build times
While playing the game, we’ve noticed that the sense of time when building buildings in your time has been a bit off. To solve this we created a prototype where we experimented on the concept of build/construction times. It worked quite well, and now we’ve also implemented it into the main game.
Below is an old gif with programmer/googled art. It looks way better now, but since I’m still waiting on my huge download - I can’t create a new gif.
No more instant building in the game. But the build time visualization will look better than a yellow excavator, we promise.
Separate Troop Pools
Robin’s been working on separating the dwelling pools so that they are local to each town. Previously, you’ve been able to buy all your accumulated troops from any town you own. It kind of broke the pacing of the game, and we decided to have a separate troop “pool” that you can buy from each town.
To connect the towns you need to construct a Rally Point, which enables you to buy troops from any town.
UI & UX changes
Last update, we talked about how you now can pillage your opponents’ buildings. David made a VFX pass to make it look even better and be more rewarding.
Bodyslam that building Cecilia! Knock the lights out of it!
The pre/post battle screen also got a facelift. We’ve been having temporary menus for quite a while now. David took the time to update it from Christians visual mockups. Another UX change that we’ve tried is to make it clearer when it’s not your turn. This is mainly a problem when playing online, but it helps a lot when playing single-player as well.'
Christian has redesigned the purchase/drafting of troops, but also reviewed the troop display in HUD to make them more legible and give more visual room for troop artwork.
Using the sepia tone to illustrate that it is not your turn worked out very well. When the colors come back to the screen it really screams for attention.
Another thing that was mentioned in the last blogpost was the guard towers! We noticed that they were a bit hard to read. It was not super clear when and where they would shoot at your wielders - so Emil added a range indicator so that you can clearly see the danger.
Don’t tread beyond the striped orange line. Or, well, do it at your own risk.
That’s it for my part in this blog! The download is done! Next up: lord Querkius (Magnus). Over and out! /Niklas
Thanks for taking the helm this time and handing over an almost finished blogpost to me Niklas! So let me just continue with the rest of the team from here on:
Carl has overhauled the buildings, spells, research, units, and how they tie together along with our producer Johannes. This started when we wanted to implement some new things in battle and then one thing led to another. Now he’s right in the middle of a huge overhaul, modifying how everything works together. But, from the looks of it right now, things are just getting major improvements and the overall experience just keeps getting better!
The game now saves your intended movement destination between turns. You can now just continue on your intended path when it’s your turn again.
Regarding graphics, there has also been great progress. Thomas has been finishing up the battle animations for several of the upgraded loth troops. Additionally, he was working on some massive background elements for the battle scenes (mainly some new trees and texture fixes) and he added a ton of decorations to all the different battle biomes. He has also been working on the adventure maps and created a lot of new objects, like new mountains, new biome textures, and especially all cliff textures for the adventure mode.
Anders is working on Wielder variations and the Barya troop lineup. He’s also worked on improving the build time visualization along with Patrik. Both of them also added a ton of buildings artwork and set up prefabs for 2.5D objects.
Kordian is hard at work with wrapping up the Loth buildings and we are soon nearing completion. It takes a lot of time and effort to create a full range of faction buildings that are visually compelling and readable.
Burning the midnight oil in the lands of Loth.
Personally, I've been adding a lot of artifacts to the game. We now have around 40 artifacts added but are looking to have 100 in total when we release the game. I also did some streaming on our Discord server while adding artifacts and quite a lot of people tuned in. While it was nice to talk to people from all over the world while at the same time as I was working, it was also a bit hard to focus. Next time I might just try to stream and talk about stuff I already have added, telling about the details, stats, etc.
It’s super rewarding to add content to the game and then being able to see it all working as intended when I play. Lucky for me I have over 60 more artifacts to add.
We've also signed with a studio that will produce cutscenes for the Arleon campaign and started to create storyboards and mockups for those visuals. It’s going to be spectacular when it’s done, especially when it is paired up with the grand song that Carl has composed.
Hope you enjoyed reading up on the development of the game and that we’ll see you for the next blog post. Until then, stay safe!
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.
