Hello and welcome to another lovely Friday dev blog! Here in sunny Sweden, the skies are grey and a light drizzle is tapping on the window. Yum! Anyhow, this week I have been doing a bit of everything, but mainly focusing on playtesting and prepping for a meeting with our publisher, which happens today. We are presenting the current state of battle mode, and let me tell you, we are truly proud of what we have done these last two months. The aim has been no less than to deliver the best battle experience the world has ever seen in a classic adventure strategy game. How’s that for ambition?
Here is our new take on the Sassanid unit. Feel free to let us know what you think of it!
I pretty much had to drag answers from people this week, since everyone has been prepping for the meeting. Niklas has been implementing lots of new features in battle. Mostly regarding the user experience such as highlights, outlines and general mouse over behavior with tooltips. He has also been working on troop abilities and troop placement. David has been “juicing” the battle experience, making sure that things look and feel just right when you interact with them. Things like how a unit responds when getting his/her turn, getting hit, etc. These types of details have become increasingly more important to us over time, well, perhaps since David started? In the end, we hope that just interacting with the game itself will be a rewarding and immersive experience.
Felix is continuing his quest to create a distinct visual look for Donerian buildings. I think we are on to something. Do you agree?
Christian has been focusing on visualizing the troop placement and tweaking the battle hud. Patrik has made the battle grid stand out more, fixed our multithreaded pathfinder and also worked with troop deployment. Anders has been working with doing more battlefield elements and improving the troops. Kordian has been doing battlefield obstacles and hit/attack effects, as well as particle effects.
Our artists are slowly venturing outside the Donerian desert and into the Rana swamps as well. These are some early tests for Rana buildings. Long live the resistance!
Finally, the team is sincerely thankful for all the amazing responses we got regarding the Legion troop and the Arleon banner in last week's blog post. Believe it or not, we do read all of the comments. It would, of course, be impossible to create something based on everyone's input, but it gives us great food for thought and new perspectives. So keep it coming!
We are thinking about having portraits for buildings, just like we have portraits for Wielders. This is a test for Sacred Woods, a research-focused building for Arleon.
Next week, I’m thinking we might run a poll where you can choose between which faction theme you want us to reveal next!
Please note that this is a devblog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.