Hello and welcome to another progress update. Quite a lot has happened in the last few weeks. We are really getting down to the nitty-gritty details, making sure that all features that have been implemented lately also makes sense from a user perspective. Things like readability, visual feedback, and general quality of life improvements are on our agenda.
This period has been really productive and it is nice to see that small changes can have a great impact on the overall game experience. Lucky for us we are going to spend two more weeks just polishing and improving the gameplay experience. Every day of just improving what we already have made a tremendous difference!
A lineup showing a few of our Wielders. These portraits will be used in the inventory, where you equip gear and artifacts.
I’ve been focusing a lot on recruitment and staffing lately. As you might have noticed on our Twitter account we are still looking for more pixel artists. We have had some freelancers leave us, due to personal reasons, and we need to fill the positions. Specifically, we are looking for a character artist/animator and a buildings artist. We will probably have well over 200 buildings in various shapes, styles, and sizes across the game, so quite a lot of content to produce! The same goes for characters which will probably amount to over a 100, all animated. So yeah. A lot of pixels.
David, Niklas, and Christian have updated the adventure movement path. Specifically the path that is drawn between your Wielder and where you want to move. They are trying to make it less “in your face” but also make it more clear to the player what options they have during their turn. We have had a problem with people not understanding their amount of movement left, so we are trying hard to fix this.
Andi continues to impress us with vivid portraits full of personality and attitude. This is Redfern who you’ll encounter in the Arleon campaign.
Marcus has along with Emil mostly focused on the adventure UI/UX. A lot of tweaks for the HUD but he also added functionality to swap between raze and occupy when you’ve conquered an opponent’s town. You now have much more flexibility in how you exploit the towns you have conquered from your opponents. A quality of life feature for all burgeoning warlords.
Carl is balancing the game through units, spells, and other modifiers. A truly daunting task considering the number of things that can affect the gameplay. Things like artifacts, gear, buildings, research, troops, songs, and spells, to name a few. Besides his traditional game design job, he has continued with composing the songs for Songs of Conquest. Good thing he used to work with musicals I say. I’ve heard a little sneak preview from the Arleon campaign and it sounds very promising!
Before Marcus improvements the research icons appeared all over the UI, covering important buttons. Clearly this new version is a great improvement, wouldn’t you agree?
The art team has been so hard at work that I haven’t been able to get any replies out of Patrik and Anders. I know they are busy so I didn’t bother them too much about it and was instead happy to get some info from our latest pixel artist, Thomas. He has created concept art along with colour and mood exploration for all the biomes of the world. This is something we have visited a little bit in the past, but it feels great to have an experienced artist taking this up again. Thomas also created the sketches of all assets for the battle biomes, things like blockers, background trees, etc.
It’s also worth noting that we recently reached over 9000 followers on Twitter, which is quite amazing considering we are still keeping quiet about several parts of the game. Here’s to 9k and let’s step up and aim for 10k before the year is over!
We are trying to find a suitable generic portrait for when you attack neutral armies. I don’t think we have nailed it just yet, please share your ideas and feedback in the comments!
Finally, we recently got a wonderful shout out from Greg Fulton, the lead designer of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. He is currently working on Fanstratics, a spiritual successor to the HOMM games, and mentioned Songs of Conquest in his latest Newsletter. I’d encourage our readers to check out his title. I am looking forward to trying it out!
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.