Time flies! Two weeks since the last development update and Lord Manhammer is nowhere to be seen! I’ve heard rumors that he was called in to slather paint on an important building in the dunes of Barya.
A perfect opportunity for me to sneak in here and give you an update instead! Let’s see how much I can share before someone finds out that I’m here.
We’ve just done some important changes to how we work since within the company. We realized that we are now over 20(!) people working on this game in some capacity all over the world - which warranted a slight alteration in our teams going forward to be able to keep track of everything.
Team Tech/Features
Team Look & Game Feel
Team Art
Team Game Design
Finally, we have a “Team Goal” whose task it is to coordinate these team efforts to a coherent vision and make sure we are working towards the same goal. Working on how we run the company is a continuous effort and it needs constant reflection and iteration, but this setup feels amazing so far.
So let’s see what we’ve been up to!
Modifiers, Modifiers, Modifiers
I’ve been doing some much-needed changes to our “bacteria system”. Bacterias are what spreads through all entities in the game through a slightly modified DAG and apply things such as “+5 Offense” to the recipients.
However, we couldn’t easily use percentages or filters before. We couldn’t even award new essences! Look at the images below for some of the results.
Faction Specific UI
A while ago, Christian made a few mockups on how the UI could look when branded to a specific faction and we fell in love with the idea. This means that if you play as Loth, you would get a Loth-flavored UI to increase your immersion.
David worked quite a loth on a system to prepare for this. See the result below!
BAttle Changes - AI Architecture & REndering
Marcus has been working solely on AI for the last weeks. We are doing some architectural changes to prepare for campaign-specific features and to improve the battle AI. Right now, ranged units decide that they want to walk instead of shooting way too often right now.
Emil has spent some time working on a new renderer to show a range of hexes indicating where you can walk & shoot and it’s coming along nicely.
Team Art has also worked a lot on getting the Arleon Biome pixel art to a more finished state and readable.
Can’t show you anything from battle yet, but I can assure you - It looks fantastic!
Biome Fog
Marcus got the idea to add fog to certain biomes in the game. He whipped up some shader and programming magic and created this. Looks pretty good, don’t you think?
Spell Changes
Carl has been changing the spell system to be more understandable for new players and I’ve been implementing them.
The biggest change is that you don’t need a skill to start casting spells. All you need is the correct essences/troops to get access to tier 1 spells. Many more changes as well, but that’s for another blog post ;)
Arleon Portraits
Andi & Team Art have been working on getting the wielder portraits for Arleon finished. We still have a few changes we need to do, but minor ones. Here’s the full wielder line up for Arleon!
That’s all I can share for now! I need to get back to programming. Thank you for reading.
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.