Hello, strategy game lovers! We’re back with another update about Songs of Conquest. This week I’ve still been pretty much focused on contracts and administrative tasks. We are signing up four more freelancers that will help us with sounds, texts, portraits, and pixel art. As I added them to the ever-growing credit list I realized that this game now has had over 25 active contributors. Wow. I truly feel privileged to be a part of this team, on a journey, to create an amazing fantasy world and game experience. Currently, there are around fifteen of us working on the game, spread across different parts of the world.
Christian has been working on visual mockups for the Spellbook. This just one of several variations, but it gives you a general idea of which direction we are heading in.
This week Niklas has been working on getting our songs mechanics to a basic state. This is a bit of a big reveal really, as we haven’t talked much about it until now. Basically it means that our musically-oriented troops will be able to play songs that give certain stat boosts/nerfs for a single round in exchange for their entire turn. Further on we will share more about just exactly how you learn new songs. But, in order to create the system, Niklas had to make changes to our Bacteria (the all mighty stat-changing system) and add filters. I’m sure it was a breeze.
Here’s the Songs editor in which Carl can create and tweak songs for the game. Good thing Carl is actually a composer AND a game designer. He was pretty much born to do this.
Furthermore, Niklas has been tying the whole team together even more strongly around a specific development target. We now have a clear strategy of adding all content and features, at least in a rough state, to the game up until the end of July. After that, the idea is to do a content and feature freeze and polish away while we play the heck out of it.
Anders has created more Wielder sprites and remade the Arleon Fortress building to better work with our 2.5D system. He has also been involved in the animation process of Arleon units. Kordian and Felix have both been taking a stab at new textures, trees, mountains, and blockers for the Doneria and Rana Biomes. All in the spirit of getting more content into the game at a higher pace.
Andi, who has just started working with us, has worked on the portrait of Cecilia Stoutheart. She is a character that has stayed with the game from the start of development and is one of the protagonists in the Arleon campaign. Later on, I hope to share an evolution of Cecilia portraits so you can get an insight into how the look of the UI and portraits have changed over time. This time I think we have nailed it though, fingers crossed!
You can now split troop stacks. Which is… a good thing. Each stack gives you the amount of essence associated with the troop. So, going for many small stacks or one big can make quite a difference from a strategic perspective.
A final thought that I want your opinion about: I’m thinking about switching to bi-weekly updates. I think the dev blog would have slightly more… substance if we allowed two weeks to pass between each update. I’m also thinking of mixing up the format a bit and doing interviews with team members some weeks, where we only focus on one aspect of the game, such as UX, design, or art direction. Feel free to leave a comment below and let me know what you think!
Stay safe and take care of each other.
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.