Another two weeks have passed and I’m happy to be back with another development report for your perusal. The big feature freeze is coming up quite soon, though we have had to push it just a bit forward. In games development, things always tend to be slightly more complicated than you anticipate. However, I’m really looking forward to start focusing on playtesting, tweaking features, and enhancing the visual experience.
While not the strongest of warriors, her songs can inspire your troops to mighty deeds. The minstrel can play an important in your army composition, the choice is yours.
Another pretty big thing that has happened is that we are changing the Doneria faction name to Barya. A lot of people were reading the name as something related to Döner kebab. We didn’t want to risk people losing their in-game immersion due to fast food connotations. So, with the game still in development, we felt it was easier to change the name sooner rather than later. Over the coming weeks, we will update to the new name on all public places (mostly Discord I guess) but also within the game. It's actually not just only the name that has gotten a facelift, we're reworking the whole faction quite a bit. They were originally created way back when we had a completely different magic and spells system. A lot of their lore and troops were centered around making that system work. But as we've evolved the game we need to update the faction formerly known as Doneria to fit better. Renaming the faction is the first step. As we continue work on Barya we'll keep you guys updated with details.
David just can’t stay from the UI and User experience (and I’m truly happy about that!). Lately, he’s been fiddling around with the spellbook and our favorite spell feature, the oh so handy quick bar.
Carl has worked on units and buildings balance as well as maps for skirmish and campaign play. He has also created additional battle maps both for normal play and some that will be suitable for battles in and around settlements and towns.
Almost every programmer on the team has been hammering away at the AI. Patrik has more specifically targeted the strategic part of the adventure AI. Niklas has added a system to calculate influence maps for AI wielders. The influence maps will be a subsystem of our larger AI and help influence the decisions of where the wielders should be heading. He also tells me that he recently added over 56 new placeholder map objects to the game. It’s basically template buildings for the adventure map that Anders can replace as he finishes up graphic assets for the buildings. We currently have plans for over 80 neutral map buildings and points of interest, and we are slowly but steady producing them with help from our pixel freelancer Joe.
What is an influence map really? I asked Niklas and he sent me this picture along with a simple note: The red means "stay away!" and the blue means "come here!". I, for one, feel enlightened!
Anders is finalizing the look of every troop from all four factions (including… Barya!) along with faction buildings. He is spending a lot of time talking to freelancers, mostly about how we specifically render things in our game and also the general look and feel design direction.
Kordian is helping Anders out with new troop designs. We will share some new troops fairly soon, I promise. Loths (see what I did there?) great new characters coming along. Andi is continuing his focus on portraits, both for buildings and Wielders. Felix is impressing us all with a continued stream of interesting and visually coherent faction buildings. He will soon wrap up that work and shift focus to all of those 80 adventure map buildings I mentioned earlier.
We are going for lots of personality and visual character traits when it comes to Wielder portraits. These are the superheroes of our world, powerful magicians that quests and conquers so they need to look their part. Leave a comment and let us know if you think we are on the right path!
For final words, I’d just like to say thanks for your continued support. A lot of you are joining us at our Discord servers just to chat with us game devs, drop ideas, or just hang out. We really appreciate it :)
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.