And once again we are back! (Even one day earlier than usual!) Working towards a feature freeze at the end of June is still kind off on schedule, even though we’ve hit some snags. The whole occupy and raze towns feature set took longer time than expected, due to a lot of unforeseen edge cases. Then again, this is typical for game development and nothing we can’t handle. We are still remaining agile and redefining our development scope and targets on a weekly basis. Well, Niklas is, I should say. We others stay informed and contribute, but trust him to make the final calls together with our publisher. All hail Niklas, our backlog overlord!
Look at that gallivanting minstrel. Is it safe to assume that she is singing a… song of conquest? I would like to think so.
Carl has worked on simplified versions of all factions. We need to get their basic mechanics into the game without doing months of code beforehand. We've worked a long time with only one playable faction in the game but now we're pushing them all in there. Some features will just be a bit simplified to start out with. Hopefully we'll find some better mechanics as a bonus!
Carl has also been expanding the lore and worked on the campaigns. There might be some short stories showing up for dev blog followers in the future. Right now he’s pondering what we can do with gear and artifacts, how to break the game ever so slightly with powerful artifacts.
Who’s that sitting on a giant throne? Why is someone digging around the base? Tell me in the comments and I’ll tell you if you are right! :)
David, along with Marcus, Patrik, Emil, and Niklas. Well, pretty much all of the developers have been working on storing wielders and troops in buildings. They’ve also developed the occupy and raze functionality. So you can now attack and defend towns. But we also have something called settlements, which are basically strategic expansion points on the adventure map, where you gain access to a bit more income but more importantly: additional building sites.
Anyhow, as mentioned above, the occupy and raze functionality had more edge cases than we anticipated, so it took a bit longer to implement. The coders are right now working on making those functionalities stable, along with more unit tests and testing the game in general
Temp art showing the UI off an occupied town. You can choose to either occupy a town and gain resources each turn or raze it and destroy one building per turn.
Patrik has been optimizing the startup and map loading, to ensure we don't spend tons of time on any one frame. Doing so can cause networking timeout issues which we obviously want to avoid. This is done by "spacing out" work over several frames as well as offloading parts of the work to worker threads. It also had the benefit of making our game run at around 200 fps in debug mode in the editor instead of our previous 60 fps.
Patrik loves to make pedagogical graphs and illustrations. So here you go: a humblebragging graph that clearly shows his mad optimization skillz!
Anders has been hard at work with buildings for Loth and handing out relevant feedback to our graphic freelancers. We’re working on all the Arleon animation sketches (with the new troop designs) as well as creating the final new troops for Loth and Doneria. Rana comes directly after that! We have a steady flow of adventure map buildings coming into the game prior to the feature freeze and the portrait work is progressing as well. Portrait art sounds kind of like a modest task, but keep in mind that we have around 10 buildings, 8 troops and at least 9 wielders per faction, times four factions + some extra portraits for neutral buildings - Which gives us about 120 portraits. Besides that, we actually have more portraits, for stuff we haven’t really revealed yet, so yeah. Lots of portraits.
Niklas isn’t only developer by day. By night he develops wildlife features for the game. Specifically he likes birds. So, here’s 4000 3D crows soaring through the sky, just for your viewing pleasures! (Will we ever have 4000 birds on screen in the game at the same time you ask? Well… ask Niklas is my reply!)
Oh, and by the way: If you (like me!) are a pixel art lover, then you should check out the beautiful game Huntdown. It was released just a few weeks ago. Developed by Easy Trigger Games and published by Coffee Stain (who is, incidentally, also our publisher!).
Stay safe!
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.