Big news! We have reached the end of our feature development push. We are now going into a development freeze where we will focus on the user experience and general visual impression of the game. When we are done with that, we will of course get back to putting more features into the game. But, before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s take a look at what we have achieved during the last months. (A lot of things actually!)
In general, this period of getting a large set of features into the game during a short time has been hugely successful. The clear goal made us focus on what was truly important and the rule of only getting things "60% done" made us home in on the bare essentials of the game.
Who is Giandra Stormspire? I can’t tell you much, but I can tell you this: She is not one to mess around with.
We now have a first pass of all biome graphics for all the factions, not only for Arleon. All the buildings of all the factions are in the game and playable, with many of them having the first pass of graphics as well. Before this push, we only had Arleon buildings and a few adventure map buildings in the game.
Before the development push, the AI was nonfunctioning in adventure. Now it works and you can play the game against an AI. We have a whopping 35(!) spells along with their respective icons implemented, all working with a beautiful spellbook and quickbar. Previously we had around 5.
You wanna cast a spell? I wanna cast a spell! Andi is helping us visualize the spell effects through icons. Can you guess what they all do?
All the troops we currently have designed are now in the game, as opposed to only Arleon troops. We even have all upgrades for all troops, functionality-wise. We also have many animation sketches in the game along with the first frames for (almost) all troops.
You could not attack an opponent's town before the push. The only way to win was to wipe out all the other wielders. Occupy & Raze didn't exist, but it is implemented now. Makes for a much more interesting game experience I have to say! We also have had a huge chunk of sounds implemented in adventure. The game was almost soundless before.
Besides what has been mentioned above, Niklas has continued to plan for our future development. This means having lots of meetings to prepare for the coming freeze and beyond. He has also, pretty much along with all the programmers, been working with zone of control. This means that the AI can now claim larger areas, so you won’t have to create traditional “bottle neck” choke points in every map in order to stop a player from accessing an area.
Mommy and daddy always told me to stay out of trouble. I guess that basically translates to “don’t walk on the ground with red stripes” in SoC.
Anders has been getting the final design done for our Loth troops lineup. He has also tried to figure out the optimal size of our wielders and has given general feedback across the art team. He claims he has had more and longer meetings than ever before. Which might seem a bit boring, but it is due to the fact that we now have a larger art team than ever. We have had some amazing talent signing up with us these last few weeks, including the awesome Cyangmou and one more experienced artist. Both of them will add great strength to our art crew and we are looking forward to sharing more of their amazing pixels going forward :)
Christian has been pretty much all over the place, but the main focus was path visuals in adventure and player feedback when it comes to Wielder movement in general. He has also been getting more into Unity and started to implement his UI directly into our game engine. We are thrilled to have him step up and spend even more time with us on the game.
We are not only doing artifacts for the game, but also something we call “gear” which can be found in chests, etc. Gear will be richer in supply, but less powerful than traditional artifacts.
Carl continues to compose and put words to the song for Arleon’s campaign. It is quite tricky to get it right, but from what little I’ve heard so far I think it is going to be epic! The song will tell the story of the campaign and we hope this will give players a great and immersive reward for completing each mission. Carl has also been looking at general balancing issues and playing around with walls and town layout with Anders and Patrik.
A lot of UI elements in this game. Fortunately, we have David and Christian thinking about things like “how does it look and feel when you upgrade your troops?”.
Phew! A lot of things going on basically. As for me, it has been all about recruiting and signing contracts with more talent for the team. We are still on the hunt for an experienced Unity developer, so if you are/know one, send us an email!
Finally: Keep all those constructive comments coming, we love to hear your opinions!
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.