First dev blog of 2021, and what a year we have ahead of us! After some well-deserved vacations, the full team is back at work, mostly from home though. The office is sparsely populated these days. We have had more freelancers joining the team lately and the graphics production has really upped the pace. I’ve been seeing to the freelancers and their respective planning, making sure that we have a good roadmap for content production. The almighty “Asset document” is becoming an increasingly important tool for us to check off things that have been done and discover where we need more work.
We have tried many variations of layout for the town. It’s tricky to create the visual effect we want without making it too big and grabbing all the real estate close to the spawn point. This is the current look we are going for!
Art
We are happy to welcome back Kordian to our ranks after his paternity leave. He is currently focused on doing all pixel art for the Loth faction buildings. Anders has worked with things you’ll find on the adventure map. Things like Essence spires, portals, and settlements. After that, he has followed up with texture and rendering fixes on buildings. Thomas is wrapping up the Loth Adventure Environment and started on the Rana biome. He also created all the hostiles, troops that go on the adventure map.
Patrik recently added back dust specs to the game. Makes for a slightly more organic and magic vibe if you ask me!
Tech
Niklas has created a map filter for the level editor. It indicates if a wielder can’t travel from one part of the map to another. This helps our level creators making sure that all parts of the map are accessible. Niklas has also created the first version of a content picker for map entities in the level editor. Previously, we only had dropdown menus - which was a bit clunky. Other than that, he’s busy fixing the loading screens. Previously we didn't have a clear way of knowing what happened when we switched scenes and synced all the states.
This image was supposed to contain a GIF from Niklas level editor tool. After trying to upload it, compress it, re-editing it, etc for over 45 minutes I gave up. All complaints about the missing image should be sent directly to Squarespace! Their image upload system is pure crap.
Robin has continued with the Wielder “handshake” system where you can move artifacts and troops. He has also reworked how we handle keyboard inputs. Marcus is hard at work with campaign-specific features for the AI. It needs to be able to switch between normal thinking behavior to scripted behavior depending on player progress on a map. This without replacing everything the AI does, only the part that is scripted.
Look and feel
Emil is working his coder magic to improve spell casting UX in battle. He has also added popups in adventure and a bunch of other minor improvements to improve readability. David has been setting up VFX for arleon troops and assisting our new VFX freelancer with project set up and instructions.
About a year ago we had a discussion with lots of you people about the look of our Necromancer unit. We are proud to share the fully animated version of the Necromancer. Hopefully, you like it as much as we do!
Design
Carl is still making campaign maps, they're coming together and thanks to team art they're looking really cool! Dialogue is up and running as well so he is working hard on writing a long story into shorter dialogue, great fun he claims. I do believe him, and the campaign for Arleon is really starting to feel coherent and suitably epic.
We were recently feature by PartyElite as one of the most anticipated strategy games of 2021! We’ll do our best to deliver on that promise!
A lot of streamers have been in touch with us over the last few weeks. We truly welcome all streamers to reach out, but please know that we are still a few months away from allowing public streaming. The Alpha has yet to start and we are working hard to get the game into the hands of everyone who follows the production. The Alpha will come, sooner or later, and when that is done we will follow up with all the streamers as well.
In case you missed the preview of Songs of Conquest in one of France’s largest gaming magazines you can check it out here.
Take care and catch you in two weeks time!
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.