Long time no see! Lately, I’ve been focusing on recruitment and talking to external partners about exciting things like cutscenes.
We are currently talking to a few artists about helping us with the approximately 300 icons needed for the game. But we still haven’t made a final call, so if you want to pitch to us, get in touch!
Regarding the cutscenes, we are discussing with a few video agencies who have done great work for other games. Striking an optimal balance between the songs and the visual storytelling will be super important to set the right mood for the campaign. First up is the Arleon campaign, which Carl is working hard to refine and finalize. He is putting a lot of time and effort into massaging the copy and lore together with Kim.
Who doesn’t love artifacts? Shiny, precious, and powerful. Eyal has produced over 100 of them which we hope will all end up in the game. Get ready for looting!
We have started to look into translations and will hopefully announce more about that fairly soon. The idea is to get help from users and fans before we try working with translation agencies. We believe you guys are the ones best suited to help us translate this game into other languages. We have a lot of Alpha signups from Russia, Poland, France and Spain. But beyond those countries, we also see people from Italy, Germany and more besides. When the time comes we will organize this through our Discord server.
Patrik is working his shader magic again. Creating pillaged versions of each building the traditional way would be very time-consuming. This is a test where we are doing it with a more technical approach.
The programmers have had a prototype week where they implemented a lot of requests from both Carl and our external producer Johannes (who works at our publisher Coffee Stain). Robin has focused on combat changes that makes the battle more dynamic and interesting. Niklas also worked on the tech-side of pillaging buildings. He created everything from the actual disabling/enabling of the building to the gold bonus you'll get as a player.
This is the Arleon guard tower. The basic version gives you increased vision radius and the upgraded version will fire at enemy wielders.
Marcus is still giving the AI his full attention. Lately, it has been AI campaign features getting some much needed love (seek and destroy kind of AI more specifically!).
He has also set up an around the clock automatic AI vs AI computer, which he can use to analyze the AI behavior. He created a prototype of this last year, but this time it has been done in a production worthy way.
Along with Niklas he also changed the audio implementation a bit which affects how the player hears the world. The images below shows the dynamic positioning of the audio listener in action. Everything sounds better now with a more natural placement of the "ears" of the player!
David has rewritten the menu flow for pre/quick/post-battle and the claim town menu.
He has also focused on battle by improving troop VFX along with effects for teleportation spells, so we can have proper effects on both start and end destinations (yowza!).
Emil focused on tooltip positioning, allowing us to anchor them to fixed positions for all resolutions. And not to forget: a bunch of bug fixes and some spell UX.
Artwise there has been a huge amount of assets being produced. Martí is continuing his animation of troops as well as Wielders, we now have the full Loth basic troop lineup ready and implemented. Coming up is the upgraded troops along with… well more Wielders!
Kordian is giving the Loth faction buildings his undivided attention and the design is really coming together nicely. Thomas, our swiss army knife of graphics production has done a bit of everything from biome design (Rana) to battle troops (Loth) and adventure map light sources (all biomes!).
Anders is trying to tie it all together and finalize the Arleon buildings, with graphical tweaks and finishing off the remaining upgrades. He has also looked at team color tweaks as well as Wielder lineup re-renders and artifact reworks and polish.
Christian recently tweaked the camera position and UI-elements when we zoom in on buildings that you interact with. Previously the popup would obscure both the Wielder and the building, but now you can see them as the UI has been moved to another position.
I’m currently considering making this blogpost a monthly thing, rather and twice per month. There is just so much going on and we all need to focus on developing the game. The only thing I can promise is that we will continue doing blog posts, but the pace might be a bit more irregular than compared to last year.
Keep in mind, if you want a more direct way to interact with the dev team you can always join our Discord server.
Until next time, take care!
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.