Hello, both old and new friends! These last few weeks have been a thrilling ride to say the least. As most of you will know by now: We released a gameplay reveal trailer at the PC Gaming Show during E3. The feedback has been beyond our wildest dreams. Rock Paper Shotgun called it “one of the prettiest games at E3” and one Kotaku writer admitted to “losing his shit” over the game. As if that wasn’t enough, the organizers of E3 gave our humble indie game an award, naming it the most anticipated game from the PC Gaming Show! So yeah, pretty stoked about it all. The wishlists are growing daily and we hope that you will be as excited as we are when you finally get to play it! If you haven’t wishlisted the game yet, please take the time to do it on Steam, GOG, or EGS. It doesn’t pay our bills but it feeds our vanity.
Italian Spartacus is a streamer and Youtuber that was really impressed with our trailer. Not sure if we can live up to his high expectations, but we’ll try!
And speaking of playing the game. Some of you know that we currently have a small closed Alpha going and we are getting some great feedback. There are still a lot of things to work on, but it is clear that we are on the right path. It feels great to finally be able to let one hundred lucky gamers try the game out, but we will also do more test rounds during the fall. So if you missed out this time, there will be more chances. In order to get notified, subscribe to our newsletter or join our Discord server.
The team has been busy with development and despite E3 the pace hasn’t slowed down. As you might know, we have a few different teams that focus on different parts of the game. So let’s start out with team tech, who pretty much does all the heavy feature coding. Our lead programmer, Niklas, has been adding a bunch of new features to the level editor. A lot of quality-of-life features, such as preview-images of map entities as well as tooltips with explanations before you place objects in the level editor. He also found Patrik's old island generator code that we used a couple of years ago. Niklas has now modified it to work with the current version of the game and added it as a way to generate a more interesting starting point for new levels in the level editor.
Checkboxes galore! Niklas loves to add functionality to the level editor whenever he needs some relaxed coding time.
Niklas and Robin also did a thorough rewrite of the online game lobby. Pretty much making how we keep the lobby state in sync between all connected players work the same way as the rest of the game (I’m told this was a major thing!). Getting multiplayer up to speed is an important aspect of the game right now, as the AI is still not where we want it to be. With online multiplayer support, our Alpha testers can play against each other and get a better sense of the long-term experience and end game mechanics.
And on the topic of the AI, Marcus has done a lot of tweaks and improvements to it lately. The recruitment of both Wielders and Troops has been modified to force smarter decisions. Marcus also built a thinking hierarchy to allow deterministic order of some items. This allows for one AI decision to be made on the base of another, like "That artifact is on the way to where I'm heading in 3 turns. I might as well pick it up".
The CPU is now also spared a lot of strain as the AI has been optimized. This pretty much goes hand in hand with the summary of team tech, as they have all been focused on the big week of optimization™ these last few days!
T’Chyra is one of those lizards you just don’t want to mess with. Nothing good will come out of it. So just… don’t.
The look and feel team is, as always, focusing on the user-facing experience of the game, as well as marketing assets, when needed. Christian has mostly been busy with marketing aspects lately. Getting the new website up, creating store assets for our three storefronts, and doing some social media housekeeping (updating profile and header images). Thereafter he focused on the multiplayer experience and created UI mockups of the lobby.
Emil worked with wielder stats in the inventory menu (or wielder sheet, as we are tentatively calling it). He added two new sections, one for troop modifiers and one for temporary buffs. He also worked with hotkeys and added the functionality to cycle between your wielders and towns. David created some tech to support our VFX artist, Mattias. Things like teleporting projectiles and building VFX mostly. David also fiddled around with the action confirm UX and the purchase slider top-up behavior.
Look at those juicy effects. David and Mattias are working hard to make all interactions appealing and click-worthy. Go on, build and then sell those buildings!
Team design (a.k.a. Carl!) has fervently pushed on with the campaigns. He is now well into the Loth campaign and grinding away at the second map as we speak. Creating a well-paced and balanced set of maps for each campaign, where each scenario can be described with a verse in a song, can be challenging. But Carl is not the one to back down from a challenge. We are confident that when you get to see the campaign cutscenes, listen to the song and experience the full campaign playthrough you’ll agree that the time we spent doing it was worth it! (and if you don’t, please do not tell Carl!).
We are working with the talented map maker Marc Moureau to create maps for all campaigns. This is a work in progress version of the Arleon campaign map. Take that Google Earth!
Team art (a pretty posh team name when I think about it) is creating more magic under the supervising eyes of our Art Director Anders and our Tech Art guru Patrik. Whereas Anders has been prettifying the campaign maps and adding more assets to the game, Patrik has fixed a lot of visual bugs and made performance improvements. Our pixel artist Kordian has finalized all the Barya hostile units and is now moving over to their faction buildings. Thomas, who sadly is working his last few weeks, is busy finishing off all the environments for Barya, both adventure and combat.
Emil is also moving on to new adventures and the whole team wishes him and Thomas the best of luck. If they ever need an extra pair of swords and shields to join them in a dungeon run, they know where to find us!
Fancy an ice bolt to the head? No? Well, here you go anyway, it’s on the house.
As we are rapidly approaching the short but sweet Swedish summer things will go quiet for a while. Expect fewer updates and fewer blog posts. In fact, expect none. We will be back in action by the end of August to pick up the pace again. Expect a fall full of more reveals, videos, and dev blogs. Until then, 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.