Songs of Conquest - HOMM2-inspired turn-based strategy adventure game

[Lagi]

exotic resources are:

Celestial Ore, Glimmerweave and Ancient Amber

now i can ignore this thread in peace

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://www.lavapotion.com/blog/202...1i66m9GqltumEVJRyulkz1g3dM6G-tcn8mqmknpj_TmRM

Development update #24​

First of all, let me convey a great big thanks from the whole team to all of you amazing people who read this blog. When we announced that the game would be delayed until next year I was worried about the response. The wonderful reactions, comments, and positive vibes we got in return were just awesome. Having all of you along for the ride is something every development studio could only wish for. We hope that you’ll be pleasantly surprised when we finally ship the game and you can try it out for yourselves!

David has been working on the updated purchase menu. Players can now upgrade those lean mean troops. How convenient!

Lately, I have been focusing on the recruitment of more pixel artists. We are currently re-shaping our art production pipeline and one step is to shift more production to outside of the studio and to make sure we have a stronger art direction and leadership in house. There are a lot of reasons for this, but basically we need to be able to produce more assets faster. Since the pixel graphics market isn’t exactly booming locally in Gothenburg we need to look outside of our backyard to find good people. Fortunately, we have some very good pixel artists getting ready to sign up for the project.

The Oathbound swore to serve in life and death, if needed. Turns out it was needed.

Speaking of graphics, Anders has redesigned some of the Loth sprites and also fixed troop animations in-game. Troops have been a general focus for a large part of the team, across many disciplines. Marcus has been adding upgrades to units along with testing the system to make sure it works. Christian has worked on the troop drafting and upgrades, along with loading screens and path explorations.

Andi is trying out a new look and feel for our spell icons. Overall I think we are on the right path, would you agree?

Carl has written away on the campaigns, focusing most of his time on the Arleon campaign. He has also given some love to the event system, writing new random events and happenings for our skirmish mode. At the same time, Patrik has been fiddling around with the AI, trying to make it reasonably hard to play against. It certainly hasn’t become self-aware yet, but it is improving each week!

Christian likes to create smooth and clean Scandinavian styled UI’s, but with a hint of meaty fantasy smeared on top. I think he is truly on to something. This is a mockup of our online multiplayer loading screen.

The most exciting thing to happen in these last weeks is that we have started a very limited pre-Alpha testing phase. A few people are trying out the game to help us squish bugs, make sure the UI works as intended and that the game is… fun? So far, we have had very positive feedback from all testers. Niklas has been fixing stability bugs and sometimes clarifying what's happening in the background for the players of the pre-alpha. One example is that people (understandably) didn't understand that the game was quick battling in the background. Because we didn't give a single clue that it did - so it just seemed like the game froze for 1-5 seconds. To solve that Niklas added a large popup with the sign "Waiting for Battle...". That made it clearer!

We have also been investing in more development tools from the Unity Asset Store. Taking time to improve and find new tools can speed up development considerably. I wouldn’t really know, but so the developers tell me. I’m inclined to trust them on this matter.

Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Menus being normal fidelity while the map is "quirky modern pixel art xddd" looks very jarring.

 

[SerratedBiz]

Get your head out of your ass. This is good pixel art, not modern or quirky or indie.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

This is amazing pixel art and not modern at all.

 

[cyborgboy95]

 

[Citizen]

when dis coming out

 

[Deflowerer]

Menus being normal fidelity while the map is "quirky modern pixel art xddd" looks very jarring.

Not sure if it's the compression of the gif, but the menus do seem to have somewhat reduced color palette and UI in general has that late 90s look imo.

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://www.lavapotion.com/blog/2020/9/18/development-update-25

Development update #25​

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.

Spoiler

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!

 

[Citizen]

Showing zone of control of neutral stacks on a strategic map is a massive incline. HoMM2-3 invisible ZoCs were weird

 

[PrettyDeadman]

Showing zone of control of neutral stacks on a strategic map is a massive incline. HoMM2-3 invisible ZoCs were weird

Visible zones of control are quest markers of Homm-Likes.

 

[Citizen]

Visible zones of control are quest markers of Homm-Likes.

Say after me: game providing player with numbers and clear information about its mechanics - incline, game hiding numbers and mechanics away from a player - decline. Please never mix those up in the future posts

 

[PrettyDeadman]

Visible zones of control are quest markers of Homm-Likes.

Say after me: game providing player with numbers and clear information about its mechanics - incline, game hiding numbers and mechanics away from a player - decline. Please never mix those up in the future posts

Are quest markers a clear information about (quest) mechanics and thus incline too?

 

[Citizen]

Are quest markers a clear information about (quest) mechanics and thus incline too?

Clear zones of control have nothing to do with quest markers. I hope you're not serious and just fucking around with me, but in case you're: visible ZoCs are like visible number stats in RPGs, not quest markers. They are giving you information so you can make decisions based on that information. Will putting my army in that spot prevent my enemy from going through that road? Can I move my recon army up that hill without engaging the neutral army standing nearby? You can't make strategic decisions like this without visible zones of control, just like in RPGs you can't make some decisions without knowing the exact damage/armor/HP stats of you and your enemy. Imagine tactical RPG where you can't see the exact stat numbers. How many hits do I need to kill that wolf? Can I do it in one round? How many retaliation attacks will he get on me? How many can I survive? You can't answer those questions without stat numbers, just like you can't act strategically without knowing the size of ZoCs.

Quest markers, on the other hand, have nothing to do with clarity, they are just removing a core element of RPG gameplay: searching for your destination, killing the feel of adventure and your motivation to explore the world. Quick example of decline: Morrowind vs. Skyrim. Morrowind quests gave you written directions (go along the river, turn left after the bridge, etc.) resulting in interesting and immersive world travel. Skyrim quests add a point to your Medieval Fantasy GPS Navigator(tm) which you are forced to blindly follow like a fucking NPC you are. The difference is clear right in the first quest, just compare searching for Cosades in Morrowind (following the roadsigns, asking around people in Balmora, knocking on every door) to your average Skyrim quest of finding a person (You see a white arrow on a map that points on the person's location following his every move, like he has a fucking GPS tracker on him all the time)

 

[PrettyDeadman]

Sorry but I am too hardcore of a player to accept game mechanics being clearly and concisely explained in the game. I always play on the hardest difficulty and with GUI disabled.

 

[Citizen]

Sorry but I am too hardcore of a player to accept game mechanics being clearly and concisely explained in the game. I always play on the hardest difficulty and with GUI disabled.

Uh-oh. hardcore gamer alert! Sure playing with gui off must make your VNs playthroughs pretty challenging

 

[cyborgboy95]

This will be one of the songs played in the background as we play the game in the adventure view.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

The artwork has some actual effort indeed, but the mix of low res art with post processing makes it look bizarre, sort of like Octopath Traveler.

I honestly don't see the point of doing low res 2d artwork unless you are trying to do some weird kind of throwback conceptual thing (or maybe drawing 2D art for a... uh... 3DS? I think that's the only low res thing even out there nowadays).

Good art rendered as fake giant pixels is as if someone took Adagio for Strings and added a drum machine backing beat to it.

 

[agris]

Visible zones of control are quest markers of Homm-Likes.

Say after me: game providing player with numbers and clear information about its mechanics - incline, game hiding numbers and mechanics away from a player - decline. Please never mix those up in the future posts

I see both sides of this. Citizen, do you think drawing the AOE impact zones for spells in the IE games is a good thing or bad thing?

like a lot of the discussions here, I think there’s a spectrum. Personally, it feels like cheating when the EEs do this, as it isn’t hard to intuit with a bit of experience. OTOH, totally obfuscated mechanics aren’t good.

The obfuscation needs to make sense as a part of the whole to be a net positive to gameplay experience I think.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

Good art rendered as fake giant pixels is as if someone took Adagio for Strings and added a drum machine backing beat to it.

 

[Citizen]

I see both sides of this. Citizen, do you think drawing the AOE impact zones for spells in the IE games is a good thing or bad thing?

It's a good thing. Most other games provide you with AoE zone preview when using AoE attacks/spells. Most RTS and TBS games at least, because the clarity is good. I personally hate when games hide important info from a player, stuff like character stats or damage calculation formula, how tf am I supposed to know what stats to focus on if I don't even know what they represent? AoE zone size is a stat, just like character armor or attack damage, there could be some effects in game that can increase or maybe decrease it and I want to know what area will be covered in fire so I could maximize the impact of my spells while not nuking my own party with fireball. The real wizard would know what size his fireballs usually are

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://www.lavapotion.com/blog/202...IwT4jdC_q9vzUV9v8LwLp8FnNGefphZrPJCKH-1892tdg

Development update #26
Magnus Alm
October 2, 2020


Hello and welcome to another progress update. Quite a lot has happened in the last few weeks. We are really getting down to the nitty-gritty details, making sure that all features that have been implemented lately also makes sense from a user perspective. Things like readability, visual feedback, and general quality of life improvements are on our agenda.

This period has been really productive and it is nice to see that small changes can have a great impact on the overall game experience. Lucky for us we are going to spend two more weeks just polishing and improving the gameplay experience. Every day of just improving what we already have made a tremendous difference!

A lineup showing a few of our Wielders. These portraits will be used in the inventory, where you equip gear and artifacts.

I’ve been focusing a lot on recruitment and staffing lately. As you might have noticed on our Twitter account we are still looking for more pixel artists. We have had some freelancers leave us, due to personal reasons, and we need to fill the positions. Specifically, we are looking for a character artist/animator and a buildings artist. We will probably have well over 200 buildings in various shapes, styles, and sizes across the game, so quite a lot of content to produce! The same goes for characters which will probably amount to over a 100, all animated. So yeah. A lot of pixels.

David, Niklas, and Christian have updated the adventure movement path. Specifically the path that is drawn between your Wielder and where you want to move. They are trying to make it less “in your face” but also make it more clear to the player what options they have during their turn. We have had a problem with people not understanding their amount of movement left, so we are trying hard to fix this.

Andi continues to impress us with vivid portraits full of personality and attitude. This is Redfern who you’ll encounter in the Arleon campaign.

Marcus has along with Emil mostly focused on the adventure UI/UX. A lot of tweaks for the HUD but he also added functionality to swap between raze and occupy when you’ve conquered an opponent’s town. You now have much more flexibility in how you exploit the towns you have conquered from your opponents. A quality of life feature for all burgeoning warlords.

Carl is balancing the game through units, spells, and other modifiers. A truly daunting task considering the number of things that can affect the gameplay. Things like artifacts, gear, buildings, research, troops, songs, and spells, to name a few. Besides his traditional game design job, he has continued with composing the songs for Songs of Conquest. Good thing he used to work with musicals I say. I’ve heard a little sneak preview from the Arleon campaign and it sounds very promising!

Before Marcus improvements the research icons appeared all over the UI, covering important buttons. Clearly this new version is a great improvement, wouldn’t you agree?

The art team has been so hard at work that I haven’t been able to get any replies out of Patrik and Anders. I know they are busy so I didn’t bother them too much about it and was instead happy to get some info from our latest pixel artist, Thomas. He has created concept art along with colour and mood exploration for all the biomes of the world. This is something we have visited a little bit in the past, but it feels great to have an experienced artist taking this up again. Thomas also created the sketches of all assets for the battle biomes, things like blockers, background trees, etc.

It’s also worth noting that we recently reached over 9000 followers on Twitter, which is quite amazing considering we are still keeping quiet about several parts of the game. Here’s to 9k and let’s step up and aim for 10k before the year is over!

We are trying to find a suitable generic portrait for when you attack neutral armies. I don’t think we have nailed it just yet, please share your ideas and feedback in the comments!

Finally, we recently got a wonderful shout out from Greg Fulton, the lead designer of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. He is currently working on Fanstratics, a spiritual successor to the HOMM games, and mentioned Songs of Conquest in his latest Newsletter. I’d encourage our readers to check out his title. I am looking forward to trying it out!

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://www.lavapotion.com/blog/202...IW40dlQ_a1PXhgIuG-cyBwdn8hZ1n9-SSFUJzJaHPRSSg

Oh boy, two weeks have already thundered past, and let me tell you, things are bizzeh! I’ve been mostly focusing on recruitment, setting up contracts with new freelancers, and planning the workflow for our new pixel artists. But I’ve also had the time to perform such thrilling tasks as filling out forms for the bank, reviewing asset documentation, and working my way through an email inbox that has screamed for some well-deserved attention. We try to answer all emails we get, but sometimes it will take me a while to get to it, depending on the overall workload. Busy days for a CEO, I tell you!

"We don't fight for you. We just fight." -Gnaw Greybeard, Voice of the clans

Carl has just finished the first draft of the Arleon song, meaning the song you will unlock while playing the Arleon campaign. It is a ballad of passion, sorrow, and much more. I sincerely believe you will enjoy it when you finally get the chance to play the game! Carl has continued to rework our magic system after thorough testing and just finished up a rework of skills and level up system. I got a quick summary from him the other day and it seems to me that the system will be a good mix of strategic choices and good old rng.

We are fortunate to have some very talented pixel artists on the team. Here is a step-by-step GIF showing the amazing work of Thomas Feichtmeir creating a majestic oak tree.

Niklas and David have improved our effects system in several ways, laying down more foundation for the big task ahead of making the world come alive. We strive to make the game satisfying to interact with and a huge part of that is using effects to make things pop, stretch, illuminate, and just really burst with visual goodness. It’s been great to see that we have taken a few more steps down that path during these last two weeks.

Niklas also made improvements to a menu where you can choose a reward. Some buildings will give you an A or B alternative, like choosing between troops or gold. Previously, if you chose a troop that wouldn't fit in your army, it just disappeared. Now you can re-arrange your troops and make room so you don’t have to go for the gold if you don’t want to.

We firmly believe in continuously taking small steps towards greatness, these images show how it used to look when you picked up items on the adventure map and how it looks right now.



David spent time doing minor improvements to the battle user experience. Marcus has joined in on the UI and UX work and made a lot of quality of life improvements. This goes for Emil as well who has become more and more involved in the visual aspects of the game (I have to admit that I enjoy working with programmers who very much cares about the visual aspects of the game!).

Anders focused on upgrades and team colors for Arleon buildings, as well as general graphic fixes. He’s been setting up files and adding neutral buildings to the game, which are quite a few already. He has then spent much time getting relevant feedback from our freelancers. As Art Director he is working hard to keep our visuals both consistent (which can be a challenge with so many artists) as well as up to the very high standards we are aiming for. This often means a lot of reworks, grit, and patience from all involved. Thankfully we have an art team that understands the hardships of creating a visually appealing game.

Another example of UI progress. Marcus has spent time considering how the splitting of troops should work in a smooth and coherent way.

Thomas has focused on all of the background art for the battle screens. This includes textures, trees, shrubs, and concepts for special props. The first biome is pretty far already, while he is now trying to get the other areas to a similar level of quality. Our new pixel artists are just now warming up: Martí has already started animating troops and Dawid is getting more acquainted with the palette and the concept art for our adventure map buildings.

Patrik has also been adding missing (and new) artwork to the game, mostly Arleon troops and buildings. He has been dabbling a bit with various special effects shaders as well, just because he loves that stuff (that’s my theory, at least). He’s also been doing asset inventorying, trying to figure out what's been done and what's left to do. He and Anders are now hard at work with getting the Arleon town to look alive, vibrant, and have all the visual impact you would expect from the heart of your faction’s empire.

Who knew that the farms of Arleon had such high yields of bacon? I would like to emphasize that Patrik, who produced this GIF, is vegan and no animals were harmed in the making of this game.

That’s it for now! See you in two weeks time. As always, let us know what you think in the comments below!

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://www.lavapotion.com/blog/2020/10/30/development-update-28

Development Update #28​

Niklas Borglund
October 30, 2020


Time flies! Two weeks since the last development update and Lord Manhammer is nowhere to be seen! I’ve heard rumors that he was called in to slather paint on an important building in the dunes of Barya.

A perfect opportunity for me to sneak in here and give you an update instead! Let’s see how much I can share before someone finds out that I’m here.

We’ve just done some important changes to how we work since within the company. We realized that we are now over 20(!) people working on this game in some capacity all over the world - which warranted a slight alteration in our teams going forward to be able to keep track of everything.

• Team Tech/Features
  
  
• Team Look & Game Feel
  
  
• Team Art
  
  
• Team Game Design

Finally, we have a “Team Goal” whose task it is to coordinate these team efforts to a coherent vision and make sure we are working towards the same goal. Working on how we run the company is a continuous effort and it needs constant reflection and iteration, but this setup feels amazing so far.

So let’s see what we’ve been up to!

MODIFIERS, MODIFIERS, MODIFIERS
I’ve been doing some much-needed changes to our “bacteria system”. Bacterias are what spreads through all entities in the game through a slightly modified DAG and apply things such as “+5 Offense” to the recipients.

However, we couldn’t easily use percentages or filters before. We couldn’t even award new essences! Look at the images below for some of the results.

FACTION SPECIFIC UI
A while ago, Christian made a few mockups on how the UI could look when branded to a specific faction and we fell in love with the idea. This means that if you play as Loth, you would get a Loth-flavored UI to increase your immersion.

David worked quite a loth on a system to prepare for this. See the result below!



BATTLE CHANGES - AI ARCHITECTURE & RENDERING
Marcus has been working solely on AI for the last weeks. We are doing some architectural changes to prepare for campaign-specific features and to improve the battle AI. Right now, ranged units decide that they want to walk instead of shooting way too often right now.

Emil has spent some time working on a new renderer to show a range of hexes indicating where you can walk & shoot and it’s coming along nicely.

Team Art has also worked a lot on getting the Arleon Biome pixel art to a more finished state and readable.

Can’t show you anything from battle yet, but I can assure you - It looks fantastic!

BIOME FOG
Marcus got the idea to add fog to certain biomes in the game. He whipped up some shader and programming magic and created this. Looks pretty good, don’t you think?

SPELL CHANGES
Carl has been changing the spell system to be more understandable for new players and I’ve been implementing them.

The biggest change is that you don’t need a skill to start casting spells. All you need is the correct essences/troops to get access to tier 1 spells. Many more changes as well, but that’s for another blog post

ARLEON PORTRAITS
Andi & Team Art have been working on getting the wielder portraits for Arleon finished. We still have a few changes we need to do, but minor ones. Here’s the full wielder line up for Arleon!

That’s all I can share for now! I need to get back to programming. Thank you for reading.

 

[Stormcrowfleet]

This game looks good. Anybody know when we'll be able to see it on steam to wishlist it?