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

[cyborgboy95]

https://www.lavapotion.com/blog/202...2SxlWOoZT29S7GGKKWEDZb78XdW-ptP5KX4vYgHjXF1XM

Development update #29
Magnus Alm
November 13, 2020


It’s that time again. Two weeks have passed since the last blog post and it is time for an update! First of all, I’d like to thank Niklas for taking the time from his busy schedule to put together a blog post while I was away two weeks ago. I thoroughly enjoy working with a team of people were pretty much anyone will stand up and say “I can do that” if someone doesn’t have the time or energy to complete a task. Creating a game like Songs of Conquest is a long haul (as you might have noticed with delays and all). It’s a marathon rather than a sprint, which takes dedication, faith, and perseverance. No one can keep the stamina and spirits up forever, but when you do feel like you are straying from the path, it means everything to have a team of dedicated and hard-working individuals around you.

We asked which biome tree you’d like to see next and hundreds answered. Your wish is our command: Here’s a tree from Loth’s biome! You’ll see more trees like this decorating the backdrop of the battlefields.

Personally, I sometimes feel like we are a crew of questing adventurers. A ragtag bunch of colorful individuals with special skills, all needed to reach our goal. We are pursuing that alluring treasure at the end of a long and arduous journey. When we finally release the game we will all have learned a lot about ourselves and made new friends and battle scars along the way. So, without me getting even more mushy and emotional, let’s take a look at what our questing adventurers have been up to lately!

This is an Arleon building called the Grand armory. You mainly use it for research to improve your troops. Well, actually that’s ALL you use it for, but hey that should be more than enough, right?

The Look and Feel team™ have started a new sprint and done some proper planning for that. David has mostly been working with the battle user experience. Feedback such as camera shakes and bouncing/knockbacking troops have been added to the game. Furthermore, David also started preparing for working on spell effects, meaning more sparks, bells, and whistles for that powerful essence wielding!

This is Malkoth. No further presentation should be needed.

Christian has tweaked how we display attack and movement range, mainly for Battle. He has also been updating and preparing the Inventory screen for implementation by Robin (our latest addition to the band of adventurers!). Emil has also mostly been working with movement range, adding more functionality to tweak the outline for a better visual result. He was also involved in creating the damage overlay in battle.

As for the tech team, Niklas fiddled away with the skirmish win/lose conditions. When you have no town for 5 rounds you will die, just like in real life.

Niklas also gave the wielders level up system some much-needed love, adding the ability to choose powers instead of skills every 4th level after level 8. Lately, he’s primarily been looking at bugs since we have a very limited pre-alpha test going and need the builds to be stable.

This is a work in progress test of our water surface generation and shader. Patrik likes to create stuff like that and in general just to make things look awesome.

Marcus has had a full-on AI focus, which helps us iron out nasty problems like the AI taking way too long time to complete turns. He’s also been making sure that the AI has features required for driving the Campaign forward. Robin, while completely new to the tech team, is an oldtimer in the games industry and has been given the task of finishing up the inventory system. A wielder needs to be able to equip artifacts and gear as well as managing troops.

Finally, Carl told me that he is neck-deep in shaping up the missions of the Arleon campaign. Lots of level design, text writing, and general lore creation. Yum!

See you in two weeks!

 

[Citizen]

That's a pretty tree

 

[grimace]

Is cyborgboy95 a news copy paste bot?

I appreciate the updates.

 

[cyborgboy95]

 

[Farewell into the night]

Man, I hope this will be a good game and not just a beautiful shit one.

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://www.lavapotion.com/blog/2020/11/27/development-update-30

Development update #30​

You might recall that I compared our development team with a band of adventurers in the last blog post. Continuing on that note I’d like to give a warm welcome to the latest addition to our party: Robin. I’ve had the privilege of working with Robin before, in fact, he was the first person I ever employed, acting as CEO of another game studio a long time ago. I would describe him as the low-key guy that doesn’t stand out from a crowd until he suddenly just slays the task at hand while spinning a dagger in his left hand with ease. And perhaps throwing in a witty remark as a bonus. Welcome to the crew Robin, lots of adventure and terrifying dungeons ahead of us. Keep those daggers sharp and ready!

Deploy the Fists of Order. The taxes will be paid on time next year, no doubt about that. Let this rabble pay the price of their insolence.

Team tech was supposed to focus mainly on the campaign from a UI and user journey perspective. However, Niklas has instead had the privilege of mainly squishing bugs and increasing stability, along with Marcus. They have solved quite a few race conditions we previously had with the AI. So the AI won’t accidentally take over your troop movements anymore. Some might say that this was a bug, I’m suspecting the AI is just preparing to take over! The tech team has also solved a few online bugs which made it difficult to play online without hiccups.

The Level Editor also got a bit of a revamp. Niklas went on a shopping spree and bought some plugins specifically targeted at level editors. This changed it up quite a bit, with fancy features such as dockable windows and in general a more dynamic look.

The AI continues to improve in the loving and caring hands of Marcus. Lately, he has focused on controlling the AI movement and refactoring the timing in battle to allow the AI to be more consistent when it thinks.

We can draw gizmos in the level editor now. I’ve been told this is a very good thing as it gives the level creator greater control over the AI behavior. Huzzah for gizmos!

Robin has overhauled the Wielder inventory. You can now see what gear the Wielder has equipped, the effects they give via tooltips and use a drag-and-drop system to change the equipment around.

Team look and feel took a deep dive into battle yet again. Emil has mostly been working with user experience regarding ranged attacks and attackable objects. David has made sure that the impacts, hits, and knockbacks feel juicy and rewarding for the player. Much time was also spent on figuring out the general look of our spells. We are trying to find a style that combines both the retro vibes of pixels but at the same time looks modern and fresh. Shaders, particles, and modern VFX combined with hand-drawn sprites. It is a tricky path to walk, but I’m confident we will find something that will look stunning.

It was too long since we showed a new troop sprite. Behold the Oathbound in its fully animated glory!

The art team has been busy looking at the adventure maps. Anders spent a good amount of time analyzing the visual storytelling of the Arleon campaign and creating assets that we felt were lacking to tell the story in an optimal way.

Patrik re-worked a lot of the functionality in how our engine draws the adventure maps on the screen. A lot of plain old boring optimization, which now makes the game run much better. But he has also got a water system to work and we now have slopes so a player can actually traverse up and down from high ground even without wings!

Recently we asked you about how to visualize the portrait for non-wielder hostiles. We got some really good ideas and are now showing the troop portrait that corresponds with the hostiles highest tiered unit. Keep commenting, it makes a big difference!

Thomas has tweaked the Arleon biome, increasing the readability, and improved the visuals overall. Additionally, he did some work on wielders and on the Rana troops. He has now turned his attention to the Faey-parts of Arleon woodlands and is collaborating with Patrik and Anders to give it a dark, magical, and mysterious vibe.

Emanu and Marti are pushing on with animations. We have tried and discarded a few variations of sprites for Cecilia Stoutheart, the main protagonist of the Arleon campaign. And it finally seems we have settled for a style and frame count that works well. It is always tricky to strike the right balance between visual awesomeness and hitting deadlines!

Patrik recently made sure that you can click and re-click on a tile to update the random placement of trees. This will be a handy tool for finalizing the visuals of our campaign levels, making them look just right for each area.

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://www.lavapotion.com/blog/202...p92HFbxT0zgLnOL_2eoyUnhdRpyiAEDCD-ykllvmze9fw

Development Update #31
Niklas Borglund
December 11, 2020


Another fortnight, another blogpost! Rumor has it that Lord Manhammer had to change his name to “Lord Querkius”, and he’s knee deep in admin & branding work to make himself known throughout Barya again with his new moniker.

This means I get to hijack the development blog again and show you what we’ve been up to for the last two weeks! So let’s get right to it!

PIXEL ART GOODNESS

Team art have been working on pixel art all over the place, focusing on our campaign. Specifically our first campaign map to make it look as jaw dropping as possible. I for one, think they have done amazing progress, and if you stick around until the end of the post I’ll show you an amazing mood video that Patrik created.

AURELIAN CLERIC
Martí, one of our pixel artists, worked on finishing up our latest Loth troops from the animation sketches created by Emanu. The result is fantastic!

AI IS GETTING BETTER

This is the more scary part of the blog post. Marcus improved the architecture to have the AI make smarter decisions. I’ll never win a game again!

We are not were we want to be, but we are getting closer. The changes we make now are mainly made to prepare for the things we want to do in the future.

However, we found and fixed why our AI seemed to have a death wish and always attacked the most difficult hostile around. It also didn’t recruit troops as fast as we wanted it to. All of that should be a bit better now.

FIXING BUGS
As all game development teams, we have bugs to fix. This sprint we have squashed quite a few. Most of them are difficult to show in a visual way. So I’ll highlight this clipping issue that Patrik solved earlier this week.

One bug was that our objects would clip into the ground at certain camera angles. Since our ground is 3D and our objects are billboarded 2D sprites, this is a fairly unique problem.

Patrik fixed this by doing the following changes:

• Moved wielders slightly towards the camera
  
  
• Hard cap at 55 degrees for all billboards
  
  
• Reduced camera angle from 65 to 60
  
  
• Unified the way we lean our landscape backwards for battle and adventure, and applied it to battle

It’s one of those issues that looks easy to fix on the outside, but is actually very complicated. Above is another image of the fix from the side.

CAMPAIGN
All our teams have been working with a campaign focus lately. Carl is working in an iterative fashion to fine tune our maps for the Arleon campaign and is making sure that all the other campaigns will make sense story wise as he goes along.

Can’t show you much from this yet, but it is very exciting!

DIALOGUE SYSTEM & TRADING
A part of our campaigns need wielders to talk to each other - which is what I and Christian have worked on lately. A challenge was to make this work through our in game level editor, and we still have some work to do.

Robin is working currently on the ability to trade troops & artifacts between your wielders! It’s a feature we wanted for a long time and it will be great to be able to play with that soon.


BURNED VILLAGE
And finally, here’s the amazing video showing a bit of collected progress from the art team. I really think it looks stunning, what do you think?


Phew! That was more than I intended to share Hope you’ll enjoy it! I need to get back to fixing the camera system for the dialogues now.

This is also the last blog post of the year. Take care and we’ll see each other in 2021!

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

this game looks pretty damn good so far, hope it actually gets released.

 

[Guvide]

The graphics look stunning. I've always wondered why no one did more Heroes clones now ever since Ubishit ruined the franchise. There's bound to be a huge market for this type of game out there whose needs aren't met.

 

[Endemic]

The graphics look stunning. I've always wondered why no one did more Heroes clones now ever since Ubishit ruined the franchise. There's bound to be a huge market for this type of game out there whose needs aren't met.

Not the prettiest, but it is a HoMM clone:

https://iosoftware.itch.io/palm-kingdoms-2

 

[Infinitron]

Carl Toftfelt, "Warrior Designer" of the Swedish-based team "Lavapotion" sits down with Maximilian Ygdell, also known as "MadMax" (formerly HeroOfPunk) from CelestialHeavens.com. We discuss the game Songs of Conquest, which Carl and his colleagues describe as a love letter to Heroes of Might and Magic and games from the late 90's which we all have grown to love.

It's unique pixel art with a modern twist accompanied by an epic story told through songs makes this game top my list of "most anticapted games" right now.

Get to know more about what we can expect from this upcoming game, it's factions, level editor, musical conquest and much more in this down to earth, podcast-styled interview.

A huge thank you and a shout out to "Stefan Stormwind" for making the audio so much better. If you want to check him out, make sure you do so as he will soon be offering classes in mastering and producing!

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
06:42 Introduction of SoC
20:36 In depth on SoC
41:47 SoC Outro/Gaming in General

 

[Mad_Max]

Hey again everyone!
This time, I think I got the forum right, right? Here's a new interview I did with Carl Toftfelt, who is the "Warrior Designer" of Lavapotion. I hope you enjoyed it. Have any feedback? Let me have it!

 

[cyborgboy95]

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://www.lavapotion.com/blog/202...T2FO9VbV00uCY23TT_tRvs4nkUiwJ68Qv5ahzd5ng5eKA

Development update #32


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!

Spoiler

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.


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.

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!
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.

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!

 

[cyborgboy95]

 

[cyborgboy95]

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

I usually don't like modern pixel art, its either too 'try hard' pretentious, or too 'cutesy', but this game has incredible graphics and presentation so far IMO. It is very well done- not just the specific 'sprites' (although those as well), but the entire world and concept feels very well put together for whatever reason.

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://www.lavapotion.com/blog/2021/2/12/development-update-33

Development update #33
Magnus Alm
February 12, 2021


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!

 

[Aemar]

but this game has incredible graphics and presentation so far IMO. It is very well done- not just the specific 'sprites' (although those as well), but the entire world and concept feels very well put together for whatever reason.

One of the few games in recent times that features proper pixel art. Hopefully the gameplay will match the expectations.

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://www.lavapotion.com/blog/2021/3/19/development-update-34

Development update #34​

Magnus Alm
March 19, 2021


You are in for a treat! Lord Querkius (Magnus) read my previous posts and asked if we should co-op write a blog post this time. I (Niklas) gracefully accepted the offer and commended him on the fantastic idea. I’m currently downloading a huge update to both Unity and our game repository, so I can’t code anyway at the moment.

And since I am the first to start editing the blogpost I’ll give you the technical updates first!

Campaign AI
Lately, with the AI, we’ve been having a laser focus on the campaign. We need to be able to get the AI to do things it normally wouldn’t do, in order to tell the story that we want to eventually tell you guys. Therefore we need ways to alter the AI behavior with settings and objects in the Level Editor. Marcus has been working on (among other things) a way for the AI to stand guard until something triggers it to do something else - like attacking the nearest wielder or start a dialogue.

It’s a lonesome task, being the designated guard.

Marcus also made a bunch of improvements to our data analysis tool. Next up is improving the skirmish AI, so he needs all the data he can get. For this we have a computer set up, that plays the game 24/7 and feeds us with massive amounts of data.

When you need lots of data, the AI got you covered. This pie chart shows which actions the AI is taking on its turns. This helps us set better values and weigh the actions that the AI should prioritize.

Mac Bug Fixes
Patrik and I also managed to solve one of those bugs again. The bugs that take forever to solve because you cannot really find the cause. This time around it was a MacOS specific bug that rendered only some of our fonts invisible on a built version of the game. It worked fine in the Unity Editor (this is why it’s important to test on your target platforms often). We had no idea why and we tried reading up on the issue for months, but couldn’t find a solution. Eventually, we got to the theory where TextMeshPro and MacOS/Metal couldn’t handle text meshes in world spaces that shared the same material with a text in the UI space. So it took a while, but now our Mac users (Patrik, Christian, and sometimes I) can read what’s going on in the game again.

Zooming is nice again
Patrik took some time to fix the zoom! It had this horribly annoying bug before that twitched the whole screen into another zoom level. Now we can zoom in and out again until our heart’s content.

Zooming in and out like there’s no tomorrow.

Build times
While playing the game, we’ve noticed that the sense of time when building buildings in your time has been a bit off. To solve this we created a prototype where we experimented on the concept of build/construction times. It worked quite well, and now we’ve also implemented it into the main game.

Below is an old gif with programmer/googled art. It looks way better now, but since I’m still waiting on my huge download - I can’t create a new gif.

No more instant building in the game. But the build time visualization will look better than a yellow excavator, we promise.

Separate Troop Pools
Robin’s been working on separating the dwelling pools so that they are local to each town. Previously, you’ve been able to buy all your accumulated troops from any town you own. It kind of broke the pacing of the game, and we decided to have a separate troop “pool” that you can buy from each town.

To connect the towns you need to construct a Rally Point, which enables you to buy troops from any town.

UI & UX changes
Last update, we talked about how you now can pillage your opponents’ buildings. David made a VFX pass to make it look even better and be more rewarding.

Bodyslam that building Cecilia! Knock the lights out of it!

The pre/post battle screen also got a facelift. We’ve been having temporary menus for quite a while now. David took the time to update it from Christians visual mockups. Another UX change that we’ve tried is to make it clearer when it’s not your turn. This is mainly a problem when playing online, but it helps a lot when playing single-player as well.'

Christian has redesigned the purchase/drafting of troops, but also reviewed the troop display in HUD to make them more legible and give more visual room for troop artwork.

Using the sepia tone to illustrate that it is not your turn worked out very well. When the colors come back to the screen it really screams for attention.

Another thing that was mentioned in the last blogpost was the guard towers! We noticed that they were a bit hard to read. It was not super clear when and where they would shoot at your wielders - so Emil added a range indicator so that you can clearly see the danger.

Don’t tread beyond the striped orange line. Or, well, do it at your own risk.

That’s it for my part in this blog! The download is done! Next up: lord Querkius (Magnus). Over and out! /Niklas

 

[cyborgboy95]

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing.

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://www.lavapotion.com/blog/2021/4/23/development-update-35

Development update #35​

Magnus Alm
April 23, 2021


What’s this? Another dev blog? Why yes, yes it is! We have not forgotten about you. The lack of updates is merely a sign of great things to come. The team is hard at work with the game, pushing for an internal deadline at the end of May. We are preparing to start a small Alpha around that date, which means some of you will finally get to try the game first hand!

Why keep it small? Well, we will need lots of more testing done and we figured it would make sense to let a few people in at a time. So we can gradually allow more people to try out the game during the fall when we have new features that we need fresh eyes to look at. There are over twenty thousand people signed up for the Alpha. And while we want every one of those subscribers to be able to try the game, allowing 20k users through the door at the same time won’t really help us achieve our goal of a methodical and structured testing phase. The best shot at getting into the early tests is to get signed up on our Discord, as we will handle communications with Alpha testers through that channel.

Andi is currently working on the main menu images. There are still a few more details and objects to add, but overall we are thrilled with how it’s coming along. What do you think?

Most of the team is working on design, features, and assets related to the Arleon campaign. We have also signed with an external studio to help us with the cutscenes that will take place between each mission. Carl and Johannes have been working with them to get the video visuals working together with the campaign song (that's almost finished and mastered).

Carl has furthermore been working on implementing and rebalancing the game after big changes to the research and upgrade system. It’s almost done! He also kept on with the maps, both skirmish and campaign, making sure they're working as they should.

More of that sweet Andi-art. The skills icons are now all done and implemented in the game. Going from temp-art to proper asset always gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside!

The art team is working across both combat and adventure visuals. Both the Arleon and Loth factions will be playable in the Alpha and we need to make sure that all assets for both factions are done. We also need to make sure that the maps for the Arleon campaign are looking great.

Kordian has been diligently wrapping up the production of all Loth buildings. Eyal has created idle animations for all of them and Patrik has been adding them to the game. It might seem like a small task, to add assets to the game, but due to our fairly advanced 2.5D setup, each object can take a while to get into the game. It all adds up if you have over 100 adventure map buildings and a similar amount of faction buildings!

Patrik and Anders have also finally started working on figuring out how our siege battle should look. They have come pretty far and we are now confident we can make it work in a way that makes sense gameplay-wise and aesthetically.

Thomas has been working on both unit animations and assets for the battle scene backgrounds. It has progressed a whole lot and now has more visual variety than before. The elements which block the player from accessing specific tiles are randomized in clusters to increase the organic look but at the same time make it clear to the user where it is possible to place troops or not.


It's been on our list for a very long time and Patrik has finally had the time to make it happen: The fog of war has been getting a visual overhaul. No more sharp black lines, but instead a more organic-looking dark cloudy style. What do you think?

Our very own AI-expert Marcus has added features for the adventure AI. This new functionality will allow us to tweak and modify the AI behavior easier, without changing the code directly. This way we can suggest everything from a very strict build plan for it to follow, to a very loose one (giving it more or less freedom). Also, we can fine-tune certain general behavior, like how aggressive it will be.

Marcus also added a nifty way for it to avoid repetitive behavior, by giving it a "fading memory" of recent actions. If it is in a situation where it has very few options, it won't get stuck just doing those but might seek out other parts of the map instead.

Searching for the treasures buried by an empire long gone. Loth has a unique story twist that will shine through the visual appearance of its faction buildings.

Emil has squashed bugs and added a bunch of minor but important UX improvements. David updated the purchase/upgrade/defend UI and also made some modifications to the troops UI in various places. The troop portraits will soon use pixel art instead of hand-painted 2D portrait. We find that the pixel art reads better in the UI and also gives the users a much clearer view of which troops are which.

Our UI-guru Christian has alternated between planning and mockups of updates to make the player experience better (including “Kingdom overview”, Wielder HUD, and Drafting troops UI/UX). But he also, finally, got to go back and finish up the Loth UI. Seeing the faction-specific UI in the game is really great.

Each faction will have its own UI to give the player more immersion. It is just one more way for us to really convey the spirit of each faction, along with distinct architecture, musical theme, unique Wielders, and troops.

Our lead programmer Niklas has added a bunch of new triggers to the game. We now have area triggers, pre-battle triggers, and post-battle triggers in the game. These are valuable tools for our level editor, giving us the possibility of creating richer and more diverse game experiences throughout both the campaigns and skirmish maps. We truly expect that this is something our users will appreciate as well. The tools we use to produce the campaign are the exact same tools that will ship with the game itself. So I for one is hoping to play some awesome user-created story-focused maps when the game has been released!

David has implemented a tutorial system and yours truly has been creating copy for the tutorials. Trying to keep it short and sweet, but still informative. Long and loathsome tutorials are a huge turn-off to all of our team.

Beyond what I wrote above there has also been a lot of development on the plans for going into Alpha and beyond. We are gearing up to become slightly more public with the game and show the much-requested combat gameplay. We are still a few months away, but stay tuned and expect great things in the future!

And don’t forget, join our Discord to get the latest news first of all, as well as being able to talk to the dev team. Until next time, stay safe!

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://www.lavapotion.com/blog/2021/6/4/development-update-36

Development update #36
Magnus Alm
June 4, 2021
Welcome back to another dev blog! There has been so much going on since the last update, that I can’t possibly cram it all into one blog post. It would simply be too time-consuming and a very long read. I will however do my best to summarize the most important development leaps during the last few weeks.

Personally, I’ve really shifted over from managing external freelancer relations to focusing more on marketing. We have pretty ambitious plans for the fall, in terms of releasing more content and showing off more parts of the game. So far we haven’t shown much video, but we plan to change that and release more in-depth looks at the game and our development process. I’m looking forward to telling you more about the game in another narrative format.

We have also prepared a new trailer that shows more gameplay and… combat! Yes, it is finally happening and you will be able to see the trailer very soon. Expect to hear more about it as early as next week!

Spoiler

Our freelance artist Cyangmou has created some large blockers for the Arleon battle maps. These objects give additional variety and break up the organic look of the combat grid in a nice way!

The Alpha is planned to start next week, assuming we can squash all bugs before then. When we are ready we will send out an email to everyone who signed up for the Alpha with more information. So if you haven’t done it already, sign up right here. Keep in mind that we’ll have very limited access with only one hundred testers to start out with. More will be added as the development progresses and we need more fresh eyes to evaluate the game. So if you don’t get picked for the first round of testing, do not fear, more chances will come!

As far as coding goes, the tech team has recently switched focus to only fix bugs prior to the testing period. But they’ve also had time to develop more features. Niklas spent a lot of time fixing our win/lose system. It had a lot of issues that we had forgotten to take care of while focusing on other things. He also added a couple of new lose conditions, to give players many more ways to fail at the games, I guess.

Apparently, your only Wielder can’t die if you are to succeed with this mission. Makes total sense if you ask me!

Marcus changed the AI think loop to help avoid "tunnel vision" and various other AI adventure tweaks. He also updated AI build plans with help from Carl, to make sure it constructs buildings in a relevant order. The AI was also further optimized with regards to maintaining a good framerate during gameplay.

When asked Robin claimed that he hadn’t done “anything sexy”. But he did mention that he set up team factions and names for campaign maps. Making sure you could transfer wielder stats between campaign maps. And another a whole bunch of small-to-medium things. If that’s not sexy I don’t know what is Robin!

Behold the new and improved bug reporting tool™! Niklas created it to nudge people into writing more relevant bug reports and from what I’ve been told it has worked wonders!

The look and feel team, who mainly focuses on stuff like UI, VFX, and UX has not been spared from the bug hunting duties! But they’ve also managed to get more interesting work done. David helped Mattias, our new VFX artist, with getting some tech setup for spells. Things like battle wide spells, night during effects, and chain lightning. David also worked on troop VFX and updated the building portraits with pixel artwork. He also added blood to the battle scene. Emil focused on the wielder inventory where he added a section for the wielder specialization and a summary for all the equipped artifacts.

Christian was hijacked from UI work and implementation to fix things like a new landing page, marketing assets, and much more. Something big is brewing, so stay tuned!

Knowing how the artifact’s stats modify and affect your Wielder is a good thing. Emil is an avid strategy gamer and he prefers things to be clear and understandable to the player. Which is… understandable!

The art team continues just to ramp up assets for the game. We now have almost all combat troops animated on a basic sketch level. Arleon and Loth have all troops finalized and Rana is pretty close to finished as well. Patrik and Anders focused a lot on tweaking the first Arleon campaign maps, which will be a part of the Alpha test. They also got pulled into fixing tons of things for the trailer production, like setting up and finetuning specific maps and scenes. Kordian continued creating hostiles and Wielder sprites for the adventure map and Martí continued to animate them.

t’s a delicate process indeed to design a troop that will look good in both large and small scales. This troop, the Chelun, has like all the other troops one version for combat and one version for placement on the adventure map.

Carl, our game designer, has been working on game balance, story, and making maps! He has been getting some great support from our external producer Johannes, who really has a hand in almost every aspect of the game by now. We are really fortunate as a team to be working with a publisher like Coffee Stain, who first and foremost focuses on the quality of the game.

Not sure when the next blogpost will be but as mentioned, please keep a lookout during next week as we plan to announce big things! Until next time, take care and stay safe!

Have to say, this game has really good art direction imo. Not even a fan of strategy yet I can't wait to get my hands on this one.

 

[cyborgboy95]