Happy New Year, My Lords and My Ladies!
Diplomacy is Not an Option has been in Early Access since February 2022. In other words, almost a year. During this time we've gathered a lot of stories about the development of the game. About the difficulties we encountered. About how our plans were revised. Today we will share a couple of such stories with you.
Mountains (and their refreshed models)
Of course, everyone has seen mountains in our game. But what stands behind them? Visually, when creating mountain models, we relied on a number of principles: readability of resources (?deposits?), simplicity of form - the model should not be overloaded with details, "picturesqueness" - actually the way these mountains look on the map and how their different models fit together and suit the environment.
All of the above define the amount of work that needs to be done to make the mountain models. Or in our case, to redo them.
Over the past year, we have made several attempts. The first was in spring. At that time we tried to assemble models from prefabs (a kind of template). The process was long, with lots of torment and created versions included. But in the end, based on your feedback, we decided to focus on improving the game mechanics. Visual adjustments could have waited at that point.
We came back to the issue only in autumn. This time with a brand new approach. Mountains were to be made not by artists, but... by programmers. We hoped to come up with an algorithm for mountain generation that would solve the problem once and for all. For both, the existing biomes and those yet to be created. However, having again wasted a lot of time, we didn't get a truly satisfying result.
At the end of autumn were looking for prefabs. Again. And who might have thought - it worked! In fact, you can now see the result in Diplomacy is Not an Option's current build.
What does this mean for us in practice? Firstly, it means that we are good enough to achieve our goal. But in the other hand, it means that it will now take a lot longer to create a new biome. After all, each biome needs its own hand-assembled mountain models.
About the front line
Surely you know that troops and buildings have attributes. You can even see them - attack, defense, health (durability), etc. However, there are also hidden properties that remain unseen for players.
For example, the mass of a troop. Or there are 10 or so other attributes that affect how different game entities interact in space, such as how much space each unit takes and how they behave when they face each other or enemies.
Depending on how you adjust these settings, their behavior can vary. For example, a heavy Trebuchet moves a light swordsman when it moves. Knights can hold the ground in battle without falling back against the enemy. It's these parameters that make it easy for cavalry units to run through enemy crowds where archers get bogged down.
During one of the experiments on the unit collision model, some of the settings accidentally "leaked" into the main version of the game. This led us to watch in amazement as the enemy squeezed through the front line, pushing the player's troop formation backward. Playing with these settings was not exactly fun, but we actually enjoyed the visual effect. So we came up with adding one more parameter - the coefficient regulating the force of squeezing. We adjusted it so that melee units would hold their position better than ranged ones.
What does that mean in practice for you? During battles against numerically superior opponents, the front line shifts back, which makes the game look more realistic. However, this improvement appeared in the game because of a leak of experimental hidden parameters. With their subsequent refinement.
This concludes the telling of 'fun facts' from the history of DiNaO development. Thank you for your time.
Thank you very much for being with us! Good luck in all your endeavors in 2023!
See you soon!
Yours, Door 407 team.