I decided to continue development of NovaMundi to address some of the feedback we have received about the game after its release; updates won’t be constant but hopefully we’ll take it to a point where the player experience is smoother.

Combat Player Experience

A point of the game that is often noted as a weakness is the player experience while in combat; of course there are many things that build up to that, so better start working on them.

One painful item on this regard was the irresponsiveness of unit selection; there have been layered things that led to this, and some of them had been fixed already in 1.0.1, however, this version includes a further small but important change to reduce the pixel perfect accuracy required to select units; there’s now some tolerance for that so you can now click somewhere near the unit, and that should do the trick.

Another point that causes frustration to the player is the units AI; units would stand there while their nearby friends were being massacred, and even sometimes when THEY were being attacked. In order to fix this I had to include a way to set the stance of the unit (because there are some times when you actually need the unit to stay away from combat to prevent it from dying). So you can now set the stance of each unit to aggressive or defensive, which will affect how it reacts to what is happening around.

Aggressive units will engage in combat with the nearest enemy, and will turn back and fight whoever attacks them while running to some direction; Defensive units will instead conserve their movement commands regardless of being hit, and will stay where you put them (they will still attack back if they are attacked once they’ve finished moving).

Another weirdness was units being stuck walking against a wall or against a unit for cases where pathfinding failed (or just in edge-ish cases with a lot of units cramped together in close spaces). The solution for this, for now, is that units will drop their movement command if they happen to be stuck in this situations. This seems to be ok for most cases based on experimentation.

Some other smaller fixes were done to this, including cases where units would crash their behavior if their targeted enemy was killed in the middle of action, removing some unwanted colliders from enemies such as the Giant Tarantulas and Scorpions, and prevent rocks in paramos from being ignored in pathfinding.

Finally there was a TINY error causing a huge feeling disruption (in my opinion). The running animation for units was offset by a single frame, which caused it to jump awkwardly when it was looping.

Inventory Player Experience

While it didn’t have as many improvements as combat, there were some important changes here too.

Players can now select how many of a given item to drop; this was more significant before the relaxation on the carry capacity, but still might come in handy for situations where your party is almost massacred and left you carrying around a lot of stuff, so you don’t have to go through an awkward flow of dropping maize one grain by one.

Also, the items in the barter screen are now sorted using the same criteria as the loot screens, which is a huge improvement to make it easier to find stuff to trade (especially if you plan to dump all the excess weapons and armor that you got as loot)

More UX Improvements

The Quests window was improved to display quests grouped by “arc”; right now there are three arcs; this change serves mainly to separate the mini quests from the main questline.

The camping flow was improved to warn the player when going to sleep with injured or sick units, so that he can apply treatment before passing the night.

Hunting encounters (deer) have been disabled for now, since their implementation is outdated and requires some tweaking I cannot do now.

Audio

QuietGecko and team have been working on improving some aspects of audio; this version bundles the first pack of such changes which includes adding footsteps sounds for the units, as well as UI sounds for the map and journal screens. More improvements are on the way.

Weight Balancing

Another item that was making the late game very frustrating was how little your expedition could carry, so it was very easy to end up super encumbered and having to cache things unnaturally with chieftains and they backtracking to them when you needed them (ugh).

After some iterations of tweaking, starting by reducing the weight of European equipment to prevent punishing the player from wielding better items (what?), I ended up reducing the weight of supplies to about 30% while increasing the carry capacity to 150%; this required some tweaks in the scale of item weights to allow for more granularity.

Visual Improvements
While this was not the focus in this version (there’s currently no 3D artist onboard, so we cannot really improve this hugely for now), I did some visual improvements including tuning the saturation of the vegetation in the wetlands, which I think was a bit too high. I also reduced the tiling of their terrain textures.

I also tweak the combat maps for paramos, which had a huge amount of tiny vegetation which looked super weird.

I also included new portraits for the chieftains Bogotá and Saymoso. I’m hoping some day we’ll have custom portraits at least for all the chieftains.