Remember to Wishlist it if you like what you see. We also have a Mailing list now, so make sure to subscribe to it as well, if you want the news to reach your email directly. Now, let’s go to the news! 🙂
We participated in Tokyo Game Show 2020 Online. As part of it, there are 4 live stream videos including a first detailed gameplay, another gameplay featuring Camilo Ramirez, a project history and announcements and a “deep dive” gameplay. With our participation, we collected a lot of feedback and already started working on it to make the game better.
As for the announcement, the most important thing is we now plan to release on Steam Early Access in January 2021. I feel this will help the project a lot, allowing us to get feedback from the players as to what features feel more fun and what we should focus on to improve.
As usual, this dev update focuses on the new cool stuff, but we also did lots of fixes, UX tweaks and content additions. I won’t go into detail on that to prevent spamming and spoiling, just mentioning it’s something we are always doing.
The way the expedition is displayed in the overworld was extended so you can now see a lot more of your people, horses and mules (that is, if you have a big expedition). They are now shown in a long line behind your leader unit, with horses and mules interspersed between them.
I decided to completely remove the food consumption in the oceanic voyage since I felt it didn’t make a lot of sense and was more of a nuisance than a strategic option. This went along with removing buying food in your hometown, which had been something we had from day one but it’s never too late.
Also, as a way to streamline the exploration, we are placing a town near the landing point, and making its location known in advance in the map. This prevents frustrating wandering around randomly since you can set that town as your initial destination, interact with the native population, and ask for directions from there.
There was also some work done in the interaction with the native population, limiting the number of directions they give to nearby discoveries, and making it feel like there is some kind of language barrier (so you are trying to interpret what they say, and only talk using keywords and gestures). You can now also add the directions they give you to your journal, for future reference.
Deer are now spawned around “habitats”, from where they may run out if you hunt them down a lot; this also means the people in the towns will reference them when you ask about nearby animals. They also flee now once injured, and as evidenced in the gameplay stream there already a somewhat fun activity to do.
On the technical side, we worked again on the performance of the forest, trying different shader options. We still don’t have a solution here.
Portraits are now shown again in the inventory and transfer windows, we are going to be adding a new window to see the details of the units including their skills and traits.
Finally, we made it so that multiple tracks play while you are exploring, instead of having a single track looping. There are also moments of silence between music tracks now, where you can only hear the sound of nature.