NovaMundi is coming to Steam Early Access NEXT WEEK! remember to Wishlist it if you like what you see.
Week 109
We sent the Early Announcement (April 13), this was followed up by more tweaks in visuals for the build which was now accessible to press and influencers, as well as critical fixes and visual improvements in the FTUE.
Another thing I worked on was the Caverns, which we had neglected a little bit. The idea with the caves is them serving as interesting places you can explore from the overworld, to find treasure but also meet with danger. I am planning to populate them with some entities based on Muisca lore (research in progress which, so far, seems to indicate we’ll have to fill a lot of gaps), thus departing a bit from the historical setting and into the mythological.
I enabled them back and reworked the lighting as well as made it so that you explore them with a single explorer for now. In there you will find “Blessings” you can use to improve your units in combat. This needs further development to add dangers to them as well as different rewards (or none!), but for now, you can at least explore them from the overworld, including persisting their state on save/load.
Week 110
I worked in the quests so that the game is actually winnable (including displaying a placeholder Victory screen!). This was something that was needed now that the build was out of the wild (who knows if a fierce Let’s Player decided to go all in and try to win the game 😀 ).
Back into procgen, I worked in the placement and size of the trees in the forests, making them bigger and more special as you went into the depths of them, and improving their spacing.
Finally, I started working in the more detailed biome handling for the terrain and vegetation, including the integration of the páramo (Alpine Tundra). This is still WIP but at least the map is now partitioned in biomes which will make it easier to create different themed areas (as well as integrate the upcoming Wetlands biome). In the process, I had to tackle an ugly bug that prompted me to create the procgen map visualizer tool, which will be helpful for future development (river placement looks horrible here, I know).
