For the past two weeks, we continued working on terrain generation and visuals. We produced 3 versions ending up in v0.29.0, update now if you haven't!
Exploration
The biggest change is the addition of the “Compress time” command; now if you press Shift while exploring, time will happen at 2x so you will move faster. I believe this is a need to prevent long travels from becoming super boring but I am still experimenting with this (may add some +/- commands to lock the time compression rate).
Units
New appearance for the Conquistador Cavalry, more similar to the concept. Kept the old one as “mounted pikeman”, may use it sometime.
Added some more variation to portraits, disabled the wooden clubs from the guardian’s portraits since they were looking a bit cartoonish cavemen to me; we will replace them with narrower staffs probably. The next version will feature some more variations still. Also, we reset the “framing” of the portraits in order to display more of the face even if we miss some details of the equipped weapons.
We are also working on a new non-military unit, we should be ready to unveil it on next update!
Terrain visuals
Implemented some visual fixes in the grass objects, and added a new texture for the rocks so they blend better with the grassy terrain. Rocks are also populated more sparsely.
The paramo (Andes tundra) biome also saw some work with the placement of the mountains there and the removal of the snow peak biome pending yet another planned overhaul of the biome placement that allows us to have more control over bigger areas of terrain instead of relying on the heightmap.
For grass texturing, we discarded some of the textures we were using and tweaked the tiling and normal scale values of some others.
A new particle system for rain was developed, although it hasn’t been integrated yet into the main game scene.
Combat
This iteration was meant to focus on combat but art integration and needed tweaks in the exploration just haven’t let me charge into it. However, I did some small high-impact changes, like increasing the size of the initial enemy sizes so they are less of a joke.
We also did some work in the audio aspect with Mr. QuietGecko, doing a pass over the attack sound effects to make sure all of them were covered, and tweaking the volume for the different combat actions.
Project and Community
We participated in the Steam Summer Sale (along with our other game, Ananias Roguelike).
We were also interviewed for our state’s TV news, and a couple of other podcasts (more info here)
This week I’d like to shout out to Kay Tila, a member of our discord community who has been helping a lot with playtesting. My story with Kay goes back a loong time including the original “Expedition” project and probably more stuff I’ve done along all these years. Thank you for all your valuable feedback!