Here comes a very condensed yet huge update of the many things we did during and in the aftermath of the Steam Game Festival (Development weeks 101 to 103, leading to v0.19.1). I didn’t include fixing stuff in general, just interesting cool stuff. I will make a separate post about the Festival itself and the upcoming plans for early access.
Overall, I decided to stick to the “Spear of Chaquén” campaign/game mode. So far, I think it’s the best decision I could have taken, and it has allowed us to focus and make progress in the game as an actual game like we never had before.
Following that, we are working towards a long-overdue overhaul of the user interface. We already started with the HUD elements, not just making them more fit to the new theme but also streamlining them and removing useless clutter and redundant information.
I also brought the onboarding from the old “Children of Bachué” campaign and adapted it to the new plot as well as the many new changes in gameplay. This is an ongoing work, as I’m ensuring any new subsystem, or any change in the gameplay mechanics gets included in the onboarding.
You can now also get lost in the jungles if you are not careful… I think I managed to strike a balance between my illusion of the player being diligent enough to keep track of where he is without an auto-map, and the expectations of the modern gamer. Now if you wander around the jungle for too long, you will “lose track”, and your automap and compass will cease working momentarily until you leave the jungle and wait around for a bit. Explorers are also now required to be in your party for the navigational aids to work, so you now have one more reason to keep them safe.
Jungle movement also has the additional complication of you veering off-course randomly, making it hard to keep a course in an expected cardinal direction. This, coupled with losing track and increased chance of ambushes, accidents, and animal attacks, should make the players think twice before deciding to cross the jungle (or be ready to face the consequences!)
On the other hand, I greatly reduced the change of units getting sick since it was a boring chore keeping them healthy.
Now, let’s talk about the changes for the units. First off, we added a new items category, “Blessings” which can be applied to a unit to improve their stats. They are valuable and you can find them as battle loot or buy them in towns. Units also now level up to a max level of 3, based on their actions in battle or hunting, improving their stats and adding a reason for you to take care of them instead of just letting them die to be replaced. You can also now hire additional units in towns all around.
The interface to use items has also been greatly improved and integrated with the “Expedition Status” screen, so from there you see what units need what, and apply it to them.
As you explore the land, in addition to the main cities you will also find smaller towns and huts which will give you “gifts” including units, as a contribution to the cause. These are akin to finding new weapons and armor in a roguelike, or at least that’s my intent.
To start filling the towns, I migrated all the characters from Ramiriqui from the Children of Bachué campaign, doing adjustments as needed. We also decided some important characters would have their special portraits, and started with Zupanaqué, the chieftain of Ramiriquí (for whom I also created a simple initial dialog tied to the quests). We also created a new portrait fragments pack for the random NPCs and units.
Camping also got some changes, the most important being you no longer HAVE TO camp at 2 am every day, instead, the expedition will collapse based on your fatigue counter (so it’s ok to do overnight journeys, at least for now until I implement stronger penalties for exploring in the dark (unless there is a full moon of course)). The visuals were improved bringing back the Muisca tents and improving their placement, and I also did some balancing around the tents weight and the effect of high burden in movement speed, which will be more noticeable soon when we implement roaming enemies and you will wish you could move faster to escape from them.
Another important change was adding and important effect to camping besides recovering fatigue, which is a big HP recovery for some units (which adds a reason for you to want to have more than 1 tent).
New exploration events include:
- Ranged Ambush: Causes damage to random members of the Expedition before jumping into battle
- Deer sighting: Spawns a Deer nearby, no matter if there are no habitats around
- Ambush: Allows the player to decide if will ignore or ambush the enemy.
Ambushes now only happen in forests, and there are some additional measures to prevent overwhelming the player with them (especially at the beginning), including having a safe area around cities where you cannot be ambushed when the danger level is low and limiting the number of ambushes in day one to two max.
For combat, I added loot after battle based on the “danger level”, and there are now bigger differences in the stats between unit types giving them a more clear tactical role. Ranged units also reload much quicker now, and random events can now be head-to-head, ambushes, or “ambushed”. The terrain combat also got a bit of a cleanup, but we still need to add some procgen and variety to it.
We also started doing some sweet art for the units to make people excited about them (including ourselves)
