So it's been a while since the last Dev Diary and I thought it'd be a great time to update everyone about what's been going on and share some screenshots.

The game is progressing fine and I've mostly been tweaking and optimizing. One big feature that was completed recently is the Battle Simulator.
The simulator spawns random battles with random heroes against random enemies and will be covered in more detail in a later Dev Diary.
If you're just want to have some fun in a quick skirmish, the Battle Simulator is where to click.

As mentioned in the trailers, I've always wanted a HUGE fantasy world to explore and travel. After playing around with different sizes, I settled on a 2500 (50 x 50) hexagonal grid.
This gives me enough room to play with and doesn't bunch everything up. It also makes the game world feel bigger and more epic.

But the problem with having a world that large is performance. The more you put on the screen, the worse performance will be.
Many games solve this problem by limiting what's visible or being rendered at any one time. The content is restricted to one level, one town, one can only zoom so far, etc.

These optimizations I also implemented but wasn't too happy with them. I wanted the player to be able to zoom out and see the entire game world in all its glory.
I wanted to be able to put as many details on the screen without compromising on performance.

Previously this was not possible and the more that was rendered, the more the frame rate dropped. So with a lot of optimization, tweaking and caching, I set about improving performance.
That was the goal of the last few weeks and I think I may have achieved it. I've included some screenshots of the current look and feel of the game world.
Don't worry, no spoilers here. This is just a draft and does not represent the final map at all.

But I thought it important enough to share and I hope it will give potential players a better overview of what this game is about.

I also spent some time improving the game world look. Adding things like rivers, bridges and creating a more natural looking landscape.
Before the grid tiles looked too circular and artificial. With a little bit of adjustment, they now appear more real and natural.

All that being said, the entire game world can now be rendered and I consistently reach a FPS of 110 - 120 on normal graphic settings.
True, I am running this on a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 but I'm hoping even older cards will be able to achieve at least 60 FPS.

On a different note, I've also decided to rearrange the Chapters a bit and include three Chapters in the Early Access Game instead of two. This will expand the game play by about 10 - 20 hours.

As always, thanks for reading this far and more Dev Diaries will be coming shortly.