Hello,
it seems it's another dev-log time! This time let's split between Demo and Full Game stuff. So here's all the fancy news.
Demo
As you may have noticed, Demo has received a bunch of bugfixes. Having proper crash analytics helped discover some game-crashing issues in the first couple of days. There was also a number of issues reported on Community Hub and on Discord. Thanks to everyone for their time and effort in raising these issues, it's a great help.
Leaderboards
The Demo now contains leaderboard integration. You probably didn't notice that, since all the leaderboards are currently hidden. First of all I need to address some balancing issues and content gaps before the leaderboards are started. But Leaderboards are going to be activated within the following two weeks as soon it makes sense to start comparing progress.
I do not yet have a final list of what is going to be measured - I am happy for any suggestion in comments.
New Unique Heroes
Three new Heroes have been added. Caesar, Cleopatra and Hammurabi. You can find all three of them through defeating Crises as usual. A few recipes have been added and a brief balancing of traits done. Poor Ozymandias was also given a Unique ability. The balancing is still far from over, so please be patient it might take a few more iterations.
Old Harvesting animations
I've added an animation of tree cutting and field harvesting (stone animation is missing yet). These animations are actually not new but about 1.5 year old, being one of the first animations I have created for the game (not the first, the first one was the smoking guy). They're not super quality - the trees weren't even made in a pixel-art editor back then (since I didn't have a clue then how pixel-art was done and have been making all in Gimp!) but they have nostalgic value so you will have to suffer them for a while.
This is how it looked in in September 2021 - the game was exactly 11 days old and had mere 2,535 lines of code:
Other changes & bugfixes
A number of smaller changes was done and already listed in release updates - you can check that here.
Full game
Aside from demo update, not much time was left to work on Early Access roadmap and push the Beta branch to a playable state. Reprioritizing work due to some new things happening (I will share more this week) was the main reason. But there was some progress in following areas:
Save game redesign
Save games as described in Micro-Log Monday 4 are separated into independent areas. This allows me better to control when a breaking change is introduced to the game (remember - we plan to go with Early Access - so lots of potentially breaking changes). So there will be a few updates in the near future that will further split down saves to smaller parts so that your game is as uninterrupted as possible during this volatile phase of development.
Tech tree
After finishing some missing Icons and tech descriptions, we now have a semi-final tech tree structure for the main game. The tree will be separated to 6 different Eras (which you will first have to unlock - more on this another time).
- Neolithic
- Classical
- Medieval
- Renaissance
- Industrial
- Modern
Each era will have approximately 20 technologies. You will have to run through a 'Crisis technology' to reach next one (possibly more than one such tech per era). Each era will contain pretty much an extrapolation of what you can see in demo - new house types, new units, workshop upgrades and productivity increments. As you can guess from the demo UI full game also has three additional Workshops - Theater, Library and Blacksmith - unlocked in classical Era. There's also a third Unit type (Heavy Unit) and a new Construction Material (Metal). Progress through eras will also introduce new Crisis types with different attacks.
What is Next
The full game Graphics now contains everything 'must-have' for Early access core game - workshops, icons, UI, crises, quests, map tiles etc. That doesn't mean I'm done there but I can now focus on other 'must-have' areas.
The next step is adding Ascension tree with first two Ascension Tiers. Since this is a work estimated for the next 4 to 6 weeks I will share this in chunks as the work gets completed. My intension is to include some elements in demo as well so that players have more clear view of the main game flow.
That is all for today, see you soon.
Cheers,
Ondrej