Hey everyone, and welcome to the 2nd devlog for These Doomed Isles. I had planned on doing these updates monthly, so this one is *checks watch* about 2 months late…
Who knew that developing games took up so much of your time!?
I’ll be getting back to doing video updates, probably more as deep dives on individual systems or on how different parts of the game are designed and developed, but for these monthly progress updates I think I’ll most likely be sticking to text updates (like this one).
If you do want to see more videos, then please let me know in the comments!
Anyway, this is a pretty hefty one, so make yourself a cup of tea and settle in for a pleasant read :)
New enemies
The original enemies were pretty dumb. To be fair, the game was in a prototype stage really. But, even so, they were really, really stupid.
There was just a single type of enemy, the “Viking Raider” as you can see below:
(yes, I know Vikings didn’t really have horned helmets, but it looked cool)
Like I said, these dudes were dumb. Or, at least, the code was dumb. They would attack every 8 turns from a random direction (if the algorithm found a suitable empty water tile at the first attempt, otherwise the game would crash…) Each wave would randomly increase the number of attackers, the health per unit, or the attack power.
Each turn, each unit would check to see if they could move closer to your shrine and then do so. If they ended their turn next to the shrine, they would attack it; otherwise they would attack any other structure they were adjacent to.
All pretty simple stuff. It worked well enough for the prototype, but it wasn’t very interesting. Particularly as the run progressed, you were basically fighting the same enemy over and over and the only real setback you faced was that you would have to reassign some of your workers to your defensive towers.
So, it was time to add more enemies!
To design new types of enemies, I broke them down into the following variables:
- Attack power
- Health
- Movement range
- Attack range (or attack pattern if it’s an AoE attack for example)
- Attack effect (start a fire, stun etc)
- Movement restrictions (flying enemies ignore walls, can they pass over water etc)
- Number of units per wave
- Target priorities (do they attack your population and housing, do they attack your food production chain etc)
- Special abilities (for example, an enemy that summons other enemies instead of attacking)
By playing around with these different variables, I was able to come up with a whole bunch of new designs - too many for me to actually fit in during the time that I’d scheduled for this work. So, like all ‘lazy gamedevs™’, I decided to work on the enemy designs that were easiest to add into the game (pro-tip: always try doing it the easiest way first).
Here’s what I ended up with:
Viking Raider
I told you I was lazy!
So, I’m cheating a bit here. The Viking Raider was technically already in the game, but I did at least put in the effort to make them a little bit less dumb. They’re now set to have a low movement range, with moderate attack and health values. They attack in smallish numbers and target your gold production (seemed like a good fit for Vikings), before then heading to your shrine to finish you off.
Saxon Raider
Even lazier still, the Saxon Raider has the exact same stats as the Viking Raider, but instead of targeting your gold production, they focus on destroying all of your food before going for your shrine.
Hey, don’t complain, at least I did a different sprite for them…
Banshee
Okay, so this is where I started to put a little bit more of an effort in ;)
The Banshee is a relatively weak enemy, but they attack in larger numbers and have a wider movement range. They’re also the first enemy that has a unique attack. They target your houses and have an AoE “wail” attack which, while it doesn’t cause a great deal of direct damage, scares your population and causes the happiness of your settlement to fall.
Blight Witch
The Blight Witch also has an attack effect, similar to that of the Banshee. They only attack adjacent tiles (including diagonals), but they target your food production and, if they successfully attack a food tile, then their attack also destroys food that you have stored.
They’re just as weak as Banshees too, but they attack in higher numbers and have a higher movement range.
Jötnar
The Jötnar is a big boy for sure. He attacks alone, and moves pretty slowly, but if you let him get too close then you’re going to regret it! His attack is the highest of all of the enemies, and his health isn’t particularly low.
Definitely the kind of enemy that you want to focus your fire on!
Dragon
The Dragon also attacks alone, and completely ignores all of your walls and buildings. With high health and a wide movement range, the Dragon will swiftly make its way to destroy your gold production, followed by your food production, before finally turning your shrine to ashes.
Their attack isn’t hugely powerful, but it is an AoE attack and it sets things on fire, so there’s that to consider (unless it’s snowing, in which case you don’t need to worry about that).
I also added a Sluagh enemy, which is kind of like a celtic zombie, but the sprite for that is pretty horrible so you’ll have to wait for the demo (when I’ve had a chance to update the art) to see it…
Status effects and defensive units
With all of the new enemies, the game was starting to become a little unfair. It was interesting to have different setbacks during your run, where you had to recover from all of your food getting blighted for example, but all too often you’d have what felt like a good run being stamped into the dirt by a unfortunate enemy alliance (a Dragon with Banshees always seemed to get me).
So, it was time to add in more ways to defend yourself.
The first thing that I added was a small number of status effect cards. This felt like a good way to not only give you more defensive options, but also to give you a way to build more synergy into your deck.
Once again, I designed a whole bunch of these and then added in the ones that would be the easiest to implement:
Bleed
This causes damage to enemies every turn and can stack. The amount of bleed on an enemy decreases each turn. I also added ‘Blood Bomb’ as a card, which causes an enemy to deal their current bleed stack as damage to any enemies in range when they die (probably need to think of a better name for that card…)
Flammable
This increases the damage that fire causes to enemies (except dragons, who have a resistance to fire damage). This can also stack, which can make it a very powerful status effect! But also dangerous, because it’s only really easy to start fires; you don’t have much control over them once they’ve started…
Curse
This causes enemies to take damage whenever you play a card. It declines every turn but can be stacked (so useful with cards that create a weaker version of themselves in your hand when played, or cards that make you copy cards etc).
Enfeeble
This reduces the attack power of enemies, and you can stack the number of turns that it lasts for.
Fear
This causes enemies to take more damage and can be stacked.
I also added a number of God power cards that can cause these (and synergise with these status effects in various ways) - as well as things that you can build in your settlement that work with the effects.
Along with status effects, you can now also draft units.
These are different from the spells and the buildings in the game as they only stay on the board for a set number of turns (using the keyword ‘service’).
The first type of unit that has been added is the ‘Conscript’ type. These are militarised versions of your current population/worker pool, and so will be removed from your population if they are killed. They also cause unhappiness per turn (and more so if they are killed). Once their service is complete, their card is returned to your deck so that you can play them again (up to three times per copy of each card).
There are now 4 types of Conscript Units that you can draft:
Shield Knights
These have a high defence (they’re basically walls that fight back).
Brutes
These have a high attack but not a great defence.
Javelineers
These have a short-ranged attack and cause the status effect ‘bleed’.
Archers
These have a longer range but low defence.
I’ll be adding more types of conscripts, as well as other cards and buildings to support them and to put interesting builds together. But more on that in a later update!
New art
Ok, so the art in the game isn’t quite there yet. It’s something that I started on, decided was ‘good enough’ and then started to focus on adding more depth to the gameplay.
The problem is that, even with pixel art games, you need to do what you can to help the game stand out visually and, as you can see with the screenshots and video on the store page, it just wasn’t doing that.
Overall, the game looks kinda flat and uninspiring. I want to make this a game where you end up having built up a settlement that you really enjoy looking at, so it was time to go back to the drawing board!
This is what it looked like before:
The first thing was to define a clear art direction, so that all of the new art would be coherent and work together (unlike the original art, which was a little bit all over the place). I picked out the following ‘pillars’ for the art direction with my reasoning below:
Vibrant
Use stronger colours, with a wider range of values between the part of the sprites in shade and the parts of the sprites in the light. Also using colours in the light and shade to add contrast between warm colours and cool colours.
Chunky
This is partly my personal taste. I was looking at what kind of pixel-art I personally like best, and it fell into either stuff like Songs of Conquest or stuff like you see from folks like Nitrome and Chucklefish.
I settled on the chunky side of things because of the amount of time it would take to go for the more detailed pixel-art. It’s also a style that I have no experience of creating, so it could have taken up all of my development time just to end up with art that wasn’t good enough to be in the game.
Clean
Strong, clean lines and simple textures. Avoid making things too detailed. This is because there’s going to be a LOT of information on screen at once, so it’s going to become an issue if every pixel is screaming for your attention!
Tactile
Like a board game or toy. As though it’s something physical that you can pick up and hold in your hands. Tough to do with pixel art, but a good goal, particularly since the game is heavily inspired by tabletop games.
I started with the UI redesign, as this was going to be on-screen all of the time, so it would be a good yardstick to make sure that the rest of the art matched the style. I also updated the cards to give them more personality and hint what the purpose of the card is, as you can see here:
After the UI, I turned my attention to the grass / land. This is effectively the canvas that you’re painting on, so I wanted to simplify this quite a bit. You can see from the edges that I’ve chunkified it a bit, as well as toned down the colour to allow the other sprites to stand out against it (you can see as well that I changed the trees and rocks to pop a bit more):
Then I started working on finding a new, chunky look for the sprites, whilst also trying to work some more colour and lighting contrast into them.
I updated the shrine:
The cabin:
The tax collector:
And the crossbow tower:
You'll notice that, as well as adding to the contrast, the colour and the chunk, I also rounded the bottoms of the buildings and rounded the shadows to contrast with the squareness of the land tiles.
I ran out of time, but the next thing I’m planning to work on is the water. It takes up a lot of the screen, so it will make a big difference to the overall look (although it will take up less of the screen space when I add in more islands that are surrounding yours - I think this will make a big difference).
I’m going to add shallow and deep water, where the water is lighter around the islands. This should help highlight them and give me an opportunity for an appealing animation in the water.
I’m also planning to experiment with the following:
- Bigger waves against the cliffs
- Intermittent water animations (waves, bubbles) in the bulk of the water
- Rocks in the water near landmasses
- Items of interest in the sea (such as shipwrecks etc)
- Reflections (of the mouse, land, anything you carry over the water)
I want to be careful not to make the water too detailed (or it’ll grab all of the attention), but it could definitely do with more interest than is currently there.
I also had a bunch of other ideas that I’m going to experiment with as time allows - let me know in the comments if there’s anything that you think would look cool in the game!
Upcoming plans
The next couple of months are going to be really focused on replacing all of the placeholder art and updating all of the art that’s still in the old style. This will mean that I can update the art on the Steam page and cut a new trailer (which will hopefully turn fewer people away…)
A big part is my plan for an upcoming demo, which will be available within the next 2 months. There’s a lot of work to be done for that, mainly around balancing and deciding how much of the current content works well enough with the systems that are already in the game.
It won’t be entirely representative of the final game, that’s for sure, but it’ll give me a chance to get it into the hands of as many folks as possible - so I want to make sure that you’re getting your hands on something where you can get a good idea of where the game is heading!
Finally, as a massive favour to me: if you like the look of the game, and you haven’t already done so, please add it to your wishlist! I know you hear this a LOT, but it really does make a huge difference because you’re telling Steam that people are interested in the game and that they should show it to even more people!
There’ll be a demo coming in the next couple of months, so if you’re interested in that then click ‘Follow’ too, so you get an update when that goes live.
If you have a friend who you think would be into it, give them a nudge too ;)
Until next time, take care of yourselves!
Andrew