Hello everybody and welcome to the first development diary for Warlords: Under Siege. We've been working on this project for the past few months - you could even say that the development of it began with our previous game, Citizens: Far Lands since both games share a significant chunk of the code-base (or at least they did before Warlords took an identity of its own!).
We announced WUS over a month ago, but generally kept it very quiet. The few screenshots that were there didn't show you much, but that's all about to change. First of all, if you prefer to get right into the action rather than sit and read my exhausting babble, you can go and play the demo right now. You can do so here, by clicking on that lovely green button. You can expect a lot of action from the first few minutes, resulting in a horde of little green goblins eventually overwhelming you. Remember - You will die...
But what exactly is Warlords? Well - we tried to make something new by mixing some of our favourite genres. Few months ago I started playing Dawn of War once again - one of my favourite RTS games. I was battling on a modded survival map and thought "Heck, it would be cool to make a game like that, but fantasy...". We already had a basic combat systems done in Citizens, so we decided to take it, expand on it, improve it and see where it takes us.
Another genre I'm a big fan of are Roguelikes - specifically random reward systems that help you on your next run. We decided to add deck building to Warlords. As a player you can gather gold, and said gold allows you to purchase packs of cards. These unlock new possibilities on your next run: new buildings, new units, production boost, unit stat boost, hero skills... We plan for Warlords to have 150 different cards on release, and then more added thereafter.
You get a set of 5 starting cards, and can choose a new one from a selection of five, every time you defeat an enemy wave. This means every single one of your runs will be a little bit different. In the demo you are given a pre-made deck of 16 cards. In the future we will likely rotate the deck, so you are given a slightly different set of toys to play with before the full game releases.
Booster packs can be purchased with gold that can be obtained in a number of ways:
- Building a gold mine which passively creates gold income while you play
- Protecting caravans which arrive from edges of the map and give you resources if they survive the journey
- Picking up gold from random enemy drops
It wasn't easy, but we made a ton of improvements since working on Citizens. First of all, we utilised something called Animation Instancing and Animation Baking. It takes away a little bit of freedom and makes our workflow a tiny bit more difficult as well as increases the size of the game significantly, but in exchange we get a MASSIVE boost in performance. Our benchmarks went from 20fps to 150 fps. It is likely we'll be able to utilise this in Citizens as well. We will talk more about other interesting technical aspects in the future.
That's it for now, and I hope you enjoyed this little write up. Please share your feedback - it's super important and we value every single one of your opinions - no matter how negative or critical. It helps us become better developers who make better games :)
All best to you, and see you in the next one!