Hello everybody and happy new year! Hopefully with a bigger games library and glorious gaming plans for 2026. While there are as usual various updates on the game since the last news item last September, I'm mainly going to focus on one in particular: the World Forge.
In the latest version of the game (until the last announcement here at least), when you create a new world, you can customize it by moving some sliders and changing some presets: you can have more archipelago-style maps, more land maps, and so on. You can customize things like overall humidity or temperature too. The current set of controls give a good range of maps in my opinion, and then when you're done with that process, the system calculates optimal placement of cities. You get a look at these cities and the relationships to each other, and you basically make a character and start the game.
Game modes and the World Forge
If you've been paying attention to the various updates, you might have noticed a bunch of "game modes" added, that are inactive for now. The standard one is the "Campaign", which is the main game, and another I plan to have upon release is the "Tutorial" which is aimed to be a mini adventure, that allows you to play out some of the story behind the game. But that's a story for another time (when it's more fleshed out). There is still lots of work to be done before sharing that, and in the meantime, I want to share something playable with you all. I've wanted to do this for a time now, and I think the planets have finally aligned, and this is happening this year, sooner rather than later.
I will be setting up a playtest of the world generator, augmented so that you can do more things than tweak a few sliders and see the results. To achieve that, I've created a new game mode called World Forge. In this mode, you can do the following things:
Create a world using procedural generation
Create an empty world (sea-world basically) that you can build to your liking
Edit a world (either empty or procedurally generated) by:
"Painting" elevation, humidity, different water types, vegetation density etc on the map
Placing cities with arbitrary properties that you can choose (why arbitrary? See export below)
Place (or clear) roads or automatically calculate them based on the location of your cities
Save the world for editing later, or load an existing world
Export the world:
As an image. Either as a small image, or a really really big image (16k x 16k pixels). I'm thinking of making a poster for my room :D
In a text-based format (JSON) - you probably need know what to do with that, but all the information needed to recreate the map would be in that file
Now the good news is almost all of the above are already implemented, so it's not going to be a tangent that delays things a lot. What is needed is mainly a bit of polish, bugfixing, a few more assets, and going through the Steam process.
Resurrection and Souls
Sigil of Kings is a roguelike at heart, but it's supposed to play like a long RPG open-world campaign. And nobody likes losing progress after 20h of playtime because of some bad RNG or a single bad decision. That's why, resurrection is now supported in the game: basically when you die, if you have enough money to have purchased some form of insurance, you should expect adventurers to be sent out from the nearest town to retrieve your corpse, bring you back to the city, and resurrect you. But don't think for a moment that the player is a special snowflake like that. All sentient creatures can be resurrected, and probably pets (if/when they're added). This can be done via spells or items. This also enables the possibility of quests like killing a lich but having to find its phylactery and destroy that to avoid its resurrection at some later time - all now possible (even creating phylacteries and binding souls to items). It has been quite fun to develop this. Here are some example videos:
Dungeon Architect
A final update bit: I am adding a simplified "level editor" in the game, mainly for use with creating levels for the tutorials, and possibly making other prefabs (level set pieces). This will of course be exposed, although it will need extra work to make the results usable somehow for future plays. A simple way this can manifest is as a "make your own home/fortress" functionality, probably if you pay the owning city-state enough money to give you a piece of land.
This is all for now, until next time!