Greetings fellow gods,
It's been over a month since the last update, and many of you appropriately started asking, "Necromancy when?", so I thought it might be a good time to update you on where things are and how much longer it will be until you can all live happily ever after with your (un)dead wives.
Raise the Dead
My work is currently focused on necromancy and the new civilization of the undead led by Necrotyrant, a unique, immortal lich necromancer who threatens the world with his army of the dead.
Both necromancy and the undead civilization will not be available as a starting choice during player creation but will be uniquely accessible through play - by conquering the undead citadel, purifying the Monolith of Awakening, and becoming the new Necrotyrant controlling the undead army.
The necromancy skill will be uniquely focused on harvesting the souls of living beings in settlements and corrupting them to then use for assembling undead workers and warriors. It will be a skill tailored towards acquiring power by causing death to living civilizations.
Conquest
The goal of the Conquest update is to enable taking control of other settlements. As players, we'll be able to create a state faction that will open up our settlements to attacks and allow us to field offensive armies that will take control of NPC towns, giving us access to their production and population management.
Those who prefer a more chill experience by building their towns uninterrupted will still be able to do so without proclaiming an independent state and participating in wars.
NPC factions may also decide to enslave weaker races instead of occasionally raiding them for their wealth and acquiring power that way.
This feature will open up a potential major endgame goal for our characters: controlling and ruling the world.
World Map Revamp
We're working on a world map revamp that will increase the resolution of tiles and change the palette to fit the game's GUI better. We still need to make some tweaks to ensure locations are easily visible, but we're already close, and this should also be done for v0.9.
Polish Language
Since November, we've been working on allowing translations into the engine and game. My wife has been hard at work translating the entire game to Polish since the beginning of the year, and she's been constantly cursing the amount of content we already have in the game, but I'll do my best to negotiate some more for you guys.
We're currently testing, tweaking, and ensuring everything makes sense. Once that's done, it should be a part of v0.9 as well. We'll have solid translation support in mods alongside it and explore options for officially supporting other languages in the full release 1.0 planned for next year.
These are the significant changes currently being made. I know things have been slower than usual recently, and I can't wait to get this big update done and return to the weekly updates schedule, which feels much more efficient in terms of development progress. Because all these major features are so intertwined through shared mechanics, it felt right to take more time and get all of them together at once.
The work on v0.9 will take a few more weeks, so expect the update in April. Once v0.9 releases, we'll be back in the weekly schedule and focus on features related to settlement management and trading as first priority.
I'm looking forward to your feedback on the upcoming changes.
Artur