"It's....
be-....
-ginning to look a lot like Christmas!"
And as yet another page on the calendar flips over and we prepare ourselves for the seasonal stress and winter depression, the light of a single candle flame brightens up the mood - we can rejoice, for it is time for another edition of Dinolords Monthly, where we check in on some of the things we have been working on for the last month-or-so!
This month, we will have a look at some of the things that have been happening over on our Discord (shameless plug in case you want to have a more in-depth look and have a chat with all of us, head on over!),
Oh lawd he comin...!
Over the past year, our main character has seen quite a few iterations. For this segment, I will hand over the word to our 3D model master, Jesper, who will go over the history of the Lord model:
When I came aboard the project, the Lord looked like this:
It was a pretty cool look, but at the time, it was clear that he was built for the original look of the game - and that look was now changing. The art was becoming more detailed and with it, a more realistic art style was also decided for the characters.
"I feel like I could get lost in your eyes. Like Zod got lost in the phantom zone"
At first, with several characters, I tried to lift them visually by updating the textures to something more detailed.
This helped with matching the updating environment, but having buttons for eyes ended up just not fitting with the direction the visuals were going in, and also lead to the characters having terrible night vision - so at this time, I started swapping out the heads of the characters. We didn't have time to rebuild the full bodies but at the same time, we also wanted to make sure that we showed the general idea of where we were going so this is the compromise we landed on.
I guess we were trying to get ahead.......
I'll see myself out. Well maybe not because I still have things to post.
With the trailer fast approaching, something was missing. A cape. Obviously. And armour I guess. But mostly a cape. That said, the lords outfit didn't work for a cape, so a new body was built. 
Not all heroes wear capes - but all Lords do !
The Lords new body was built under considerable time constraints but he made it. A few things were fixed afterwards, like the colouring of the cape - but his detailing was always a bit bare bones, and I had plans to go back in and add more later.
But there were other, more important things to do. Rebuilding the other characters, adding new characters, getting new people into the art pipeline, making dinosaurs for the dinosaur game is also something felt important... and... so on.
Over time, the Lord that was made for the first trailer looked outdated. Thing I wanted to fix became more and more.
"Hello darkness my old friend. Why is my hair see-through from the inside again" - And the answer to that is - Game Magic!
This summer, it was suggested that we should have a new - updated - Lord. At this time, there were many things I could do better by starting over.
I got to work, with a plan of having two different body types to choose from. This would mean two versions of every armour set, but also expanded abilities to roleplay in the game.
Due to deadlines, I ended up focusing on the first body type for the initial deadline and then went back to finish the second body type afterwards. We all wanted to make sure we got as good of a lord as we could for it.
At this time, I called in help too. Lina drew up amazing patterns that I could plaster on the armour, and Philip drew a texture for the face of the initial body type. The previous lord literally just had a single colour facial texture, so there were a lot of improvements to gain here.
For the cape I worked with a new physics solution that was... a lot better.
Gain - Cool Cape. Also gain - Giant bald pattern from dodge-rolling so damn much. Realism TM or something. OK so that latter part was actually fixed. That said, you can go bald if you want to and I'll get to that in a moment.
I went back and created the rest of the second body type, and a second outfit for each character. At the same time Ulrik was also brewing on a character creator that we will show off another time when it's further along. This is where you can choose to be bald btw!
We are a small team, but we also believe in giving options where possible. What we have now is a base and I hope we can expand a lot further with that base so that people wont feel constrained when building their new Lord. Here are the two Lord body types with the same armour.
That was a relatively small dive into the many revisions of The Lord. I could go much deeper but then we would be here all day. Hope you got something positive out of it !
Thank you Jesper for the rundown, but absolutely also for the visual upgrade - what a make-over!
Concept art
Lina has made this super cool drawing of the Stegosaurus unit, complete with longboat-siding, shields and archers.
Over on Twitter, you can check out a neat timelapse showing the work from sketchlines to fully coloured!
Buildings
Brick by brick, we are chipping away at the specifics of base-building!
During November, and most of December as well, big things are happening to the base-building elements of the game. I guess one could say that we are doing foundational work for how you progress through building, upgrading and managing your base.
Designing things like that is impossible to do in a vacuum, as it interweaves tightly with unit production, level design, session pacing and loads of other factors - all of which also can't be designed in an isolated setting.
This results in something that might feel a little scattered, but is the product of incremental work on multiple systems in parallel.
The details of base building are still setting, so we are not quite ready to reveal it all yet, but expect news on this soon.
Until next time
That's all, folks!
Next time it is the December edition, and due to holidays and me taking a couple days off, that edition will be pushed slightly into January.
Until then, we all hope you all have a great time with your families, friends, loved ones, pets, dustbunnies, or dinosaurs.
-panxter