Hey everyone,
Sorry for the lack of updates. The game is not dead, and we are still working on it, but being a pet project, it’s not always easy to find time to work on.
Over the last couple of months, we’ve been working on refactoring a few systems and addressing some design decisions that we weren’t happy with.
One of the systems we’re currently reworking is the enemy AI, which is probably one of the hardest things in any RTS. I’m not going to pretend that we’ve found a way to create an amazing AI that revolutionizes the genre; instead, we want to focus on challenge and fun. Sometimes, keeping it simple is the best approach.
In our case, we knew from the start that we didn’t want the AI to follow the same set of rules and goals as the player. A good example of this is the zombies in They Are Billions. They don’t use resources, don’t need to build buildings, or expand their territory—and it works quite well.
In Everlords, we want to have something similar—not zombies, but an AI that plays by a different set of rules than the player. Will it be fun? Hard to say right now, because we’re in the middle of overhauling the AI system and how it handles everything. But I hope that when it’s done, and after several iterations, we’ll arrive at something interesting.
In the beginning, I also mentioned that we weren’t happy with a few design decisions. One of them is how the "biomes" worked. In the old design, once you placed a biome, it would stay static—meaning it was forever yours. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, but we hit a snag with the Hostile Biomes, which could be destroyed and reclaimed. It just didn’t feel right that we could do that to others, but our own lands would remain untouchable. We also wanted to support the theme of a fragile world, where nothing is truly permanent, except for the forces that reshape it.
After some thinking, we created a first prototype just to see how it felt:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwVKui6zoA
Now, each biome you place has a building—a cornerstone, if you will—that supports the biome and claims it as yours. If that building gets destroyed, the entire biome goes with it.
We’ve polished it a little more, making the biomes bigger, changing the placement style of the cornerstone building, and adding a preview of the biome's shape:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prZ_ZHFhX8c
This relatively small design change opens up many more strategic options and creates a completely different dynamic. Nothing is really safe anymore. The stakes of losing a biome are much higher (you lose all the buildings built on it). Plus, now that each biome has an owner, we can create an interesting multiplayer mode. I’m not saying that we’re actively working on multiplayer at the moment, but it’s something we’re considering for the future.
Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for more!