Here we are at the first dev log of Deity's Domain. First of all, I want to thank all of you for the support you've shown so far. There's nothing more rewarding than seeing people's reactions to the project we're working so hard on. Thanks to everyone who shared this page with their friends; it’s a great support.
A large part of this month was spent reorganizing the roadmap and setting clearer goals for the future of the project. It’s still too early to set precise dates, but it’s good to have soft dates as targets. Additionally, preparing material to showcase the game has taken up a significant portion of the available time.
I would have liked to spend more time balancing the existing mechanics, especially the population growth and faith mechanics, which, though implemented for some time, require an initial balance iteration. However, as a good programmer, I got lost in refactoring and consolidating the AI system and citizen management. I won’t go into too much detail to avoid boring you, but overall, I streamlined unnecessarily complicated logic and added another layer to the existing system to have better control over what’s happening in our Capital. Now I expect fewer bugs and glitches in our Citizens' routines. As you know, unlike other games, here the player can interact with every citizen at any time, directly or indirectly, adding many variables and complications that must be considered. Therefore, having a solid and scalable system at the base is even more critical, even if it means pausing the implementation of new features for a long period. This task will likely continue into part of July as well.
Between reworks, I found time to advance some utility tools within the project. Specifically, I implemented a system that will allow interaction with game objects without having to grab them directly, but instead "click" them like a button in a graphical interface. I hope to show you something about this soon; a practical demonstration will make it easier to understand the utility of this interaction tool within the world of Deity's Domain.
Additionally, the Engine (Unity) was updated from version 2023 to the new Unity 6, resulting in a decent reduction of CPU load and some minor improvements in lighting.
As I’ve mentioned in various points, I work on the project in my free time and during my commute. I spend about 3 hours traveling to and from work, and in nearly 2 of those hours, I work on the game using a laptop. While it’s a high-performance laptop, as the project grew larger, it started to become limiting. So at the beginning of the month, I built a new desktop PC to speed up the work when I’m at home, which has been a great help, significantly speeding up the debugging processes.
Now I'll stop with this boring stuff and move on to show you what has been produced for the game this month. Specifically, the modeling of some of the future structures in Deity's Domain has progressed:
Arena: I want to clarify that we are not sure if this feature will be included in the final game, but we want to explore whether it makes sense to include an Arena in our Capital, which will allow our citizens to be entertained with fighting and blood shows.
Port (Work in Progress): The port will be a fundamental structure, unlocked in an advanced stage of the game, allowing interactions between populations across archipelagos. However, there’s still much work to be done before we can see it in the game.
To close, I’d like to show you some animations of the Creature we are working on. So far, during the prototyping phase, we’ve been using generic "Humanoid" animations, and it was time to create custom animations for the Creature. It’s still too early to show anything, but I admit I can’t wait to share news about it with you!
Walk:
Run:
Pickup:
Drop
For the next blog, I hope to have completed the rework of the Citizens' AI, so I can get back to adding the features I’ve planned. Over the next two months, I hope to add some progression features for the City and the Deity. After that, I plan to return to working on the Creature to start giving it an AI worthy of the name.
That’s all for this devlog. I’m really excited to have this space to let you know how things are progressing. I can’t wait to read your comments; if you have any questions, feel free to ask below or let me know what you think.
Thanks again for your attention, and see you very soon! ;)