"What? You mean Retro-Pixel Castles is finally going to have castles?" Yep! That's right. The time has finally arrived to start working on the castle and upgrade mechanics for the game. InDev 23 will mostly focus on adding a new upgradable village center, that will eventually turn into a towering castle, as well as lay the groundwork for upgradable buildings all across the village in future updates.
This update has been a long time coming, and I'm really excited to get it out to you! I've actually been working on this update through a large chunk of InDev 22's development cycle, so I already have some fun bits scattered around Twitter for you to look at, like an early work-in-progress shot of the castle artwork!
If you have any requests, be sure to post them in the comments. Let me know what you want, and how you want it to work! You might just find it sneak into the next patch. :)
Also, don't forget to submit your screenshots to the latest Screenshot Roundup!
InDev 23 Road Map
The Castle and Building Upgrade System
- The Village Center will now start off a small, extremely easy to build structure, and you'll be able to use excess materials to slowly upgrade it into a towering castle.
- Every upgrade will allow you to place more buildings, store more resources and assign more builders.
- Other buildings will also be able to be upgraded in the future, like the Lumber Mill, Mining Facility, Farms, etc. A few of them may make it into InDev 23, time permitting.
Building Restriction System
- You will now only be able to place a set amount of buildings, the amount you can place will be tied to your Village Center/Castle. The more upgraded the Village Center, the more buildings you will be able to place.
- The system is not meant to overly restrict the players, but is designed to encourage you to eventually replace low-value buildings (Like Tents) with higher-value buildings (Like Hovels) to utilize your building limits more effectively.
- Walls and roads will not be counted against this system, and you'll still be free to place as many as you'd like.
Miscellaneous Changes
- The Golem AI will be redesigned, making Golems less CPU intensive and hopefully a bit more intelligent. This should help fix a lag issue many players are having late-game with village designs that are mostly golem-dependent for their defenses.
- A new tile loading system will be added, reducing memory usage and load times.
- New shadow rendering system, that will allow for some more realistic shadows on certain terrain and objects.
- More walls types will be added that can be used to create wall "groups", to accompany the new wall priority system added in InDev 22d. For example; red wood walls, blue wood walls, and yellow wood walls, that each have the same stats as a standard wood wall, but get their own grouping in the priority list.
- As always, more bug fixes and small optimizations!