As I write this, we’re putting together the first Preview of Beta 2. Beta 2 will have 3 major new changes:
Steam Workshop support for modding
First pass at localization
Dynasties
Let’s see where we’re at.
Localization
For Beta 2, we are going to focus on 3 languages: French, German and Spanish. This is because they don’t h ave as many unique characters as say Russian or Chinese. Baby steps.
For Beta 3, the focus is going to be on Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, along with other languages based on popular demand.
Preview 1 of Beta 2 won’t automatically launch the game in a player’s language. That is because while we have localized the game, the amount of bugs due to cut off text is just too much to have it default to this.
Case in point:
See the title? It’s cut off. We need to update the screen to give it more space.
Modding
On the modding side, not much is going to be in Preview 1. It’s been set up so that I can now start to upload mods. But the way it’s going to work for Beta 2 is that you’ll be able to make a mod, press a button to get the file dialog box to upload it, put in some tags and it’ll go into the correct area. We’ll be iterating on this so that it’s easy to manage these mods as we suspect there’s going to be a lot of them.
Dynasties
Dynasties aren’t in Preview 1, they missed it by “that much”. This is because of a design change we made. As some people have noticed, we actually are ending up with too many champions in the game. We really need to get the Essence system in. That’s the 0 you see at the top of the screen. Hint: It shouldn’t be 0.
The way it’s supposed to work is that you, the player, start with about 10 essence. When you recruit a champion you have to imbue them with your power. This is what lets them be champions and not just regular soldiers. Similarly, while your dynasty will produce children with their own traits and such, turning them into an in-game champion will cost 1 essence. Now, through the course of the game, there will be other things to spend essence on as well as other things that can increase essence, but this mechanic is intended to prevent…um…breeding an army. 🙂
Final Touches on Preview 1
We are still putting in final touches for Preview 1. Right now, the focus is on making the game less buggy and the localization and modding. There’s a lot of AI work and balancing work to do. Thanks to your feedback we know exactly what needs to be done.
Stay tuned!