Welcome plagued ones to our weekly Dev Blog!
This week we've got some more catacomb concepts, Player book UI concepts, a recap on our pillage area name competition and a very special sneak peek!
The update forecast: currently all signs show that V0.16 will be landing on your Steam accounts on Friday 14th of July!
Catacombs Concepts
To add to last week's Dev Blog here are some more shiny concepts for our new pillage area, the catacombs, we feel these also make great desktop wallpapers too! These are also in 4K resolution for maximum detail. This new pillage area will take Player's on a journey across Mercia to the far West. Stocking up on supplies at Crutchley Hill before venturing into here is a must. If you thought The Black Gate was challenging you may want to take a party with you for this one!
Much like the secret underground passage that runs through Raven's Reach from The Black Goat, the catacombs will of course be underground. Make sure you pack enough torches for everyone!
From the desk of SIG_Mike this is a concept of the Mausoleum Cave, very atmospheric with loads of details to spot.
Here's a bonus concept piece also from the desk of SIG_Mike the Catacombs Chapel!
New UI Concepts For Player Books
For our new update that's dropping this Friday the 14th July we have a sneak peek preview of one of the new features making its may into this update. Here are 2 new UI page concepts for our Community written player books! One of these is an updated take on the open book layout and the other is a concept for a single page note.
Long standing players of The Black Death may remember our Steam forum post detailing that Players could write their own stories back in September last year. These books were then selected by us and chosen to be in our updates and could be found in chests at events around the world.
You can look forward to seeing these new UI changes in our new update this Friday in V0.16. Without revealing too many details here is a preview of what these pages will be used for. As mentioned these books were randomly found around the world but now they will be obtained from an NPC that can be found in various locations around Mercia. On your travels if you see this merchant be sure to see what books he is selling. Some books are even split into volumes, so make sure you collect them all!
As a thank you to our Community, we have rounded up every book submission that has ever been sent into us here at SIG into this new update, that's 25 books in total (some even have 4 volumes)! We have enjoyed reading every entry and we hope you pull up a chair in The Black Goat in Raven's Reach or in your own Estate taverns and get lost in a good story!
We are still accepting story submissions for The Black Death if you would like your tales and adventures to be preserved in the lands of Mercia! Click on the link below to head over to our Steam forums post; all the details of entry can be found in here. Don't worry if you can't separate your story into the set amount of characters or pages, we check through each book and can do this for you so you can focus on crafting your stories!
Stories Of Mercia: Write A Story For A Book In The Black Death!
Here is the double page concept UI:
Here is the single page note concept UI:
Development Name The New Pillage Area Re-Cap
If you don't follow The Black Death on our forums, well... you should! Hop in there and get involved in Community discussions! If you missed our Dev Blog from last week or our forum post here is another re-cap of our competition that we are running. Using our handy Google Form below you can send us your creative names for our new pillage area. This submission form will run until midnight tonight, so make sure you get your entries in!
Name The New Pillage Area For The Black Death!
We will then have the hard task of selecting 5 of our favourite entries to go into a live Community Poll. This Poll will then run for the whole of this Thursday (13th July 2017) until midnight (BST time) for the Community to vote for their favourite out of these 5 names!
The winning name of the Community Pillage Poll will be chosen as the final name for our new catacombs pillage area and will be included with the update in V0.16 this Friday!
Super Secret Teaser!
What could this be...?
Super Secret Sneak Peek Here!
That's all for this week!
// The SIG Team