How’s everyone’s summer going? Well it’s about to get even better because I’m happy to announce that Hibera, Requiem for the Forgotten’s Demo will be available to everyone on Steam starting August 3rd! That’s pretty soon!
I have been spending a ton of my time testing and polishing and balancing to make sure the demo is a great experience for everyone, but I also have been working on a bunch of new features for the full campaign including:
Personal and Class Abilities
Created designs and data files for tier 3 classes
Playable dog character (Rufus)
Ability aware Action Preview UX
Song “weapon” type
Ally and Neutral Faction support merged
Scaffolded full game campaign
Greyboxed 6 new missions
Font Manager + Accessibility font settings
Playstation controller support
Map Editor improvements
Finalizing Demo build
Fixed a hang with GameAnalytics on exit
Fixed the movement arrow changing size based on screen resolution
Lots of additional bug fixes
Probably the most exciting thing (after the demo of course) that happened this month is that I started scaffolding the full campaign. This will take the missions from the demo and combine them with many many more missions into our full campaign. Eve and I have broken our story into mission-sized chunks and I’m in the process of building them out. This involves an ancient and sacred game development technique known as Greyboxing. This is where you build out the game using intentionally ugly and placeholder assets. It helps you to iterate quickly on the gameplay to make sure it’s working well before spending too much time making new art assets.
Along with lots of new missions comes lots of new content, I have been adding the tier 3 units to the game, at least their data files. I have also been adding a huge number of new abilities to the game. Every tier 3 class has a signature ability and most of the tier 2 ones have one as well. Some notable class abilities include Destrier, which allows a cavalry unit to move again after their action with their remaining movement range, and Steel Web which may inflict a movement debuff every time the user hits an enemy.
On top of that lots of the playable characters are getting minor signature abilities that play to their personality. Tadhg is an Early Bird meaning he has a speed bonus for the first 5 turns of each mission. Luigi and Enzo are Inseparable, meaning each gets a bonus to hit or avoid whenever they’re next to each other. I recently added a playable dog character named Rufus. His ability No Thumbs, means that sadly he can’t open doors, loot chests, or equip consumables.
I am so excited to be getting the demo out to everyone and at the same time it feels really good to be finally digging in hard to the meaty content portion of the game. I’m going to keep this short and sweet for now and keep an eye on our Steam page for news about the Demo!
Until then.