Hello Survivors,
It’s been longer than I’d like since our last update post. I have no excuse for keeping quiet so long, but I’ll try to make up for it by being as informative and open as I can and tell you what we are doing and what/when to expect.
Development Status
First, I’d like to be honest with you, and say that I believe we’ve bitten on a bit more than we can chew. We started working on that new project (more info below), one that is very ambitious, and at the same time promised you that we will provide more post-release updates to Judgment. Our new game is turning up much more complex than we expected (so much that we haven’t been able to announce it officially yet), and the update we have in mind for Judgment is taking far longer than we anticipated.
This doesn’t mean that our plans changed, only that the timeline is not what we hoped it would be - we still want to provide more free content for our loyal players. Right now our most immediate goal and focus is to get our new game to a position in which we can make an official announcement and start showing our progress. That means enough implemented gameplay and art for a short, preliminary trailer, and then all the branding work, which includes actually choosing a name for the game… A choice that is turning out to be far more complex than we ever imagined! Let us know if you have any cool name ideas for a Tim Burton-inspired city building game with survival elements.
Here’s a new piece of concept art (and an old one too), and if you want to hear more about it once information becomes available, you can sign up here (or follow us on twitter / facebook).
Once we are done with that part and make the official announcement, we will prioritize Judgment again and focus on finishing this big update. It will still be a while longer but I’m sure it will be worth the wait.
I personally did spend some time working on Judgment code, while the art guys focused on the new game. What I did manage to do in Judgment so far were mostly small fixes/improvements and big infrastructure changes such as those I mention below (game modes support, destructible buildings - that has been abandoned since) and some preliminary desert survival mode changes (more on this mode below) such as map generation. What still needs doing is content creation - designing, implementing and balancing the things that will make the Desert Survival mode unique, all the new artwork, and additional general fixes/improvements.
Game Modes Support
As many of you have probably noticed, any change in the game’s configuration (such as activating/disabling a mod, or changing language) required a restart. Due to lack of experience this being our first game, we made some architectural mistakes early on and a lot of the config data was being cached, making it impossible to “just switch configs”.
It was a very boring and exhausting task, but I managed to improve our system so that you can now change configs without having to restart. You can enable/disable mods, and change language from the title screen.
You may be asking yourselves why would I go to so much trouble to fix something that is relatively painless? It’s not so bad having to restart when activating mods or changing languages, it’s not something that happens very often. The answer to that question is: Game Modes.
In our next update, when starting a new game, you will be able to enable/disable different modes. For example, you can enable/disable the campaign storyline, the opening battle, and any new mode that we choose to add that can affect gameplay in pretty much any way. This is similar to mods, except its on a per-game basis, and you don’t have to activate/deactivate them before loading a game, the system will automatically bring up the right config for every saved game.
Desert Survival Mode
Our incentive for the game modes system was that we wanted to introduce a new game mode, one that would significantly change how you play the game and provide new challenges even to veteran players. After running through different options (more on one of these below), we decided to go with the Desert Survival Mode.
In this mode, your base will be placed in the desert instead of the woods area you got used to. Gameplay mechanics and balancing will be changed, in a way in which we hope to put more emphasis on survival and needs. Food and water will be harder to find, it will no longer be as simple as building farms and wells.
We still haven’t gotten all the details and balancing, mostly we’ve been doing infrastructure work, and left the fun part for last.
Abandoned Idea - Survival Mode
Our original idea for a new game mode was around a “Survival Mode”. In this mode, the plan was to make faster-paced, shorter, games, in which you didn’t HAVE to explore the map to advance (you could get almost everything in the base), and enemies attacked you at regular intervals, increasing in strength. Sort of like a tower-defense waves mechanics.
The idea was that you had to grow strong fast enough to survive increasingly difficulty waves of demons, without trying to fight back and solve the story. Just seeing how long you could survive.
Adding this mode required us to vastly rethink how base defense works. It should be able to support much stronger and larger hordes attacking your base, in a way that there is no “winning strategy” that you can use to always win these battles regardless of how many demons and your own strength. Strategies that make use of our limited AI such as building huge mazes for the enemies to be attacked as they go through, and a choke point where you can kill them one by one.
The first step towards this, was giving demons the ability to destroy your buildings. We actually went as far as implementing this, but when we started to test and balance it, encountered too many issues. The game and enemies simply weren’t designed around this, so unfortunately, we had to abandon this idea and so we came up with the Desert Survival mode.
Stay in touch
Remember, we love to chat with you guys, hear what you like, what you don’t, see your screenshots, and discuss your ideas for improvements/additions. You can catch us on our Discord server where we are very responsive - https://discord.gg/judgment