Updated to version 2.1.1.4 on February 8, 2018.
- Added new Avatar animation that is a blinking dragon's eye
- Added placeholder voice-over for an initial set of game events
- Made many improvements to the game map, including the ability to resize the map up to 256x256 and new icons that give status for game events
- Added the new Werewolf troop animation
- Game now supports from 720p up to 4k display resolutions
- Various bug fixes and gameplay improvements
The Avatar is now present within the game and will telepathically speak with you to provide situational awareness. The eyeball will become animated while speaking with you and the eyelid blinks in a random pattern.
The voice-over tracks are just placeholders until I can have them created by a professional. I plan to have many different game events with voice-over and several variations where it makes sense. That will help to reduce repetitiveness. I also have different limiters for each voice event to prevent spamming them.
Some of those events are tied into the game map now. For example, fortresses and rifts will signal attacks by blinking their new map icons. The voice-over is triggered when the attack happens for a certain amount of time off-screen and limited by a global threshold. Leaders are circles that always blink to help find them on the map. All zealot banners are displayed as icons and their paths are shown too. That really improves the situational awareness for attacks.
The map can be resized from 128x128 to 256x256. The map will automatically scale according to the game resolution the first time the game loads for this update. Afterwards, you can re-size like any of the dialog windows, by pressing the lock icon and dragging a side or corner. The new dimensions and position will be saved when the game exits.
Upcoming changes
I am now going to re-design the rifts, Avatar abilities, elite troops, and chaos levels. Players will be able to select up to 4 different epic rift types to summon over a captured basic rift. That epic rift will boost a specific Avatar ability and allow the player to summon a specific elite troop.
The Avatar abilities will become buffs that are active for a set amount of time during a chaos level. There will still be 4 of them and the buff order will randomize every chaos level. The idea is that players will have windows of opportunity to use certain abilities that are boosted by that active Avatar buff.
In addition, every epic rift unlocks a new buff for that specific Avatar ability. That means you can essentially choose an upgrade path similar to a character "build" in an RPG. I plan to make each unlocked Avatar level unique, fun, and increasingly powerful! I want to really do a lot with this idea and emphasize the god-like abilities.
Chaos levels will all be the same amount of time and much quicker, most likely 3-4 minutes. I will tweak the pace of invaders and eliminate the evicting each chaos level, so players can keep rifts for the upgrades. I will then start evicting slowly when the Apocalypse phase begins, so the game still has that intense pace towards the end.
I will have a lot more to share as I make progress with these changes. I'm hoping to have most of them done by the end of March. I will try to post incremental updates on the Steam forums. Please feel free to ask me any questions. Thanks for reading! :)