Hi there!
Continuing on from last weeks’ post, a short summary of the second zone.
The general flow of the game is having the heroes move across several zones (currently 4 in total) to reach the final big bad boss guy. The first zone, Albion, was covered several times already. The second zone is Marca Hispanica, which is a mountainous area with snow because we wanted to have an environment vastly different from Albion. The third and fourth zones are similarly different, but I’ll cover them sometime in the future.
The concept art for the second zone was created some time ago, but the zone itself wasn’t very developed until we changed engines. The only piece of info we had was a sketch of how the zone was split into regions that would control how and when the enemy units would spawn on the map. After we moved into Serious Engine, we had a good idea of what the zone has to look like. After Mateja and Lucija were hired and had gained some experience making levels for Albion, we gave them the task to make some levels for the second zone. They have since done a great job in fleshing out the identity of the levels, and it’s much snowier than the original concept. Ivan did the world map design based on the original region sketch.
During the time we had enemy units that moved around the world map destroying nodes, there was an idea that the other zones could have different gameplay in terms of how urgency was presented. The idea for the second zone was adding an enemy that moved over some invisible nodes from the top of a mountain and to the last node on the map. The last node in all zones was always a city node that was under siege, and your heroes were going there for story reasons. After winning the fight, you would enter the city as an encounter, and be able to trade, purchase relics, heal and so on. This also provided the player with a small respite before venturing on. We also had an idea for doing an underground segment in the zone (visible in the concept image above). There would be a few nodes marked as “underground” which would spawn a few specific encounters and would hide the nodes that were above ground. Needless to say, this didn’t go far from the idea stage :)
The current plan for the gameplay of all zones is to be equivalent. Since the traversal is directed to the last node anyway, you’ll have to choose which rewards to pick up based on your current state. Low on health? Go down the route that leads to a city. Lost a hero? Go north to grab that hero. Want to chase Guardians? You get the idea. The only exception is the last zone, which will feature very few nodes and the boss fight.
Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in talking to us devs, come join the Discord server for the Hand of Merlin, or ask me about stuff on Twitter.
MarkoP