First of all, we have two new DevLogs for the month.
This one is about our Share Intel feature:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj8JsoVYOeQ
And this one is all about Characters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMByJ7ehaZE
After attending the ESGS event last month, we spent the first week of November discussing player feedback and plotting what we have to do in the next couple of months to address issues raised. It has become quite apparent to us that we needed to rework some aspects of the game to improve performance, maintain consistency and streamline our process.
Bulk of our November work revolved around this rework. We're still not fully done with it so it would continue over the next few months. Fortunately, we were still able to introduce some new features. Below is a summary of the major things we've added into the game:
New Character Sprites and Portraits
One of the major player issues before is the difficulty in identifying individual characters in the map as we were still using the same sprite for male and female characters in the game. With these new sprites, characters have different body sprites based on their class, and its color scheme also changes depending on its race. Although, its a bit hard, you can also somewhat identify gender by checking out the character's hair length.
We've also introduced randomized variations in the character portraits, to further differentiate them from each other. It's unfortunate that our portrait icons in game are quite small, because it loses many of the awesome details added by the artist:
Blueprint System
Settlements now start as small villages that eventually grow and expand. The faction leader may place a blueprint for a specific structure and another builder character can take on the job of constructing it. We'll introduce more unique structures in the future that would provide various benefits and means for the characters to fight back against the player and their other opponents.
Migration
As mentioned, settlements now expand and may build new unoccupied dwellings. We've also introduced a daily random event that may spawn new migrants to occupy empty homes. This is a way for factions to grow. It poses another threat to the player - by leaving a tiny village alone for a while, you may find that it has grown into a much stronger settlement days later.
Multiple Settlement and Factions
We've started work on our multi-faction system. For now, we've only set it up so that there are three starting factions and settlements at world spawn. For now they just claim adjacent regions and cleanse corruption but this will open up much more in the future, as we allow factions to build new regional structures, raid and invade opposing factions, and more.
New World Events
Alongside having multiple factions, we've also started tinkering on how we want them to expand and interact. For now we just have two new ones added to the other already existing events:
- Claim Region: Allows a character with Royalty trait to claim ownership of an adjacent unclaimed region.
- Cleanse Corruption: Allows a character with Purifier trait to cleanse an empty corrupted region.
Soon, we want characters to be able to build new Mines, Farms and Garrisons, as well as raid and invade the player and other opposing factions.