It’s that time again. Two weeks have passed since the last blog post and it is time for an update! First of all, I’d like to thank Niklas for taking the time from his busy schedule to put together a blog post while I was away two weeks ago. I thoroughly enjoy working with a team of people were pretty much anyone will stand up and say “I can do that” if someone doesn’t have the time or energy to complete a task. Creating a game like Songs of Conquest is a long haul (as you might have noticed with delays and all). It’s a marathon rather than a sprint, which takes dedication, faith, and perseverance. No one can keep the stamina and spirits up forever, but when you do feel like you are straying from the path, it means everything to have a team of dedicated and hard-working individuals around you.
We asked which biome tree you’d like to see next and hundreds answered. Your wish is our command: Here’s a tree from Loth’s biome! You’ll see more trees like this decorating the backdrop of the battlefields.
Personally, I sometimes feel like we are a crew of questing adventurers. A ragtag bunch of colorful individuals with special skills, all needed to reach our goal. We are pursuing that alluring treasure at the end of a long and arduous journey. When we finally release the game we will all have learned a lot about ourselves and made new friends and battle scars along the way. So, without me getting even more mushy and emotional, let’s take a look at what our questing adventurers have been up to lately!
This is an Arleon building called the Grand armory. You mainly use it for research to improve your troops. Well, actually that’s ALL you use it for, but hey that should be more than enough, right?
The Look and Feel team™ have started a new sprint and done some proper planning for that. David has mostly been working with the battle user experience. Feedback such as camera shakes and bouncing/knockbacking troops have been added to the game. Furthermore, David also started preparing for working on spell effects, meaning more sparks, bells, and whistles for that powerful essence wielding!
This is Malkoth. No further presentation should be needed.
Christian has tweaked how we display attack and movement range, mainly for Battle. He has also been updating and preparing the Inventory screen for implementation by Robin (our latest addition to the band of adventurers!). Emil has also mostly been working with movement range, adding more functionality to tweak the outline for a better visual result. He was also involved in creating the damage overlay in battle.
As for the tech team, Niklas fiddled away with the skirmish win/lose conditions. When you have no town for 5 rounds you will die, just like in real life.
Niklas also gave the wielders level up system some much-needed love, adding the ability to choose powers instead of skills every 4th level after level 8. Lately, he’s primarily been looking at bugs since we have a very limited pre-alpha test going and need the builds to be stable.
This is a work in progress test of our water surface generation and shader. Patrik likes to create stuff like that and in general just to make things look awesome.
Marcus has had a full-on AI focus, which helps us iron out nasty problems like the AI taking way too long time to complete turns. He’s also been making sure that the AI has features required for driving the Campaign forward. Robin, while completely new to the tech team, is an oldtimer in the games industry and has been given the task of finishing up the inventory system. A wielder needs to be able to equip artifacts and gear as well as managing troops.
Finally, Carl told me that he is neck-deep in shaping up the missions of the Arleon campaign. Lots of level design, text writing, and general lore creation. Yum!
See you in two weeks!
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.