It’s time for a development update! We’ll jump right into the immersive world of Songs of Conquest, as we are currently working hard with finalizing our 5th edition of the lore-document. Well, actually it is Kim who is working hard and me and Carl are merely shouting encouragement and feedback. Anyhow, the document is a way for us to create a coherent world with a rich history, culture and atmosphere. It’s an important tool to create a cohesive game. And we prefer our games… cohesive. Don’t you?
It’s tricky to get a lot of details and personality in really small Wielder sprites, but I think the art team is doing a great job so far. What do you think?
Continuing on with design work, Carl has been balancing and checking a lot of the numbers in the game. He’s also worked more with skills and powers for upcoming implementation. Another big area of focus for the design work has been to create build plans for our AI so they know what to build and when. The Alpha testers are doing a great job at letting us know what the AI struggles with and where it performs well, the build plans are a way to make sure the AI is challenging enough for our players!
All of the programmers and the “Look and Feel” team have been constructing a whole new UI and flow when a player builds new buildings. The old system simply needed to be updated in order for the game to really shine when it comes to town management and constructions.
This is how the new research UI looks. It gives the user more visibility about what research is available to the faction. As well as just looking better than the old UI. Nice.
Niklas also worked on a new kingdom overview section. Showing detailed info about what you've claimed and built. And he also fixed an audio preview scene for us developers to easier check and add sounds to the map entities of the game. And on the topic of making things easier he added a "claim everything" cheat command to the dev-console. Good cheats make it easier to develop the game!
Yes, developers cheat in their own games. For a good reason mind you! Players cheating however. That’s another story!
Robin also focused on the UI Rework for the town building experience. Some of the bigger things include "sticky selection" of Wielders. Which means a Wielder will always be selected if there is one alive on the map. And he also added more hotkeys for both inventory and the spellbook. Furthermore, Robin created a very developer-esque new menu for the Global research from Large buildings. It resides under the Kingdom Overview which Niklas also worked on.
Marcus changed the AI calculation loop so it tries to respect frame rate dynamically, which will make it adapt better to different computer specs. This was done together with lots of other small optimizations that tries to reduce the time it takes for the AI to make decisions.
The two screenshots show before and after Marcus optimized the AI. Notice the freezing in the first one that's not as bad in the other (look at the wielder banner for comparison).
The whole art team has been knee deep into the sandy dunes of Barya. The artists have all been focusing on the buildings and Wielders from the desert merchant nation. All Wielders are now designed, animated and implemented into the game! Most buildings are done-ish and are now longing to be animated with the help of Eyal. Patrik also fixed some pesky tearing in the ground material, creating big black “rifts'' in the world. We can now safely say that we, and our testers, won’t have to stumble upon black chasms across the adventure map, which feels pretty good.
Anders and Kordian are dual wielding the graphic development of the main building of the Barya faction. Each time you upgrade it you’ll see a new visual representation on the adventure map. Please let us know what you think of the building progression!
Finally, some of you might have heard that we recently let 100 more people into the closed Alpha. In fact, there were around 2000 people who applied to get in. We are thrilled that so many of you want to test the game, and please know that there will be more chances. As we get nearer to release we will gradually increase the amount of testers at a higher pace!
Until next time my friends, take care!
Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.