Development update #33

Long time no see! Lately, I’ve been focusing on recruitment and talking to external partners about exciting things like cutscenes. 

We are currently talking to a few artists about helping us with the approximately 300 icons needed for the game. But we still haven’t made a final call, so if you want to pitch to us, get in touch! 

Regarding the cutscenes, we are discussing with a few video agencies who have done great work for other games. Striking an optimal balance between the songs and the visual storytelling will be super important to set the right mood for the campaign. First up is the Arleon campaign, which Carl is working hard to refine and finalize. He is putting a lot of time and effort into massaging the copy and lore together with Kim.

Who doesn’t love artifacts? Shiny, precious, and powerful. Eyal has produced over 100 of them which we hope will all end up in the game. Get ready for looting!

We have started to look into translations and will hopefully announce more about that fairly soon. The idea is to get help from users and fans before we try working with translation agencies. We believe you guys are the ones best suited to help us translate this game into other languages. We have a lot of Alpha signups from Russia, Poland, France and Spain. But beyond those countries, we also see people from Italy, Germany and more besides. When the time comes we will organize this through our Discord server.

Patrik is working his shader magic again. Creating pillaged versions of each building the traditional way would be very time-consuming. This is a test where we are doing it with a more technical approach.

The programmers have had a prototype week where they implemented a lot of requests from both Carl and our external producer Johannes (who works at our publisher Coffee Stain). Robin has focused on combat changes that makes the battle more dynamic and interesting. Niklas also worked on the tech-side of pillaging buildings. He created everything from the actual disabling/enabling of the building to the gold bonus you'll get as a player.

This is the Arleon guard tower. The basic version gives you increased vision radius and the upgraded version will fire at enemy wielders.

Marcus is still giving the AI his full attention. Lately, it has been AI campaign features getting some much needed love (seek and destroy kind of AI more specifically!).

He has also set up an around the clock automatic AI vs AI computer, which he can use to analyze the AI behavior. He created a prototype of this last year, but this time it has been done in a production worthy way. 

Along with Niklas he also changed the audio implementation a bit which affects how the player hears the world. The images below shows the dynamic positioning of the audio listener in action. Everything sounds better now with a more natural placement of the "ears" of the player!

David has rewritten the menu flow for pre/quick/post-battle and the claim town menu.

He has also focused on battle by improving troop VFX along with effects for teleportation spells, so we can have proper effects on both start and end destinations (yowza!).

Emil focused on tooltip positioning, allowing us to anchor them to fixed positions for all resolutions. And not to forget: a bunch of bug fixes and some spell UX.

Artwise there has been a huge amount of assets being produced. Martí is continuing his animation of troops as well as Wielders, we now have the full Loth basic troop lineup ready and implemented. Coming up is the upgraded troops along with… well more Wielders!

Kordian is giving the Loth faction buildings his undivided attention and the design is really coming together nicely. Thomas, our swiss army knife of graphics production has done a bit of everything from biome design (Rana) to battle troops (Loth) and adventure map light sources (all biomes!).

Anders is trying to tie it all together and finalize the Arleon buildings, with graphical tweaks and finishing off the remaining upgrades. He has also looked at team color tweaks as well as Wielder lineup re-renders and artifact reworks and polish.

Christian recently tweaked the camera position and UI-elements when we zoom in on buildings that you interact with. Previously the popup would obscure both the Wielder and the building, but now you can see them as the UI has been moved to another position.

I’m currently considering making this blogpost a monthly thing, rather and twice per month. There is just so much going on and we all need to focus on developing the game. The only thing I can promise is that we will continue doing blog posts, but the pace might be a bit more irregular than compared to last year.

Keep in mind, if you want a more direct way to interact with the dev team you can always join our Discord server.

Until next time, 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.

Development update #32

First dev blog of 2021, and what a year we have ahead of us! After some well-deserved vacations, the full team is back at work, mostly from home though. The office is sparsely populated these days. We have had more freelancers joining the team lately and the graphics production has really upped the pace. I’ve been seeing to the freelancers and their respective planning, making sure that we have a good roadmap for content production. The almighty “Asset document” is becoming an increasingly important tool for us to check off things that have been done and discover where we need more work.

We have tried many variations of layout for the town. It’s tricky to create the visual effect we want without making it too big and grabbing all the real estate close to the spawn point. This is the current look we are going for!

Art
We are happy to welcome back Kordian to our ranks after his paternity leave. He is currently focused on doing all pixel art for the Loth faction buildings. Anders has worked with things you’ll find on the adventure map. Things like Essence spires, portals, and settlements. After that, he has followed up with texture and rendering fixes on buildings. Thomas is wrapping up the Loth Adventure Environment and started on the Rana biome. He also created all the hostiles, troops that go on the adventure map.

Patrik recently added back dust specs to the game. Makes for a slightly more organic and magic vibe if you ask me!

Tech
Niklas has created a map filter for the level editor. It indicates if a wielder can’t travel from one part of the map to another. This helps our level creators making sure that all parts of the map are accessible. Niklas has also created the first version of a content picker for map entities in the level editor. Previously, we only had dropdown menus - which was a bit clunky. Other than that, he’s busy fixing the loading screens. Previously we didn't have a clear way of knowing what happened when we switched scenes and synced all the states.

This image was supposed to contain a GIF from Niklas level editor tool. After trying to upload it, compress it, re-editing it, etc for over 45 minutes I gave up. All complaints about the missing image should be sent directly to Squarespace! Their image upload system is pure crap.

Robin has continued with the Wielder “handshake” system where you can move artifacts and troops. He has also reworked how we handle keyboard inputs. Marcus is hard at work with campaign-specific features for the AI. It needs to be able to switch between normal thinking behavior to scripted behavior depending on player progress on a map. This without replacing everything the AI does, only the part that is scripted.

Look and feel
Emil is working his coder magic to improve spell casting UX in battle. He has also added popups in adventure and a bunch of other minor improvements to improve readability. David has been setting up VFX for arleon troops and assisting our new VFX freelancer with project set up and instructions.

About a year ago we had a discussion with lots of you people about the look of our Necromancer unit. We are proud to share the fully animated version of the Necromancer. Hopefully, you like it as much as we do!

Design
Carl is still making campaign maps, they're coming together and thanks to team art they're looking really cool! Dialogue is up and running as well so he is working hard on writing a long story into shorter dialogue, great fun he claims. I do believe him, and the campaign for Arleon is really starting to feel coherent and suitably epic.

We were recently feature by PartyElite as one of the most anticipated strategy games of 2021! We’ll do our best to deliver on that promise!

A lot of streamers have been in touch with us over the last few weeks. We truly welcome all streamers to reach out, but please know that we are still a few months away from allowing public streaming. The Alpha has yet to start and we are working hard to get the game into the hands of everyone who follows the production. The Alpha will come, sooner or later, and when that is done we will follow up with all the streamers as well.

In case you missed the preview of Songs of Conquest in one of France’s largest gaming magazines you can check it out here.

Take care and catch you in two weeks time!

Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.

Development Update #31

Another fortnight, another blogpost! Rumor has it that Lord Manhammer had to change his name to “Lord Querkius”, and he’s knee deep in admin & branding work to make himself known throughout Barya again with his new moniker.

This means I get to hijack the development blog again and show you what we’ve been up to for the last two weeks! So let’s get right to it!

PIXEL ART GOODNESS

Team art have been working on pixel art all over the place, focusing on our campaign. Specifically our first campaign map to make it look as jaw dropping as possible. I for one, think they have done amazing progress, and if you stick around until the end of the post I’ll show you an amazing mood video that Patrik created.

AURELIAN CLERIC

Martí, one of our pixel artists, worked on finishing up our latest Loth troops from the animation sketches created by Emanu. The result is fantastic!

AurelianCleric.gif


AI IS GETTING BETTER

This is the more scary part of the blog post. Marcus improved the architecture to have the AI make smarter decisions. I’ll never win a game again!

We are not were we want to be, but we are getting closer. The changes we make now are mainly made to prepare for the things we want to do in the future.

However, we found and fixed why our AI seemed to have a death wish and always attacked the most difficult hostile around. It also didn’t recruit troops as fast as we wanted it to. All of that should be a bit better now.

FIXING BUGS

As all game development teams, we have bugs to fix. This sprint we have squashed quite a few. Most of them are difficult to show in a visual way. So I’ll highlight this clipping issue that Patrik solved earlier this week.

cliffclipping.gif

One bug was that our objects would clip into the ground at certain camera angles. Since our ground is 3D and our objects are billboarded 2D sprites, this is a fairly unique problem.

Patrik fixed this by doing the following changes:

  • Moved wielders slightly towards the camera

  • Hard cap at 55 degrees for all billboards

  • Reduced camera angle from 65 to 60

  • Unified the way we lean our landscape backwards for battle and adventure, and applied it to battle

Screenshot 2020-12-10 at 14.42.32.png

It’s one of those issues that looks easy to fix on the outside, but is actually very complicated. Above is another image of the fix from the side.

CAMPAIGN

All our teams have been working with a campaign focus lately. Carl is working in an iterative fashion to fine tune our maps for the Arleon campaign and is making sure that all the other campaigns will make sense story wise as he goes along.

Can’t show you much from this yet, but it is very exciting!

DIALOGUE SYSTEM & TRADING

A part of our campaigns need wielders to talk to each other - which is what I and Christian have worked on lately. A challenge was to make this work through our in game level editor, and we still have some work to do.

Robin is working currently on the ability to trade troops & artifacts between your wielders! It’s a feature we wanted for a long time and it will be great to be able to play with that soon.

BURNED VILLAGE

And finally, here’s the amazing video showing a bit of collected progress from the art team. I really think it looks stunning, what do you think?


Phew! That was more than I intended to share ;) Hope you’ll enjoy it! I need to get back to fixing the camera system for the dialogues now.

This is also the last blog post of the year. Take care and we’ll see each other in 2021!

Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.

Development update #30

You might recall that I compared our development team with a band of adventurers in the last blog post. Continuing on that note I’d like to give a warm welcome to the latest addition to our party: Robin. I’ve had the privilege of working with Robin before, in fact, he was the first person I ever employed, acting as CEO of another game studio a long time ago. I would describe him as the low-key guy that doesn’t stand out from a crowd until he suddenly just slays the task at hand while spinning a dagger in his left hand with ease. And perhaps throwing in a witty remark as a bonus. Welcome to the crew Robin, lots of adventure and terrifying dungeons ahead of us. Keep those daggers sharp and ready!

Deploy the Fists of Order. The taxes will be paid on time next year, no doubt about that. Let this rabble pay the price of their insolence.

Team tech was supposed to focus mainly on the campaign from a UI and user journey perspective. However, Niklas has instead had the privilege of mainly squishing bugs and increasing stability, along with Marcus. They have solved quite a few race conditions we previously had with the AI. So the AI won’t accidentally take over your troop movements anymore. Some might say that this was a bug, I’m suspecting the AI is just preparing to take over! The tech team has also solved a few online bugs which made it difficult to play online without hiccups.

The Level Editor also got a bit of a revamp. Niklas went on a shopping spree and bought some plugins specifically targeted at level editors. This changed it up quite a bit,  with fancy features such as dockable windows and in general a more dynamic look.

The AI continues to improve in the loving and caring hands of Marcus. Lately, he has focused on controlling the AI movement and refactoring the timing in battle to allow the AI to be more consistent when it thinks.

We can draw gizmos in the level editor now. I’ve been told this is a very good thing as it gives the level creator greater control over the AI behavior. Huzzah for gizmos!

Robin has overhauled the Wielder inventory. You can now see what gear the Wielder has equipped, the effects they give via tooltips and use a drag-and-drop system to change the equipment around.

Team look and feel took a deep dive into battle yet again. Emil has mostly been working with user experience regarding ranged attacks and attackable objects. David has made sure that the impacts, hits, and knockbacks feel juicy and rewarding for the player. Much time was also spent on figuring out the general look of our spells. We are trying to find a style that combines both the retro vibes of pixels but at the same time looks modern and fresh. Shaders, particles, and modern VFX combined with hand-drawn sprites. It is a tricky path to walk, but I’m confident we will find something that will look stunning.

It was too long since we showed a new troop sprite. Behold the Oathbound in its fully animated glory!

The art team has been busy looking at the adventure maps. Anders spent a good amount of time analyzing the visual storytelling of the Arleon campaign and creating assets that we felt were lacking to tell the story in an optimal way.

Patrik re-worked a lot of the functionality in how our engine draws the adventure maps on the screen. A lot of plain old boring optimization, which now makes the game run much better. But he has also got a water system to work and we now have slopes so a player can actually traverse up and down from high ground even without wings!

Recently we asked you about how to visualize the portrait for non-wielder hostiles. We got some really good ideas and are now showing the troop portrait that corresponds with the hostiles highest tiered unit. Keep commenting, it makes a big difference!

Thomas has tweaked the Arleon biome, increasing the readability, and improved the visuals overall. Additionally, he did some work on wielders and on the Rana troops. He has now turned his attention to the Faey-parts of Arleon woodlands and is collaborating with Patrik and Anders to give it a dark, magical, and mysterious vibe. 

Emanu and Marti are pushing on with animations. We have tried and discarded a few variations of sprites for Cecilia Stoutheart, the main protagonist of the Arleon campaign. And it finally seems we have settled for a style and frame count that works well. It is always tricky to strike the right balance between visual awesomeness and hitting deadlines!

Patrik recently made sure that you can click and re-click on a tile to update the random placement of trees. This will be a handy tool for finalizing the visuals of our campaign levels, making them look just right for each area.

In case you missed it, we lately released a new song from our Soundtrack. It is a moody and immersive piece called “The essence” composed by Reynir Helgasson, the party Bard. Do check it out!

Until next time, 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.

Development update #29

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.

Development Update #28

Time flies! Two weeks since the last development update and Lord Manhammer is nowhere to be seen! I’ve heard rumors that he was called in to slather paint on an important building in the dunes of Barya.

A perfect opportunity for me to sneak in here and give you an update instead! Let’s see how much I can share before someone finds out that I’m here.

Short story - Folly of Cedric

Cedric of Lower Cheltingham coughed, as the acrid stench reached through the silk scarf covering his nose and mouth. The vapour coated his throat in a vile taste that would stay with him until his death. Noxious steam filled the embalmer’s lab, advancing and retreating like a company of rats on a fallen soldier. The muck of the yard covered his Hessington leather boots, and he feared he would never get the odor of this place out of his Fairside Wool riding cloak. He was a long way from the comforts of home. 

“Malerence Tenic?” he called into the dim interior. “I have a missive from the council.” 

He stepped deeper into the dim interior. There were shelves full of vials, potions and dried things he didn’t want to look at too closely. Tables of bubbling beakers atop bronze braziers filled the right side of the room. 

This was his punishment for a thoughtless remark in the presence of the Unseen Society. They ordered him, like some lowly courier, to deliver a message — in person —  to the Master Embalmer, Malerence Tenic. When he started to refuse, they brought up the oath, ‘... loyalty and obedience in all things, to the Empress Aurelia eternal…’ Ridiculous old fools. But to please his father, he nodded and obeyed. 

Now he was a three day' ride from home and this backwater hamlet didn’t even have a servant to take care of his horse!

“Up here, courier,” a voice called out. The voice had come from above. Cedric saw a walkway and railing above the man-high iron cauldron. 

It was an educated voice, almost musical, and that surprised him. He had assumed the embalmers came from common stock. Who but a commoner could work in these conditions, surrounded by corpses and patients? Both of which stank. He considered correcting the embalmer, that he was no lowly courier but Sir Cedric Cheltingham, and then thought better of it. Did he really want it getting back to his peers how far he’d fallen? Better to remain anonymous. 

He climbed up the wooden ladder, bemoaning the oily film on the rungs that now coated his Lenox calf-skin gloves. At least the fumes were not as dense up here. 

The embalmer was taller than Cedric, stoop-shouldered and rail thin under a shapeless grey smock and the blue embalmer uniform that hung down to the tops of moisture stained boots. The beaked embalmer mask covered his eyes, and he wore a strip of cloth over his nose and mouth. The hood of the smock hid a lumpy bulging deformity. 

No wonder Malerence Tenic performed his experiments in this remote lab. He’d never be welcome in society. He could not imagine being seated at court next to such a disfigured creature. Cedric could not wait for the moment he would leave this fetid place and surround himself with the beauty that reflected his own fine features. Careful not to show his disgust, Cedric bowed as expected. “May the glories of old be new again.” He proffered the leather tube with the council's documents, careful not to touch the embalmer. The embalmer’s gloved hand snatched the tube. “Off you go, then. I’m very busy just now.” Cedric bit back the retort that came to his lips. His quick tongue had already earned him a three-day ride to this backwater cesspit. “I’m to wait for a reply, Master Embalmer.”

Malerence Tenic turned away from Cedric and broke the seal on the tube containing the message. The embalmer was still, and Cedric thought he’d forgotten about him when Tenic turned and looked him over. The embalmer’s forehead above the beaked mask wrinkled, and he imagined a frown under the face coverings.  “Bend over, man. Let me use your back to write my reply and then you may be off.”

Much as he resented the indignity of acting as a table for the Master Embalmer, Cedric bent over so he might leave there all the sooner. Pain lanced through his body as a heavy object smashed into his skull. He collapsed onto the slimy planks. The Embalmer’s foot shoved him off the walkway and he fell to the stone floor below. His left knee took most of the weight and gave a painful wrench, followed by a horrible crunching sound. Pain flared from his leg. He’d broken it, he was sure. 

Figures scurried around him in the mist. Quick, heavy steps and a deep rumbling command. Wait, that wasn’t a boot, it was a hoof! Horned ones!

Cedric looked around in confusion as two more of the Ram-headed creatures raced by. A dozen voices came from somewhere above him. It sounded like they were near the ceiling. How did they get up there?  And why weren’t they helping him? He tried to pull himself up to standing, but all he could do was drag his damaged body towards the entrance, the light, and aid.  The Master Embalmer strode past him, and he stretched his arm to him. “Help me,” he pleaded. The embalmer ignored him and followed the Horned ones out of the Lab. That’s when he saw the body wedged behind the cauldron, wearing the singular blue uniform, and affixed to the shoulder, the green crest of the Embalmer’s Guild. Malerence Tenic was dead. 

Some instinct for survival forced him to drag and crawl his way to the entrance despite the pain. As he pulled himself over the lintel and into the light, six Horned Ones bounded around the building and down the drive leading away from the embalmer’s lab. Above him dozens of Faey Spirits, like giant, rabid dragonflies, chittered and screeched as they flew past and followed the Horned Ones. 

How had the Faey penetrated so deeply into Loth without notice?  He would bring the wrath of Loth down on them for daring to assault him, a member of the Court! 

At the palisade gate the spirits, horned ones and the imposter gathered. The imposter threw off the mask and hood.  Cedric gasped. That strange inhuman face was one he’d only seen in pictures from storybooks. A Faey. What he’d taken for a deformity was the rack of antlers that marked a Faey Noble. He started to shake. The Faey Noble drew her hands together, intoning words of power. Cedric watched with a growing realization of what she intended. The air crackled and lines of bright light sparked between the faey noble, the horned ones and the faey spirits. She was a wielder!  A glowing orb appeared between her hands. Cedric clawed his way forward, heedless of the filth that covered his fine clothes. He saw the bright ball of light form and watched helplessly as she hurled the sphere of energy directly at the lab filled with the noxious and — Cedric now realized —  flammable, potions. He scrambled forward, his will to live overcoming all other thoughts. 

A fiery blast rushed overhead and tossed him, flying and tumbling, as the embalmer’s lab exploded behind him. The last thing he knew was the taste of embalming fluid as he opened his mouth and screamed. 

A jolt ran through him. Cedric gasped, then screamed in the darkness, expecting to feel the flames consume him. But the flames did not come. He was cool. No, he was cold, and he could smell the rank odor of the embalmer’s lab. He opened his eyes. Above him stood a short man in the blue robes and beaked mask of an embalmer and behind him a half-dozen lords of Loth, his peers. The moon rose high behind them and a dozen buildings still burned from the explosion. 

"Thank all the heavens you've found me," he said, marveling at his luck to have survived such a blast! "It was the Faey. Twenty, maybe thirty of them. They can't have gotten far." 

He sat up, and pointed toward the palisade when he saw, poking through the ruin of his Lenox calf-skin gloves, the mottled grey pallor of his hand.  A bit of skin flapped loosely from his third finger, dirt encrusted his black nails. But it didn’t hurt. It must be the light or some after effect of the explosion. 

"Rise, oathbound courier," the embalmer spoke. 

“I’m not a cour-”

Oathbound? 

Oathbound. ‘... loyalty and obedience in all things, to the Empress Aurelia eternal…’ 

Oh no.

He tasted the embalmer's fluid on his tongue and knew that he was dead. No. Not dead, Oathbound.

Development update #27

Oh boy, two weeks have already thundered past, and let me tell you, things are bizzeh! I’ve been mostly focusing on recruitment, setting up contracts with new freelancers, and planning the workflow for our new pixel artists. But I’ve also had the time to perform such thrilling tasks as filling out forms for the bank, reviewing asset documentation, and working my way through an email inbox that has screamed for some well-deserved attention. We try to answer all emails we get, but sometimes it will take me a while to get to it, depending on the overall workload. Busy days for a CEO, I tell you!

"We don't fight for you. We just fight." -Gnaw Greybeard, Voice of the clans

Carl has just finished the first draft of the Arleon song, meaning the song you will unlock while playing the Arleon campaign. It is a ballad of passion, sorrow, and much more. I sincerely believe you will enjoy it when you finally get the chance to play the game! Carl has continued to rework our magic system after thorough testing and just finished up a rework of skills and level up system. I got a quick summary from him the other day and it seems to me that the system will be a good mix of strategic choices and good old rng.

We are fortunate to have some very talented pixel artists on the team. Here is a step-by-step GIF showing the amazing work of Thomas Feichtmeir creating a majestic oak tree.

Niklas and David have improved our effects system in several ways, laying down more foundation for the big task ahead of making the world come alive. We strive to make the game satisfying to interact with and a huge part of that is using effects to make things pop, stretch, illuminate, and just really burst with visual goodness. It’s been great to see that we have taken a few more steps down that path during these last two weeks.

Niklas also made improvements to a menu where you can choose a reward. Some buildings will give you an A or B alternative, like choosing between troops or gold. Previously, if you chose a troop that wouldn't fit in your army, it just disappeared. Now you can re-arrange your troops and make room so you don’t have to go for the gold if you don’t want to.

We firmly believe in continuously taking small steps towards greatness, these images show how it used to look when you picked up items on the adventure map and how it looks right now.

David spent time doing minor improvements to the battle user experience. Marcus has joined in on the UI and UX work and made a lot of quality of life improvements. This goes for Emil as well who has become more and more involved in the visual aspects of the game (I have to admit that I enjoy working with programmers who very much cares about the visual aspects of the game!).

Anders focused on upgrades and team colors for Arleon buildings, as well as general graphic fixes. He’s been setting up files and adding neutral buildings to the game, which are quite a few already. He has then spent much time getting relevant feedback from our freelancers. As Art Director he is working hard to keep our visuals both consistent (which can be a challenge with so many artists) as well as up to the very high standards we are aiming for. This often means a lot of reworks, grit, and patience from all involved. Thankfully we have an art team that understands the hardships of creating a visually appealing game.

Another example of UI progress. Marcus has spent time considering how the splitting of troops should work in a smooth and coherent way.

Thomas has focused on all of the background art for the battle screens. This includes textures, trees, shrubs, and concepts for special props. The first biome is pretty far already, while he is now trying to get the other areas to a similar level of quality. Our new pixel artists are just now warming up: Martí has already started animating troops and Dawid is getting more acquainted with the palette and the concept art for our adventure map buildings.

Patrik has also been adding missing (and new) artwork to the game, mostly Arleon troops and buildings. He has been dabbling a bit with various special effects shaders as well, just because he loves that stuff (that’s my theory, at least). He’s also been doing asset inventorying, trying to figure out what's been done and what's left to do. He and Anders are now hard at work with getting the Arleon town to look alive, vibrant, and have all the visual impact you would expect from the heart of your faction’s empire.

Who knew that the farms of Arleon had such high yields of bacon? I would like to emphasize that Patrik, who produced this GIF, is vegan and no animals were harmed in the making of this game.

That’s it for now! See you in two weeks time. As always, let us know what you think in the comments below!

Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.

Development update #26

Hello and welcome to another progress update. Quite a lot has happened in the last few weeks. We are really getting down to the nitty-gritty details, making sure that all features that have been implemented lately also makes sense from a user perspective. Things like readability, visual feedback, and general quality of life improvements are on our agenda. 

This period has been really productive and it is nice to see that small changes can have a great impact on the overall game experience. Lucky for us we are going to spend two more weeks just polishing and improving the gameplay experience. Every day of just improving what we already have made a tremendous difference!

A lineup showing a few of our Wielders. These portraits will be used in the inventory, where you equip gear and artifacts.

I’ve been focusing a lot on recruitment and staffing lately. As you might have noticed on our Twitter account we are still looking for more pixel artists. We have had some freelancers leave us, due to personal reasons, and we need to fill the positions. Specifically, we are looking for a character artist/animator and a buildings artist. We will probably have well over 200 buildings in various shapes, styles, and sizes across the game, so quite a lot of content to produce! The same goes for characters which will probably amount to over a 100, all animated. So yeah. A lot of pixels.

David, Niklas, and Christian have updated the adventure movement path. Specifically the path that is drawn between your Wielder and where you want to move. They are trying to make it less “in your face” but also make it more clear to the player what options they have during their turn. We have had a problem with people not understanding their amount of movement left, so we are trying hard to fix this.

Andi continues to impress us with vivid portraits full of personality and attitude. This is Redfern who you’ll encounter in the Arleon campaign.

Marcus has along with Emil mostly focused on the adventure UI/UX. A lot of tweaks for the HUD but he also added functionality to swap between raze and occupy when you’ve conquered an opponent’s town. You now have much more flexibility in how you exploit the towns you have conquered from your opponents. A quality of life feature for all burgeoning warlords.

Carl is balancing the game through units, spells, and other modifiers. A truly daunting task considering the number of things that can affect the gameplay. Things like artifacts, gear, buildings, research, troops, songs, and spells, to name a few. Besides his traditional game design job, he has continued with composing the songs for Songs of Conquest. Good thing he used to work with musicals I say. I’ve heard a little sneak preview from the Arleon campaign and it sounds very promising!

Before Marcus improvements the research icons appeared all over the UI, covering important buttons. Clearly this new version is a great improvement, wouldn’t you agree?

The art team has been so hard at work that I haven’t been able to get any replies out of Patrik and Anders. I know they are busy so I didn’t bother them too much about it and was instead happy to get some info from our latest pixel artist, Thomas. He has created concept art along with colour and mood exploration for all the biomes of the world. This is something we have visited a little bit in the past, but it feels great to have an experienced artist taking this up again. Thomas also created the sketches of all assets for the battle biomes, things like blockers, background trees, etc.

It’s also worth noting that we recently reached over 9000 followers on Twitter, which is quite amazing considering we are still keeping quiet about several parts of the game. Here’s to 9k and let’s step up and aim for 10k before the year is over!

We are trying to find a suitable generic portrait for when you attack neutral armies. I don’t think we have nailed it just yet, please share your ideas and feedback in the comments!

Finally, we recently got a wonderful shout out from Greg Fulton, the lead designer of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. He is currently working on Fanstratics, a spiritual successor to the HOMM games, and mentioned Songs of Conquest in his latest Newsletter. I’d encourage our readers to check out his title. I am looking forward to trying it out!

Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.

Development update #25

Big news! We have reached the end of our feature development push. We are now going into a development freeze where we will focus on the user experience and general visual impression of the game. When we are done with that, we will of course get back to putting more features into the game. But, before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s take a look at what we have achieved during the last months. (A lot of things actually!)

In general, this period of getting a large set of features into the game during a short time has been hugely successful. The clear goal made us focus on what was truly important and the rule of only getting things "60% done" made us home in on the bare essentials of the game.

Who is Giandra Stormspire? I can’t tell you much, but I can tell you this: She is not one to mess around with.

We now have a first pass of all biome graphics for all the factions, not only for Arleon. All the buildings of all the factions are in the game and playable, with many of them having the first pass of graphics as well. Before this push, we only had Arleon buildings and a few adventure map buildings in the game.

Before the development push, the AI was nonfunctioning in adventure. Now it works and you can play the game against an AI. We have a whopping 35(!) spells along with their respective icons implemented, all working with a beautiful spellbook and quickbar. Previously we had around 5.

You wanna cast a spell? I wanna cast a spell! Andi is helping us visualize the spell effects through icons. Can you guess what they all do?

All the troops we currently have designed are now in the game, as opposed to only Arleon troops. We even have all upgrades for all troops, functionality-wise. We also have many animation sketches in the game along with the first frames for (almost) all troops.

You could not attack an opponent's town before the push. The only way to win was to wipe out all the other wielders. Occupy & Raze didn't exist, but it is implemented now. Makes for a much more interesting game experience I have to say! We also have had a huge chunk of sounds implemented in adventure. The game was almost soundless before.

Besides what has been mentioned above, Niklas has continued to plan for our future development. This means having lots of meetings to prepare for the coming freeze and beyond. He has also, pretty much along with all the programmers, been working with zone of control. This means that the AI can now claim larger areas, so you won’t have to create traditional “bottle neck” choke points in every map in order to stop a player from accessing an area.

Mommy and daddy always told me to stay out of trouble. I guess that basically translates to “don’t walk on the ground with red stripes” in SoC.

Anders has been getting the final design done for our Loth troops lineup. He has also tried to figure out the optimal size of our wielders and has given general feedback across the art team. He claims he has had more and longer meetings than ever before. Which might seem a bit boring, but it is due to the fact that we now have a larger art team than ever. We have had some amazing talent signing up with us these last few weeks, including the awesome Cyangmou and one more experienced artist. Both of them will add great strength to our art crew and we are looking forward to sharing more of their amazing pixels going forward :)

Christian has been pretty much all over the place, but the main focus was path visuals in adventure and player feedback when it comes to Wielder movement in general. He has also been getting more into Unity and started to implement his UI directly into our game engine. We are thrilled to have him step up and spend even more time with us on the game.

We are not only doing artifacts for the game, but also something we call “gear” which can be found in chests, etc. Gear will be richer in supply, but less powerful than traditional artifacts.

Carl continues to compose and put words to the song for Arleon’s campaign. It is quite tricky to get it right, but from what little I’ve heard so far I think it is going to be epic! The song will tell the story of the campaign and we hope this will give players a great and immersive reward for completing each mission. Carl has also been looking at general balancing issues and playing around with walls and town layout with Anders and Patrik.

A lot of UI elements in this game. Fortunately, we have David and Christian thinking about things like “how does it look and feel when you upgrade your troops?”.

Phew! A lot of things going on basically. As for me, it has been all about recruiting and signing contracts with more talent for the team. We are still on the hunt for an experienced Unity developer, so if you are/know one, send us an email! 

Finally: Keep all those constructive comments coming, we love to hear your opinions!

Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.