Fiefdom
The End of Fiefdom
This message is an update regarding the development status of Fiefdom. While this once was our primary focus professionally, personal and economic conditions have caused the developers to have to seek sources of outside occupation that make continued development not possible.
Despite our best efforts and a gracious amount of feedback from the community, we are unable to leverage the support into a more developed product.
We want to express our sincere gratitude to everyone who has been a part of this undertaking. Your feedback and suggestions have been incredibly valuable, and we appreciate the time and effort you have invested into giving our game a chance.
Thank you for being a part of the Fiefdom community. Your support has meant the world to us, and we hope to have your understanding during this challenging time.
Lunatinea LTD.
Summer Sale Live Now!
This launch has been everything we could have hoped for and more! If your interested in Fiefdom and what it can become now is a great time to buy the game and see what its a about!
Thanks for everything
- The Lunatinea Team
June DevLog
It's been about a week since our first update and we thought it would be a good idea to let people know what we have been working on. The Squire update was more focused on the things we felt were left untidy following release and we were excited for this next update to work on new, more ambitious things for Fiefdom. We hope to improve the game with each update in the technical, aesthetics, and game-play areas. The first step we’ve taken for this next, larger update is improving and expanding lighting effects for your fief.
Although life has been busy, we’ve still found time to work on this upcoming update! So far, we’ve made a couple larger changes to the aesthetics of Fiefdom. The first being the lights appear in your fief.
As you can see in the image above, we've also added the ability to change the color of your city’s roof’s. We think this will help the player feel more connected to their fief as well as make each game more visually unique. Feeling connected to the fief and your rulers is one of our focuses when designing Fiefdom, so this is one step closer to making that connection even better.
We know there's a lot of room to improve in terms of gameplay, more specifically construction and the large amounts of downtime, and that is what we will be transerfing our focus to for the next few weeks. Life should slow down in a couple weeks, where we will have a lot more time to focus on expanding Fiefdom’s horizons. Until then, we leave you with this:
-The Lunatinea team
*Summer Sale: Fiefdom will go on sale the 27th! Unfortunately, this is as early as we could start.*
Squire Update Patch Notes
General Gameplay
- Adds beta saving and loading!
This is a feature that we wanted to add with the original release, but unfortunately it had some major issues during development. While that was happening, life stuff got in the way so we decided to put it on the back burner. We looked at it with fresh eyes once life slowed down and were able to get it to be functional now. Right now, it still needs a little work and refinement, so consider it a beta launch. Please come report saving and loading bugs in our discord. As of now, the game autosaves every 5 years, but you can save any time in the escape menu.
- Changed scaling of population growth and resource production
A common theme in this patch is making the game feel less unpredictable. This change will add to the feeling of accomplishment of getting a big city, since it will take more time and effort. Also, it will allow the numbers on the screen to mean a little more than they do right now.
- Excess houses will now be destroyed over time
- Adds “house ruins” to city generation
Something we felt that was missing from Fiefdom was the tangible impact from losing a large chunk of your population. Sure, the stability bar goes down but there isn’t anything reflected within the city. Now, if there are an abundance of houses, they have a chance to get destroyed and turned into ruins. House ruins are a new tile that can (and probably will) be built over, but serve as an aesthetic reminder of the player’s failings as a monarch.
UI & Appearances
- Fixes bug where the UI would get squashed and stretched with resolutions/displays not in a 16:9 aspect ratio, making the game unplayable at times.
Unfortunately, none of our alpha testers had a monitor with an aspect other than 16:9, so this problem went overlooked. We’ve tested the fix with some extreme aspect ratios, so it should be working now.
- Revamps the tilemap to add more depth and a more consistent look
- Reworks the road tile sprite
- Adds colored text to the event UI to help players pick out key information
- Adds button to randomize crest in the new game menu
- Increases odds a citizen will spawn, making for slightly busier streets
- Resizes the X button to the “Decisions” window
It now matches the size of the other smaller windows instead of the family tree window.
Events
- Reduces event frequency by 30%
With saving and loading, we think the game should move away from the quick-burst, roguelike feel. That was never the intention for the game when it is completely finished, so we’re making small steps starting now.
- Changed events that only happened once a run to once in a generation
This should keep some more variety within events now that saving and loading has extended the time period the game is played in.
- Removes “Castle Fire” event
This was one of the first events we ever created. It was made in a time when the family tree could get very large. Unfortunately, this event just appears way too often for it to be fun in the current build. Maybe we can add it back when it would be less detrimental to the game.
- Rescaled many events to shift the court balance less
Hopefully this will reduce the negative impact of trying new options out for events. Especially with saving and loading, this should make Fiefdom feel more gradual and more like a strategy game.
- Adds several new events
Construction
- Adds an option in the construction window to delete infrastructure (roads, bridges, and walls)
This was a highly requested feature, so we are happy to say that it is now in the game.
Bug Fixes
- Fixes bug where the city would continually try building on tiles that were unable to be built on, resulting in stunted city growth.
Known Issues
- The tilemap can sometimes have a weird pattern of null tiles at the center when reloading a save game. If this happens to you, try exiting to the menu without saving and reloading the save game. We have no idea why this happens, so let us know if you have any ideas!
- We know the family tree is unstable right now. We’re looking into it.
- Due to changes in city generation fixing the stunted growth of the city, the road tiles have been forming “courtyards” instead of spacing out like they used to. It’s not the end of the world, so we’re leaving it in for now.
End of Week Dev Thoughts
We just wanted to make a post discussing what has been going on at Lunatinea since launch.
Firstly, we have been surprised by the amount of visibility Fiefdom has been getting. We've seen it on the "New and Trending" page several times, which we never thought our little game would get to! That's all thanks to everyone who has bought or shared the game, so thank you!
We also want to address problems with the family tree. It's been really unstable since launch and we are trying our best to find the issues within it. We don't have any updates yet, but please know that we are aware of the bugs and hang ups. Sorry about that, we will update you as soon as we are able to resolve those issues.
As many of you know, the event system is a big part of our game. We always want to add more, and we thought the community might want to share some of their ideas. So, we've created a google survey for people to submit event ideas! Linked here, you'll be able to submit event ideas directly to us. If we end up using your idea in Fiefdom, we'll give you a special tag in our discord!
One last bit of news: we've been working hard on the next update! Chiefly, this update will feature saving and loading. We know this is a highly anticipated feature, so we wanted to get it out as soon as possible. Originally, we wanted to release the early access with saving an loading. There were some complications with other, more critical, systems within the game so we weren't able to reach that goal at first. In addition, we will address the UI not conforming to certain resolutions as well as some more smaller improvements. A full set of patch notes will be posted with the release of the update, which should launch in the next week or two!
Warmly,
-The Lunatinea Team
First Quality of Life Update Patch Notes 🏰
UI
- Adds a bar above the calendar that shows the balance of your court
Since this is one of the easiest ways to lose right now, we wanted to make it more accessible to the player. With this change, a player can look at the power balance easily while an event is
active.
- Adds randomized starting crest to the crest designer
- Adds some more options to the crest designer
No more plain white crests when starting!
- Adds volume sliders to the main menu
…whoops. We’re working on a full settings menu, but this should have been in from the start.
- Adds an X button to the “Decisions” window
It was there at one point, but it must have gotten overwritten by another change.
Decisions
- Abdicating your throne now sets your stability to .6
Abdication doesn’t really serve that much of a purpose right now. Hopefully this will serve as a last resort option when in dire situations.
Events
- Reworks the “Royal Responsibilities” events to set a static court balance instead of granting an amount of power
We found that having that big power swing without warning was unfun and felt useless unless in the exactly right situation (low stability and court imbalance in the appropriate way). These events were always supposed to be a “bail out” for sticky situations, but never this situational. With this change, you will always be able to choose either option without losing immediately while also keeping it a risky choice.
Construction
- Increases road cost from nothing to 5 Coins and 1 Food
The roads were changed due to a score exploit using the free roads. We still want building roads to be accessible and fun, but we can’t be giving out free points either.
- Decreases Prison and Church costs from 10k Coins each to 8k Coins each
- Increases Estate and Cathedral costs from 25k Coins each to 35k Coins each
The construction curve felt a little weird to us. It seemed like by the time you could afford a Church or Prison, you could already afford the Estate and Cathedral. Hopefully this will make the progression feel a little bit more spread out.
Bugs
- Fixed a bug that occurred when starting a new fiefdom after exiting the main menu, there was a high chance of getting an error that softlocked the game from loading.
- Removed lines from the family tree. These were, surprisingly, causing some issues…
Known Issues
- We’ve been having really inconsistent problems with the “What the Heart Wants” event. We think it has led to a game crash before, but we have no idea why. Please keep an eye on this with us and let us know if you have any issues!
- The UI has some problems in some resolutions.
- Some family tree components can get disjointed. Specifically when new spouses are killed and added over and over again.
🚨Fiefdom Early Access Out Now!🚨
While we were wrestling with the business side of Fiefdom, we had to do a lot of waiting before Fiefdom was actually released. In that time, we were able to make some small changes to enhance this first round of early access! It's not a lot, but we're hoping these changes make the game more enjoyable while we build out larger content like the wildlife update. On that note, we still have some things we're hoping to improve either with or before the wildlife update.
Here are some of the things we're keeping our eye on while developing new content:
- Events can get repetitive and lose their story impact, specifically the scandals. Right now, these are some of the only events that repeat, so they are taking over the event system. With more events coming in future updates, these shouldn't pop up as much.
- A real tutorial. In our alpha testing, most people thought the game was relatively intuitive so we didn't focus on building out a tutorial. However, this is something we really want to work on as the game grows.
- Map cohesion and aesthetics. There's some issues we've been noticing with the terrain and we're planning to overhaul it in the wildlife update.
We're always looking for ways to make the gameplay more engaging. If you have thoughts, questions, or concerns about Fiefdom, feel free to join our discord and talk to us!
Thank you so much for supporting Fiefdom's first steps! It will help it grow into something amazing.
-The Lunatinea Team
Fiefdom Early Access Out in 7 Days!
- The Lunatinea Team
Fiefdom Early Access Out May 25th!
We'll be updating our community page any time we have share worthy updates and we can't wait to continue working on this. Please join our discord to stay up to date with all things Fiefdom!
Thank you so much from the Lunatinea team! Can't wait to have you along for the ride.