Genre: Point-and-click, Racing, Real Time Strategy (RTS), Simulator, Strategy, Indie
Godus
Community Update - Godus Wars - February 3rd 2016
When is combat coming out?
Right now! With the release of Godus Wars, combat finally makes it’s full introduction into the Godus universe. Peter has always considered Godus being two games: one tranquil, peaceful and the other war-like with bloody battles taking place across the unique lands.
Have you abandoned Godus?!
Not at all! The release of Wars proves that we are still dedicated to Godus and everyone who owns or has previously purchased Godus, already has Godus Wars! Yes! Godus Wars is free for all previous Godus Kickstarter backers & owners.
How many people have been working on Godus and what are their roles?
11 people have worked on Godus Wars.
Peter and Konrad - Design
Dimitri, Gary, Ryan & Richard - Programming
Annah - Art
Ian - Audio
Anthony & Turner - Production
Martin - QA
Tony - GUI
What about the winner of Curiosity - Bryan Henderson?!
Bryan is featured in Godus Wars! He can be seen as an opposing deity on one of the continents.
Why Early Access?
We’re using Early Access to gather balancing feedback and gauge player reaction as we work towards a feature complete release.
Early Access will allow our users and loyal Kickstarter backers to try out and provide detailed feedback in order for us to deliver a more polished, optimised and balanced game upon release!
The release of Wars demonstrates that we are still dedicated to Godus.
Everyone who owns or has previously purchased Godus, already has Godus Wars! Yes! Godus Wars is free for all previous Godus Kickstarter backers & owners - It should auto-magically appear in your steam library, if it doesnt please let us know!
What's the plan with the Godus backer rewards at this point? When will people be receiving those?
We're continuing to work through the release of the Kickstarter backer rewards. The Art of Godus backer book was sent out to the appropriate tiers last year and the Early Access launch of Godus Wars brings with it a large collection of Godus design documents and Documentary has been completed.
What will you do with Godus Wars feedback?
We will be collecting all detailed and relevant feedback posted and while we won't be replying to all posts individually, we will be reading everything. Be sure to keep an eye on the Announcements board for Feedback updates!
What is happening to this page now that Godus Wars is out?
Now that Godus Wars & Godus are both available as one package, we will be closing the Godus Store page and removing the higher price from sale. The discussion boards will be left untouched.
Community Update - September 11th
This week we’re very happy to announce that the team has been making some good progress in regards to the combat gameplay! As you may already know, we’ve recently spent some time tuning and fixing the Warbands pathfinding. We have now reached a very good result that we want to playtest before continuing working on this. That’s why recently we moved onto a new exciting feature: Combat God Powers.
In combat, God Powers will help you change the course of the battle. You will be able to set your enemies on fire, slow them down or give your troops a bonus to maximise your chance of victory!
This novelty in how powers are used in Godus is also presented to players with a new UI visualisation. The power cards are looking more aggressive to better convey the combat theme.
Annah has been working on this for the past few days and we’re happy to show some of the new visuals today.
Rain of Purity is a power you probably already know. You’ll be able to use it in combat and its card now looks more beautiful than ever:
Another cool new power is Military Settlements. It will allow you to build a special type of structure necessary to create Warbands. Here’s how it looks:
A bunch of new exciting powers and visual improvements are part of the combat update and we will begin showing them to you very shortly.
Let us know what you think!
The Godus Team
22cans
Konrad's Korner - August 26th
"This week we are going to step back a little and take a closer look at our vision of how we see players using Warbands."
"The ever shifting terrain and the verticality provide by the many land layers makes Godus a unique landscape for battle. We really want to play on these features to provide an experience that is very different from what players might expect from a RTS title."
"Directing troops and exploiting the landscape (and even altering on the fly) in any meaningful way proved to be a very challenging feat of multi-tasking once more than half a dozen units were on the field. The decision of using Warbands grew out the desire to retain a sense of scale to conflicts without forcing the player to manually control large numbers of individual soldiers."
"We really want to encourage smart and tactical gameplay, where players are rewarded for paying careful attention to the actions of individual Warbands.To this end we have reinforced the effects of the landscape on the performance of the soldiers. Height advantage and tree cover for example have a powerful effect on the outcome of battle. Players able to exploit the landscape with clever positioning of their Warbands will have the upper hand even over far superior numbers."
"Players will also notice that veteran Warbands will become stronger (potentially a LOT stronger). The goal is to encourage and reward players to use and preserve their soldiers carefully rather than seeing them as completely disposable. We are currently experimenting with how to make these veterans visually distinct on the battlefield to reinforce their status as elite units."
Here's a a couple of new screenshots of a recent Combat build showing off some of the new military props around Settlements.
Konrad's Korner - August 17th
"This week has seen the start of some upgrades to the movement arrow system. Up to this point we’ve been using the movement indicators from the leashing system. While those indicators are fine for moving followers about in Homeworld, they didn’t reflect troop movements accurately enough for our liking. You can see the problem below:"
"The first thing we did was take not normally seen debug navigation pathing lines which look something like this."
"And use them as a basis to draw the movement arrows to make them look like this:"
'There is some work still to be done to produce smoother, more visually appealing arrows, but they now accurately reflect navigation."
"The current leash arrow drawing system also wasn’t really designed to handle drawing and tracking movement arrows for multiple units. We polished up the system to only display movement arrows for currently selected Warbands and be able to wipe and redraw the arrows at any time."
"What’s left now is some smoothing and visual polish of the arrows. We’ve implemented a system to allow us quickly and easily replace the textures used to draw the arrows themselves and playing around with different looks have produced some rather fun results."
Also - Check out Annah's 3D printed Archer!
Konrad's Korner - August 11th
Over the coming weeks, Konrad will take us through a range of different topics as we continue progressing with Combat. First up is one of the more annoying problems the team has faced recently - a memory issue that has been causing any build to crash quickly after launching.
Konrad - Design
"Godus has seen a great many changes to its code base in the last few months. As we were expecting, at some point this would mean trouble. Recently this really caught up to us - builds were becoming so unstable that it was time to roll our sleeves up and do some serious maintenance. Just imagine how annoying it has been trying to develop game that crashes every few minutes! Unfortunately the root of many of these issues have proved to be very difficult to track down, the debugging tools we've been using so far insufficient. Richard has been tracking down and dealing with it"
Richard - Programming
"The first step towards solving memory issues of this sort is to hook up some powerful diagnostic tools. As with any game codebase, Godus is far too big and complicated for us to go through by hand finding these issues - it would take years! Instead, the tools have given us a load of data pointing towards potential issues. Lately, I've spent time sifting through this and fixing issues where necessary. We're starting to get the benefit from this as we uncover more issues, but there's still more work to be done to get to a point where we're happy with the game's stability."
Konrad - Design
"So what does this mean for Godus? Well, it's but a mere setback of course! These kinds of challenges are part and parcel of game development. We've been hard at work creating a special build of Godus to run on a specialised debugging and memory logging machine which will provide us with highly detailed data allowing us to identify the source the instabilities. While it has meant we've had to divert a significant portion of Richard's time from the development of features, it will ultimately mean a far more stable and robust game going forward."
Godus Combat Progress Update - July 23rd
Richard wanted to really go into detail about the problems and obstacles faced with the Mustering Fields implementation in the upcoming combat release.
Mustering Fields
Goods Combat Progress Update - July 23rd
Richard wanted to really go into detail about the problems and obstacles faced with the Mustering Fields implementation in the upcoming combat release.
Mustering Fields
Combat Production Progress Update - July 10th
Update Time!
This time Anthony (Producer) has a look at one of the bigger challenges the team faced recently with combat development. Annah also showcases a few more bits of art & unit design.
Production - Anthony's Words
"After several months of intensive work, the result we reached with the Warbands pathfinding system is closer than ever to what we envisioned for the game. Let’s look back at the challenges we faced."
"As you already know, we really want to have fluid and responsive Warbands in the game. A pathfinding system already exists in Godus, but we needed to rewrite considerable parts of it to make it compliant with the combat system and our ambitions. "
"For example, we no longer only want your followers to access shrines or new lands to conquer, we want them to be able to reach pretty much any point of the map and react correctly to the sculpting you or the AI might do on the map. One thing we don’t want, is frustrate you because your Warbands did not reach a point, for no real reasons, resulting in a battle loss. Visually speaking, we want them to stay in formation as much as possible to convey a real sense of military discipline. Again, no matter what is happening on the map, you should feel like you’re controlling armies."
"There is still work left to do to reach our objective, but hopefully this gives you an idea about the kind of experience we want to create for you, and we hope you will love it."
Programming - Ryan's Words
Ryan previously mentioned about the AI Pathfinding in a previous update but at that stage the size of the task wasn't quite known.
"The pathfinding system, written by Dimitri, was designed for navigating followers from point A to B as the crow flies. Sometimes this can fail because of sculpting issues or invalid leashing. In Godus, followers adhere to a queue to allow a set amount of followers to move at any one time to increase performance."
"However, with our Combat Warbands, each member must have priority over this system to allow for fluid gameplay and a smooth combat experience. Each warband has it’s own navigation system object that calculates the paths that it is being ordered to move to. Given that Warbands can have many members, the navigation object must be aware of the states of each of its members, where they are in terms of the path laid out for them, if a member has come into any problems and ensuring they stay together along this dynamic world."
"To do this, I have had the assistance of Dimitri who knows the system best, he's worked with me to figure out any edge cases and issues that could arise from this. We have had to do some significant work on this to allow the Warband to be more intuitive when it comes to navigation."
"For example, if a Warband has been told to move to a specific position but that position is in the water, we will travel as close as we can and then cancel the move order and await further instructions or attack anything within our range. We want players to feel like they can safely send a Warband to a position even if its illegal and they’ll try and work something out."
Art & Design - Mustering Fields
We thought it might be a good idea for Annah to show off a little of what she has been working on but before that it's probably best Konrad actually details what Mustering Fields actually are..
"Mustering fields were developed with the aim of solving two distinct problems with the way warbands are generated from citadels. Firstly we needed a stable space for a warband to appear. The ever changing terrain of Godus caused a lot of problems for the navigation system when a spot chosen for a warband to generate became invalid during the process, such as a new abode appearing in their chosen spot. Without it you were never quite sure where a warband would try to get to as it spawned."
"Secondly, having individual soldiers stream out of the citadel as the warband was generating took a long time especially with larger warbands. During this time before the warband got into formation, all the soldiers were vulnerable and could not be commanded. They could all be easily mowed down 1 by 1 by enemy warbands without being able to respond. This problem was especially prominent in large bases where a soldier would have to travel quite far before finding a large enough space to generate their initial formation."
"Having mustering fields part of citadels ensures warbands always have a valid location to form and allows us to generate the entire warband instantly right next to the citadel without it looking like they popped out of thin air en mass."
Combat Programming Progress Update - June 26th
Following on from last week's update, Godus programmer's Richard & Ryan delve deeper in to the artificial intelligence and warband pathfinding currently being tweaked during the current development sprint and there’s also a round up from Producer Anthony
Commander AI
Richard has found time to go through just what the Commander AI is, in a bit more detail than before.
"Something we haven't talked much about is the “Commander AI” - this is the enemy god, the entity plotting and conniving to bring your fledgling society to its knees. Because of its huge scope, the Commander AI is something we'll be evolving and iterating on quite frequently as we proceed with our combat work. For now, however, let's talk about how the AI will want to start a game."
Commander AI - Before
"Citadels (the new name for military settlements) are key to combat. Having bigger citadels means you can have bigger warbands and more of them, giving you a substantial combat advantage. To make large citadels though, you need a lot of free space. As such, the AI will do its best to quickly clear rocks and trees and flatten land."
"Like you though, the AI has limited belief, so it has has to constantly weigh up whether it's more cost-effective for it to sculpt a piece of land, spending belief now to gain much more belief from any abodes built on it in the long-term. Or if it should instead use that belief on god powers, to try to cripple you in the early game."
"Nothing's as simple as it seems though. Experienced Godus players will be considering a lot of things as they sculpt. Will this sculpt make it easier for enemy warbands to get in attack range of my citadel? Or will it isolate my builders, preventing them from making more abodes? These are the sort of pitfalls that it's really easy for the AI to fall into, particularly in an extremely malleable world such as that of Godus, where the environment can be changed not only by the AI, but by the player as well."
Commander AI - After
"Our ultimate aim is to provide the player with an AI which is highly flexible and capable of providing both an enjoyable experience for new players and challenging & exciting gameplay for Godus veterans, over a long period of time. Getting the AI to this stage has been really enjoyable, so I'm looking forward to having more to tell and show you as we progress."
Pathfinding AI
Programming coder, Ryan spills the beans on the warband pathfinding found within the game.
"Pathfinding already exists in Godus and the followers often find themselves navigating through the world thanks to the pre-existing system. For combat, we’ve had to slightly redesign that system to allow for warbands to move in groups as they navigate across the maps on the player or the enemies command."
"Like a real army, the warbands move in formations by keeping together as they move across the maps and bunching together to traverse obstacles such as rocks, abodes and the terrain. Therefore, players will get an understanding that the warband should be considered one unit but that each of the members of that unit are individual soldiers following a single command."
Anthony's Sprint Review
“This sprint allowed us to fix some critical issues in the warbands pathfinding system. They can now stay in formation most of the time when moving on the map which is clearly the kind of result we wanted to achieve."
"The objective now is to make them move naturally and react dynamically to any change in the map (sculpting or AI actions). As one of the fundamentals actions in Combat, we’ll make sure to spend as much time as necessary on warbands movements: fun is clearly not an option when it comes to this kind of mechanics.”
Next Time
Next time we'll be looking at giving you a unique insight into our next development sprint!
As an added bonus, Annah has updated the combat art we previously released to reflect the progress made on the archer models.
Thanks
22cans
Combat Design Progress Update - June 19th
Last week we posted Annah's Combat Art Progress Update and that was well received with fans and the community. This week Konrad has found the time to speak about the design elements of combat.
Early Combat Design
"My original goal was to integrate combat into Homeworld and Weyworld, but after watching groups of soldiers slug it out in Homeworld in an early build of the combat implementation, it became immediately obvious a number of things were very off. Great care had been taken to create a peaceful Zen like atmosphere in Godus. Everything from the pacing, the visuals and the music and sound effect had been tailored towards this goal. And now these bloodthirsty warriors were ruining it all."
Another consideration was when to introduce combat, what role it would play and how. After all, we really want to create engaging wars. The structure and layout of Homeworld simply wasn’t very condusive to introducing combat in a big way. Weyworld was better, but still not ideal and I didn’t want players to have to wait that long to get stuck into battles. Homeworld takes a long time to play through after all. A good solution would be to create a whole new world designed with combat in mind from the ground up allowing us to showcase how this can be more like wars than just combat in the most impactful way while retaining the tranquil gameplay in Homeworld.
Example combat map
So the decision was made to introduce combat in a brand new world. We’ve been experimenting with world size and pacing and right now we’re finding combat works much better on smaller, more concise worlds. The pace of building and expansion (basically all the non-combat stuff) felt much too slow for a combat world, so we’ve also been experimenting with streamlining and speeding up that part of the gameplay. We want players to get stuck into combat quickly without being bogged down too long in extensive village building and sculpting.
Example combat map
Looking at the Graphical User Interface
We had to make some extensive changes to the control scheme and GUI to accommodate the needs of combat mechanics too. While leashing was a fine way of getting followers about in Homeworld, it proved too slow and imprecise for ordering troops about. We added controls for moving selected Warbands anywhere or having them attack any target with a single click, more akin to what players would expect from an RTS game.
In the last update you saw the changes to the GUI. The banners are a great multipurpose feedback and control tool. At a glance you can see how many Warbands you have, what type of soldier they are, what kind of shape they are in and what they are currently doing. Not only that, but clicking one will centre your screen directly on the Warband allowing for fast navigation of the map to where it counts.
Of course, the new GUI features are taking up the space previously occupied by the Timeline button and unlocked cards display. The GUI change, different method of moving followers and various other mechanics adjustments are all contributing to making a combat world very different to Homeworld and Weyworld. Combat is rapidly evolving into an entirely separate mode altogether. The great advantage of this is that by keeping the gameplay experience of Homeworld and combat separate, we don’t have to try to squeeze everything into a single mode and make large GUI, tone and gameplay compromises. We already have systems and the precedent of delivering a different game mode within Godus (Voyages) and it’s becoming more and more attractive to deliver a combat experience in a similar manner.
Next Week - Programming
Anthony - Producer
Production time! Next week we'll have the finalisation of this combat sprint and a similarly in-depth look at the programming side of development with Richard.
"I've been stripping the tasks into JIRA for the next sprint and planning the finalisation week for this one. Next week, along with Richard's Programming Update, I'll share the contents of our next sprint plan and a small review of this one."
