Genre: Point-and-click, Racing, Real Time Strategy (RTS), Simulator, Strategy, Indie
Godus
Combat Art Progress Update - June 12th
Following on from last week's update, Godus artist, Annah takes you through a few of the art elements being worked on during the current development sprint and a few words from Konrad.
Skinning & Modelling
"The Warbands are initially consisting of a small army of archers, so I thought it would be fun to give them a ‘Robin Hood’ style outfit and hat, with a quiver on their backs. "
"Their uniform colours (blue, red etc) denote whether their allegiance is to you or an enemy, and will help identify them in the field."
"However, after some in-game testing, we’ve realised that they needed to be modified slightly. Currently their build is very similar to a follower so it is quite hard to distinguish between each character (especially when you are zoomed far out, which is the popular viewpoint in when in combat.)"
"I’ve been bulking them up a bit, upgrading their costume, creating some female versions (because equal opportunities), and give their hats some more definition, among other things."
"The ‘skinning’ is the process of attaching the model to a rig, which has animations assigned to it. In Godus, we tend to use just a couple of rigs and I have to make sure the model is correctly skinned to these otherwise you can get some very strange character movements in game!"
Creating Warband Banners
"Warband banners appear when you create a warband through your military settlement."
"You move these around the map to navigate your warband. These banners need to show your colour, as well as the colour of the warband (something I’ll touch on in the GUI design below), be able to stack, animate, scale and potentially be carried by a member of the warband. The player banners also need to be easily distinguished from the enemy banners."
"At the moment the simplest way to show this is through a band of colour along the top that denotes your team colour, and the bottom colour displaying the warbands colour. The enemy banners are a different shape, and all one colour. Symbols on the banners may be added at a later date."
Combat UI - A Word from Konrad
Before Annah goes into detail regarding the user interface for combat, Konrad wanted to make sure people realise how much combat has changed and progressed from the Godus Alpha.
"While combat isn't new to Godus, some of our backers have experienced a crude, basic iteration of it in our early Alpha. At that time it really hadn't been the focus for development that it is now. This new combat implementation brought about some interesting changes and problems."
"The Alpha combat did not mesh well with the tone and feel of Godus. We experimented with introducing military settlements into Homeward & Weyword and the result was deemed very unsatisfactory, feeling very much out of place and shoehorned in."
“Over the last few months I’ve been experimenting with different worlds for combat to take place in. It’s changing the feel of what we have but for the better, I think."
Combat UI - Back to Annah!
"We needed a way of being able to select and view the warbands easily, as well as seeing their current status, even if they were not on screen."
"This involved rearranging the GUI a bit to allow for a strip of warband banners along the top. Initially, you will only be able to see the very bottom of a banner, but as soon as you are able to create a warband then it drops down slightly to notify you can do so through your Military Settlement."
"Each banner will display the colour of the warband (which is the same as the field warband banner), the warband rank (in stars along the top), an animated character that will represent whatever the warband is doing at that moment (i.e. running in a particular direction, standing still, or fighting), and the number at the base tells you how many there are in the warband. "
"When a warband's health begins to deteriorate, the banner becomes more and more ragged. When they are close to being wiped out, they'll be virtually ruined. Clicking on a top banner will take you to that warband, highlighted by a ring on the ground and potentially a line from the banner for the war band."
"We’ve moved the card button to the bottom left, so we can install a warning button. This spiky circle will tell you if a settlement, abode or warband is under attack, and clicking on it will take you directly to the problem area."
The GUI is always subject to change throughout implementation and testing as we discover the best ways for combat navigation.
Next Week
The next progress update will focus on the Design elements of this sprint. Konrad will give everyone a unique look into creating the artificial intelligence and level design structure. Here's a reminder of the sprint plan:
Thanks and catch up soon,
22cans team!
Friday Update - June 5th
Hello everyone!
Sorry for the period of quiet lately, we've had an exceedingly busy few weeks. In case you haven't heard we've had a number of new people join our band of creatives here at 22cans, including our new CEO - Simon Phillips!
We've managed to pull Simon away from his busy day to say hello:
“Hi, Simon here. It’s been an incredibly exciting and an incredibly busy few weeks here at 22cans. I’ve recently joined the company as CEO and part of that role includes looking at all the ongoing ways we can work smarter, more dynamically and produce better results."
Within this we solidified our company mission statement and that is ‘To create world changing ideas’, something that I genuinely believe we can do with the incredible talent we have in the studio. Godus is still very much part of our plans and will continue to be developed with the support of our, rather passionate, community."
"I hope to interact with the community as much as time allows and look forward to the team bringing high quality, meaningful updates on progress."
You can read more about Simon's arrival and the rest of the new staff on Develop Online
Right, what's been happening on Godus recently?
Well today we're starting something new, fresh, snazzy with the way we deliver information to our community and players! (That's you!)
Producer Anthony - another of the new 22cans members - has laid out our Sprint plan for Combat over the next few weeks and going forward we'll be giving you and idea of what we'll be working and how we're doing it.
A sprint is a period of time, usually one to three weeks, where the development team are all focused on completing specific elements. We use sprints internally to set reachable goals and targets to further the often tricky development cycle.
In Sprint 1, we'll be looking at the work done by the programmers, artists and designers. Here's our plan for the next three weeks.
Anthony - Producer
"In this sprint the team is busy working on the archers units. As one of the brand new addition to combat in Godus, it is really important that controlling and killing of these characters feel awesome. The team has been hard at work to make sure the basic combat interactions feel just right when put into players’ hands: from improving the pathfinding to iterating on the archers 3D models, this first sprint will all be about what players will see and manipulate when combating in Godus."
Over the coming week's we'll be sharing insights from the Art, Programming & Design team about their Sprint progression, challenges and impressions. Next week we'll be featuring Annah's upcoming artwork.
Thanks and catch up soon,
22cans team!
Friday Update - June 15th
TEST
Friday Update - May 15th
Thanks Pavle!
At the end of the month, Godus programmer Pavle has decided to move on to other things. Pavle has been known around the studio for his messy desk, passionate nature and love of Jaegerbombs.
Pavle has also been involved with our Kickstarter 'Making of' Documentary which is getting the finishing touches ironed out right now. Keep an eye out for more Documentary news in the coming weeks.
We wish him all the best with all his future endeavours.
We asked Pavle to have his own say about his time at 22cans:
"22cans was my first job, ever."
"I got an internship here after one year of university at the Instituto Superior Técnico in sunny Portugal because of an off-the-cuff e-mail I sent Peter Molyneux. In that e-mail I explained that I, while I was completely unexperienced and mostly uneducated, I was passionate about making amazing games and I was willing to work for very little money."
"I never expected anyone to even read that e-mail."
"Peter had just put up the address on a couple of articles about 22cans and I expected him to be getting flooded with correspondence, but he forwarded me to Tim Rance, who got me on a couple of skype calls with himself and the team (22cans had around 6 people at this time). Based on these calls the people at 22cans flew me over to Guildford and changed my life."
Pavle, Jack & Paul during development of Curiosity
"Through the madness of Curiosity I learned how to work really hard while still having an amazing time. At the same time I learned how to live by myself. With the Kickstarter campaign I was amazed by the support of people from around the world, and then with Godus I learned, and I'm still learning, how much a product needs to evolve to become great, and how much work that takes."
"Leaving has been a very hard decision but I'm comforted by the fact that I'll remain in touch with all the friends I've made here and Godus is left in the incredibly capable hands of Richard, Ryan and the rest of 22cans."
"My three years at 22cans were the most formative, interesting, amazing years of my life. I leave owing a tremendous debt of gratitude to everyone at 22cans that has taught me something or just helped me survive these secretly amazing grey English winters."
"I'll still be working as hard as I can these next 2 weeks but I might spend my last day hiding in the kitchen, reminiscing of the good times."
Meet Ryan
We have a new addition to the Godus programming team - Say hello to Ryan!
Tell us about yourself, Ryan!
"So.. My name is Ryan and I'm currently interning at 22cans as part of my course at Goldsmiths University. Before that, I studied Computer Science and previously worked for a design company as a creative technologist."
"I wanted to work for 22cans because I really enjoyed curiosity and Godus and I thought that it'd be great to be a part of the talented team at 22cans."
Ryan is currently working on our Combat Warbands - Creating a navigation system that allows the warband to navigate to their paths whilst staying in formation to give a more realistic feel to them. Neat!
Friday Update - April 24th
What's been happening this week?
This week the team have working hard at polishing off a Combat build for an internal preview that, if successful, will be pushed to our Opt-In testing branch early next week! Most of the initial time consuming groundwork has been implemented and the team are now focusing on challenging artificial intelligence, tricky GUI elements and Annah's awesome art assets.
Thanks Jack!
As you may have heard, Jack Attridge - one of the original Godus co-designers left the 22cans team this week. He's off to start his own gaming venture after years of mentoring from Peter Molyneux and the rest of the team. Before Jack left, he was in charge of finishing off the 22cans Documentary mentioned in our Kickstarter.
Keep an eye out for this in the near future!
Good Luck Jack!
Fancy New Godus Combat Art!
Annah has created two new bits of Godus artwork and they're combat themed! He's a little glimpse at the sort of destruction that you can come to expect from the combat found in the final version.
With all this talk of Godus Combat and Opt-In builds, we thought it might be time to remind the community about how to access our often buggy but feature packed Developer Builds! Please remember that these builds are meant for testing and might include all kinds of bugs that haven't been swatted by Martin yet!
Now is the perfect opportunity to dive in to Opt-In!
How to Opt In to Developer Builds
If you'd like to participate in our regular developer builds, just follow the easy instructions below.
Go to your Steam Library
Right click on GODUS and select "Properties"
Click on the "Betas" tab
Enter your beta access code, which is ‘22canstester'
Click "Check Code"
Click on the dropdown menu and make sure “releasetest” is selected
Hit "Close" and you're all set
At this point it's probably a good time to mention that players should create a back up of their Godus save games. In the event of a nasty bug, they'll be able to revert back with minimal problems!
Just follow the steps below:
Right click on Godus in your steam library
Select "Properties"
Go across to the "LOCAL FILES" tab
Select "Browse Local Files
Find the folder starting with "prf1" and make a copy somewhere save
Then to reload your old save if something goes wrong simply copy the contents from the OLD prf older into the NEW folder prf folder and when you next load the game it should be back to your old world.
Konrad's Korner
This week Konrad returned from his travels around Japan. After guzzling many of the sweets and goodies he brought back, we managed to ask him a few questions from community members regarding Combat!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7pjVrdxULA
Recent Bug Fixes
Martin is constantly inundated from the community with bugs found within Godus. Here's a recent list of ones Martin has squashed.
The game crashes after relaunching the game while on any tutorial
The game keeps on crashing when the user builds the first abode then relaunches the game
User is unable to proceed to 'Weyworld' after unlocking and sailing the 'Ark' on 'Homeworld'
The game randomly hitches while playing through the game
The land under some Settlements reverts to its initial land formation after the user plays again on Weyworld
Upgrading the 'Farming Settlement' will change the 'Settlement Size' value for 'Mining Settlement' and 'Builder Settlement' info modal on the 'Timiline' UI
The description of the Shrine of Stamina ( Stronger Followers ) on the Timeline UI is incorrect
Astari festival started after conquering Astari Village
Various Translation Errors
The value / text displayed on the Super Boost card description is incorrect
Friday GIF!
Here's a look at Richard's AI in motion! Here the computer AI is creating, squishing and evolving their follower lands. You can see that Richard isn't actually controlling it as the mouse pointer is completely stationary!
See you next week & keep sculpting!
Check out our new Support Portal!
Hello!
We recently realised that our current support methods weren't working as well as we were hoping it would. Each day we we receive numerous support tickets from players on PC, Mac & Mobile platforms and we weren't able handle them in a way that we were happy with.
So today, our new Support Portal is available to everyone! Check it out here - 22cans Support
Here's what it looks like:
About the new Support Portal
22cans Community Manager, Dave has been working on bringing it to life. Let's ask Dave some questions!
What does the new support portal do?
"In our new, tidy and clear layout, it's never been easier to find the answers to any of your Godus problems, whether it's looking for some in-games tips or if you've come across new bug and you'd like to know if we're aware of it."
Our Community Manager Dave dealing with support queries.
How is it better than before?
"The previous portal was really rather clunky and definitely seemed quite hard to find the correct information needed to answer your Frequently Asked Questions! Now you can access the FAQ's through selection of easy to use flows."
How does it help 22cans?
"This new Customer Support portal, will allow us to answers Support Tickets more quickly and allow us to track down the newer bugs that are currently in-game."
Cheers Dave!
The new Support Portal is available now and will be able to answer many questions from PC, Mac & Mobile versions of Godus. If you feel that your question cannot be answered by the new system, tickets are still available to help out with the difficult problems!
It's all gone a bit hoppy here at 22cans! Join us as we take a look at the Godus' Eggquinox Extravaganza!
For the next 7 days, Godus has been turned into an Easter playground! Our new artist Annah has been hopping away all week creating a host of new Easter & Rabbit related content.
The Astari have donned extremely cute Rabbit masks and will continue to run havoc around the lands.
Miners have replaced their usual helmets with broken egg shell hats and Farmers now harvest their crops wearing yellow chick outfits!
The green grass and brown soil has been transformed into the pastel shades of Spring and your lands have been covered in daffodils & tulips.
Settlements have been kitted out with egg related props such as baskets full of coloured eggs, little burrows with a bunny bum poking out and more!
All available right now for free on PC & Mac!
Bye fabs!
As a few of you already know, fabs is leaving 22cans and off to work in the mystifying world of VR.
fabs has been involved with 22cans for well over two years and has helped Curiosity & Godus progress from the first beginnings into two successful titles across different platforms.
We managed to corner fabs to talk about his time at 22cans and working on Godus before he disappeared.
What's the best thing you've got out of your time at 22cans?
"It’s been educational for me."
"Coming to 22cans right at the beginning, back when Curiosity was an idea and not even announced. I was thrown in at the deep end with all sorts of new things."
"I had to pick up C# for Unity, and I had to learn PHP, and how to run web servers for getting the cube data to and from iPhones and iPads. That was another thing I’d never worked on: mobiles, I’d always been a PC or console developer before. For a lot of the server work, I got to use C++11 in Linux for the first time professionally, which was really pleasant, as I’m a big fan of C++. 11 and 14 were like an old band suddenly releasing a new album, which is funny, because Godspeed You! Black Emperor just reunited to do some more music together too."
"Things like that have been constant at 22cans. Learning, and using that new knowledge, has kept me constantly interested. When we had a lull of cool new things, I would feel the nag to do something, and that’s probably why I started dabbling in Haskell."
What made you join 22cans?
"I came to the cannery off the back of a console game release after hearing that Peter Molyneux was setting up a new company. I wanted to be in that team, and be part of a new and potentially historic moment in gaming. I am not driven by simple financial gain, so when I saw that he was going to try to do something different, I felt I couldn’t say no to the offer of a position on the team."
"The code team has almost no overlap, with juniors and seniors, with console developers and those that had come from mobile, and those from outside games entirely. The mix has been both challenging and inspiring; I’d never change it."
"The varied skills create an atmosphere of shared knowledge and respect, with curators for different areas and technologies."
fabs is sad on his last day.
What was the best moment from working at 22cans?
"In previous employments, the times that have shone have always been the times where I’ve been learning and implementing new things. Inventing just in time, and producing to a deadline is a fantastic feeling."
"The best moment for me was just before the kickstarter campaign when I was given a weekend to implement a prototype for the landscape rendering for Godus."
"The early days of Godus were really fast, get stuff done, working as a team with a really well communicated common goal. Those times we iterated so fast that everyone was excited to see what had changed by the end of the day."
So, Godus?
"Godus was a lot of fun to develop for me, as I got to spend quite a bit of time optimising the game, and working with landscape rendering and shaders. Shaders are a place where you can invent quickly, see your mistakes and successes really fast, and iterate on problems without fear of breaking things."
"They’re a thing of beauty to a person like me, who loves maths and wants to make something that other people will enjoy. Optimisation is fun, but in a different way. Sometimes, you have to rewrite quite a lot of code to make a difference, and sometimes you can just spot a mistake, or something is in the wrong order, and a single line of code difference can make a huge impact."
"Take for example the beautify code, there was a bug in there that meant that beautify was being slowed down by houses, a very simple mistake made by someone when they first implemented the update, all fixed by adding a spatial lookup, and now the frame rate has stabilised completely."
"Optimising the landscape was an exercise in constant refinement. There were never any big gains to be made, but there was always a slightly better way to access and use the data. Memory bandwidth was always the bottleneck in that code as voxels and vertices and how much influence they have on each other causes a lot of reads and writes from memory."
"That time is over now."
Are you leaving Godus in a good shape?
"Godus is as pretty as it needs to be (coding wise), and there’s not much more performance we can get out of it without a major rewrite."
"Due to this, last year I took over the savegame systems, making sure that saves were as robust as they could be, as backward compatible as possible, and as recoverable as possible when all that fails. The amount of data in godus, the followers, their houses, where they are going, the land on which they are walking, that all adds up to quite a bit, and to make that seamlessly migrate between different devices is no simple task. So many moving parts leads to so many corner cases, and it’s the corner cases where the bugs hide."
"There’s a hundred war stories about savegame bugs, but the scariest one was the case where the houses just would all vanish at once. We finally traced it down to an issue with the network layer not handling really large lumps of data, and the houses were the biggest thing. The quick fix, and the one that was put in just before release on iOS, was to just zip the data before storing it, hoping that we could find the real cause and fix it properly quick enough to put out a new built. Finding the root cause, proving it, and then fixing it was much harder. We got hold of the source code so we could trace it down, and I was able to find the single line where a message header was being misread under very specific circumstances, because it was overlapping a boundary between two larger container packets that were just the right size and timing."
"The bug was found in code that had been working for years, in other people’s released games, and yet it was there and only found because we had really big lumps of save data for our houses while doing other smaller messages. When you find these bugs, you start to think that there are probably millions of bugs out there going unnoticed, waiting to break something in a horrible way, because they are in code that has been thoroughly tested and been working for years."
fabs is taking it hard
You were always pretty involved with the community, any messages for them?
"I’ve enjoyed being more involved with the community, both on the Proboards and on Steam forums. I’ve never held my punches, and I think the community warmed to my openness."
"I’ve got plans in the years to come of going full Indie, not for some time, but when I do, I know that an open forum is a healthy forum, and humour goes hand in hand with misunderstanding."
Oh... How about that secret feature you were working on?
"I had a last Hurrah! before I headed off in the shape of a semi secret feature, and a super secret feature. Not things I specialise in, either of them. The semi secret feature was just some new editor tools, which will be useful in case we do move to a more level based Godus, one that has real progression in a the tradition of Peter’s other games."
"I always felt that the desktop version of Godus was always Black and White 3 in spirit, and in that respect, multiple worlds of your homeworld seemed like an inevitability."
"Regarding the super secret feature, I think I’ve made it pretty public that I’m not a fan of F2P, and so it wasn’t so much a task that only I could do, but one that I found to be quite therapeutic."
"I hope you all like it."
Friday Update - March 27th
Hello Followers!
It's been another busy week with the Godus team. A new artist joined the team, our Community Moderators visited the studio and Konrad has been forever tweaking his designs for the upcoming combat implementation.
Say Hello to Annah!
We have a new addition to the Godus team this week. Say hello to our new artist, Annah!
Who is Annah?
"I went to Uni and studied Computer Animation before working in London at a gamification & educational games company for several years."
Why did you pick 22cans?
"I chose 22Cans because I love the worlds they create, they look really awesome and I wanted to be part of that."
What have you been up to in your first week here?
"First week has been fun and challenging, wrapping my head around the various systems and workflows. I've started work on making some military assets and combat related stuff. Oh and I've also getting to know the team's personality and quirks ;)"
As Annah mentioned, she's hard at work on creating military and combat assets for the new update. We're extremely pleased that Annah has joined us and can't wait to see what she'll create!
Konrad's Korner!
We're pretty sure Konrad doesn't like the name we've give his little weekly segment and that's exactly why we're continuing with it! Konrad is once again offering his statistics and behaviours document to the community for everyone to glance at.
Once again, the information and designs in the document are all subject to change and Konrad is always tweaking these designs.
It's a bit different this time and it's probably isn’t going to interest everyone, but feel free to have a look over it and tell us what you think. We're always looking for constructive feedback!
This week's big bug fixes
Martin, our QA Lead is always breaking the game. We think he's actually starting to enjoy breaking the rest of the team's work. Take a look at this week's most irritating bugs that have been fixed.
The game crashes after relaunching the game while on any tutorial
Game crashes after migrating
The 'Edit Worlds' menu option was missing
User's save is crashing on boot
Astari settlement in Homeworld is a Frontier Hut
The progress goes back to drowning tutorial after the game crashes when migrating from iOS to Android
User's Custom Homeworlds can become corrupted
"Chest in your territory:" text is missing on the Story when changing to any language
The description of the Shrine of Stamina (Stronger Followers) on the Timeline UI is incorrect
Gained homeless Astari is not building abodes on free plot on Weyworld
New Combat Build Available!
We've uploaded the latest build to Steam and it should be available on opt-in now.
Again, this is a broken, part implemented feature and we know it'll be buggy as hell
As always your feedback is really appreciated.
New Features!
Stealth - Warbands can now hide under trees to enter stealth, lying in wait to launch a surprise attack on their opponents. Larger warbands are more difficult to hide and will need be standing amongst more trees to enter stealth.
Burning the trees which are providing an enemy warband with cover will force them out of stealth.
Friendly warbands in stealth will fade out slightly to indicate their status. Enemy warbands will become invisible (well - you can still see their drop shadows - we're using this for testing)
"Turreting" - Warbands which have a significant height advantage over their opponent now won't automatically chase them and will instead hold their position and retain their advantage.
Armour buff - Warbands now have an armour value which can be buffed by hiding amongst trees.
Selected warbands are now shown with a single selection ring.
Warbands have movement arrows indicating their direction of travel (still very much a work-in-progress)
Selected warbands now have a 'Stop Move' button, to cancel a move in-progress.
This week Konrad has been working on the tricky mathematics and complicated statistics behind combat while Pavle & Richard have been programming the battle formations, troop movements and dangerous projectiles that are all an important part of our next update!
Oh and we’re happy to announce that Build 11468 is out of our Opt-In System and has been promoted to an official release.
Here's Richard working on the combat projectiles.
What’s new?
What's in Build 11468? Well...
Magical blue chests have appeared across the world, each telling an important and mystical part of the full story of Homeworld and its past.
Build 1146 also fixes all of these pesky bugs:
Archers convert to Astari before the player can deal with them.. Making them stupidly powerful
Users are experiencing drastic slow-down after reaching 1200 Followers on the Main Steam branch
Some users are reporting a crash on load which is unrelated to the Balance File Editor
If the user has 'Gem Spend Confirmations' turned off, they will never know how many Gems they've spent on an Upgrade
If the user renames their Steam Workshop worlds, they will no longer load
Cliff Sculpting God Power doesn't appear to work
The Keyboard Shortcut modification window is almost unusable
The application will crash and no longer allow access to Voyages if the user abandons a mission within the Voyage
No Happiness Meter In Weyworld
Auto-Collection Shrine Crash
Crash in Info panel with too many settlements
Welcome to Konrad's Korner!
Konrad managed to spare a little time from his hectic schedule to answer a few questions that the Godus community had recently pitched to him. The video contains information about unit experience, God participation and more!
Just click the video below!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srYiaYszVWs
Design Document V3
Konrad also is allowing the third version of his Unit Characterisation Design Document for Update 7: Combat to be picked apart by the community. The third iteration of the document features 'Phase-1' of a '3-Phase' combat implementation. This document once again focuses on Warbands, March Mode, Controls, Unit Generation and Forming Armies!
Once again, the information and designs in the document are all subject to change and Konrad is always tweaking these designs.
This time it's a 37 page PDF file (it just keeps getting longer!) and once again, it's probably isn’t going to interest everyone, but feel free to have a look over it and tell us what you think.
We'll release something a little different next week!
And finally..
Seeing that it's Friday, we thought it might be nice to publish a little tease of the Combat we've been working hard on!
Interested in keeping up to date with the team's daily doings? Take a look at the Daily Dev Activity on the 22cans website - Click Here!
Thanks for your continued support and keep sculpting!
