Ready your necromancy spell-book - the wait is over! Nemire is ready for release on February 19.
Peace,
Egi
Nemire
Releasing February 19
Ready your necromancy spell-book - the wait is over! Nemire is ready for release on February 19.
Peace,
Egi
The End Is Near
New trailer for the game is now available on the Steam page and on YouTube
This is kind of big, but the game is pretty much done. I'm polishing and tying up the loose ends. I'm pretty confident to announce a release date this month.
See ya soon
Midgame Stream
Stream #1
Devlog #6: What enemies to expect
Principles of enemy design
One of the most important principles is ensuring that enemies are challenging but not annoying, meaning that they should present a significant challenge to the player while still being fun to fight against. Additionally, enemies should be diverse and distinctive, allowing players to differentiate between different types of enemies and develop strategies to overcome them. Another important principle is giving enemies weaknesses that can be exploited by the player, encouraging strategic thinking and planning. Lastly, enemies should synergize with each other, creating challenging and dynamic encounters that require players to adapt and respond to changing situations.
Enemy diversity
I follow two main rules for assigning enemy types to environments. Firstly, I ensure that no single enemy type appears in all environments, as this can make gameplay feel repetitive and predictable. Secondly, I assign environment-specific enemy types to each environment, matching the theme of the environment and highlighting the strengths of each enemy type. With each environment featuring different layouts and obstacles, players will need to adapt their tactics and strategies to overcome the challenges presented by each enemy type. By prioritizing diversity, distinctiveness, and strategic gameplay in my enemy design, I hope in creating an engaging and rewarding experience.
Enemy abilities
Each enemy type, based on their level, has a special ability, a trait, or both. These abilities are carefully crafted to challenge the player and their unique playstyle, forcing them to adapt and strategize accordingly. Since enemies typically specialize in one area, it is easier for players to develop effective strategies to counter them, adding an additional layer of depth to gameplay. In designing enemies, I also prioritize synergies between them. Enemy abilities and behavior are designed to work together, making the squad stronger as a whole and creating dynamic and challenging encounters for players.
Devlog #5: AI and game difficulty
This Devlog comes much sooner as I was able to put in a significant amount of time during the holiday period. I'm making sure that most important systems are working the way I imagined them to work.
Mission difficulty
Doing missions under a mission cluster increases human preparedness for that cluster which in turn increases the difficulty and further unlocks next clusters. This will now work together with a new system to select the right enemy units for the difficulty, human preparedness level and time.
For those who played the test version - the game will be slightly more challenging.
AI
Implemented a few different ways an enemy can choose a target. This will allow for hardcoding certain behavior for specific units. Additionally it can be changed in runtime, meaning that enemy target priorities can shift by a trigger event.
Positioning is also something AI will consider. It works the same way as choosing a target. Some enemies, for example: human archer will always seek cover and will not overextend.
I'm very happy how these systems turned out - it will help to give personality and function to units with very specific goals and strategies.
What's next
Next comes boss fights, more on that in the next Devlog most probably.
Devlog #4: Playtest Results
Player Feedback
With the end of #TurnBasedFest (https://turnbasedfest.com/) Public Playtest will be nearing it's end. I've gathered a lot of meaningful and constructed feedback. Most Play-testers were mentioning couple of the same things and I have to say - I completely agree. Let's go thru some notable points:
Improvements (already done):
- Camera is now less jumpy and zoomy. During Undead turn camera stays as Free-Cam. During Human turn camera is controlled by the game to keep focus on what is happening.
- Walking over fire inflicts damage. Previously standing until next turn on fire dealt damage. More tuning on damage required.
- More tooltips.
- Camera can be controlled by pushing mouse to the edge of the screen.
- Dozen of UI fixes and improvements in the Unit select page.
- Delay after attacking implemented to actually see full attack animation.
- Unit select page now correctly loads player units.
- New Archer ability: Piercing Arrow
New backlog items
- Game currently is way too easy. Needs more balancing.
TurnBasedFest
TurnBasedFest was incredibly awesome it was an honor to be part of it. New Wishlist addition count during these days was completely insane and unexpected, I am very grateful. Hi, to all new Wishlisters!
Notable Mention
Check out The Indie Buffet with Nemire gameplay:
Devlog #3: Environments
I'm easing in back to development at full speed. I got married since the last devlog and had some well deserved and long vacation. Honestly, getting back to it was pretty hard but I'm having so much fun working on Nemire.
Things done since the last update:
- Art for Forest zone
- Forest procedural generation
- Art for Village
- Village procedural generation
- Some polishing
Currently in progress is making Village zone to actually look and feel like a medieval village.
Environments
Game will launch with 4 environments: Graveyard, Forest, Village and Castle. Each environment will be procedurally generated with different rules. Each environment will not only look different but will play different. Let's dive right into each one.
Forest
Forest will contain quite a lot of trees blocking field of view with very few big open spaces.
Village
Village will be an open space with buildings. Offering mostly half cover outside and some more protected places in the human houses. I have so much more ideas to make this look amazing and so far it's incredibly fun to make art and code for this zone.
Graveyard
Graveyard is an open space with a lot of half covers and an occasional crypt. This will be the starting zone for the game.
Castle
No art for the castle yet. It will be a combination of narrow maze-like corridors and big open halls. This is where the last boss encounter will be.
What's next?
Wrap up with proc. gen. for Village zone together with all art. Then I most likely will be moving towards a new playable class. It's going to be melee and will introduce some new mechanics.
You
Thank you gamers and game devs for all the feedback! Every bit helps to make Nemire as good as possible.
Feedback about anything is very welcome and greatly appreciated.
Peace,
E
Devlog #2: Ability unlocks and combat visuals
It looks like two weeks is a pretty good time interval for game dev progress. Let's get right into what's new.
Combat and Abilities
Mage has received some love for Hellfire and Chain lightning abilities, improving how it looks to feel more impactful. Another addition is the Firewall ability.
Hellfire
This is how it looks with "Damage Cone" trait which also damages enemies in the cone behind.
Chain Lightning
Firewall
With Firewall ability main goals were to create a dynamic tile selection. Right now it is more of a utility ability to zone enemies and feels too weak compared to the other two.
Ability and Upgrade unlocks
Last few weeks I've been fighting with the UI for Ability and Upgrade unlocks. Here's how it looks:
There is now a Plus button to indicate available new Upgrade or Ability.
Then you can select what upgrade you like. The amount of how many upgrades you can choose from will depend on the difficulty you chose. In this picture it is shown for Easy difficulty which allows selection of any allowing for some wild builds.
Abilities are chosen in the same fashion.
Calendar
Week modifiers
Calendar is a big topic and will serve a pretty important role in how the game plays. There will be weeks with modifiers to the missions. Modifiers like weather, religious periods, celebrations, fantasy planetary events. All of which will apply modifiers to the missions. For example a religious tradition which requires humans to stop consuming food - making them weaker. Or a celebration of a historical event making humans more united and stronger, following by a week of a massive hungover. You get the point.
Events
Events will bring unavoidable boss battles. Think of it like drawing an Epidemic card in Pandemic board game. But in this case you are aware of it 7 weeks prior to prepare. One that is already in the game is a mob of villagers. Villagers grab their pitchforks, a bag of rocks and march to deal with you and your bunch of undead.
What's next
- Continued work on Mage abilities, remember, there has to be 6 for every class.
- It would be really beneficial to create a new environment for my own sanity and for more diversity in screenshots.
- I would love to start working on Berserker unit. I can see it in my head with his huge two handed axe.
You
What do You want to see more?
Ideas are very much welcome from anyone! You ant me can shape the game to be the best version of itself.
Devlog #1: Game difficulties and unit upgrade unlocks
Past few weeks I've been working on visuals and functionality of the main menus, proper save system and upgrade unlocks.
Main objective was to create a Run selection screen together with the flexible save system and difficulty selection. The Run select screen will display some info about saved runs like unit count, essence number and what week was reached.
The hardest bit will be setting what each difficulty actually mean. For difficulties I really don't want harder difficulty to mean "enemies have more HP" or "there is more enemies". Here's my thoughts on how difficulties may vary:
Difficulties
Normal
- Normal difficulty should provide a healthy challenge.
- Has to include permadeath.
- Unlocking an ability prompts to choose from 2 random abilities.
- Getting an Upgrade prompts to choose from 3 random Upgrades. (Maybe here we could do something clever to so the offer doesn't seem too random)
Easy
- Easy difficulty should be for people that like winning.
- No permadeath.
- Unlocking an ability prompts to choose from 3 random abilities.
- Getting an Upgrade prompts to choose from 9 random Upgrades. (Maybe here we could do something clever to so the offer doesn't seem too random)
- Longer time between Events (encounters)
Hard
- Permadeath.
- Unlocking an ability prompts to choose from 2 random abilities.
- Random Upgrades granted for units.
- Short time between Events (encounters)
Mission Select Tab
I've also remade the art and functionality for the Mission information display. Since missions are small scrolls that means the display had to be a scroll too. This provided an opportunity to rework how info is displayed about the mission and to remove "debug" text from there. I think the end result looks pretty good but I just might revisit for little improvements, as for everything.
What's next?
- Ability and Upgrade selection. Work has already started to be able to select Abilities and Upgrades when unit unlocks it.
- Next big thing will be giving "oomph" for the combat. Clear effects, pretty particles and a healthy amount of screen shake (possible to disable, of course). This is pretty much the reason why there is no gameplay video yet.
P.S
This was pretty fun to write, it could become a bi-weekly kind of thing. We'll see.