Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Role-playing (RPG), Simulator, Strategy
NovaMundi: The Spear of Chaquén
NovaMundi 1.0 Full Release coming soon, October 12th!
NovaMundi is an exploration game with tactical combat in which you lead a group of indigenous warriors to traverse the vast and dangerous territories of the Andean mountains seeking to unite the Muisca populations and prepare them to stand against the upcoming invasion efforts from European powers in the XVI century.
NovaMundi now has a Full Release date: October 12th, 2024!
We are working hard to make it through the finish line with something worthy. We appreciate all the help you can provide letting your friends and content creators about the game; share about it in your gaming communities!
We picked the October 12th date because of its importance for indigenous communities in America, which we believe greatly aligns with the message of NovaMundi.
As we work towards it, there's a new Early Access version available and it comes with many important improvements!
The visuals when you start the game have been greatly improved; the start time of the day has been changed so it begins a little bit earlier and you now get to see the sunrise, including activating the mist of the mountains for dramatic effect. I like how it ended up.
The parameters for Mist to appear have been tweaked around so it should now be more likely to end up caught on it (previous version it was much less likely to happen, and only in the paramo biomes which make a minority of the map).
Now let’s talk about combat. The movement speed for units in combat has been tweaked to avoid “The Flash”-like super quick units and enemies when they were wearing ornaments of speed or otherwise had elevated stats. They are now quicker but the speed calculations were divided in tiers instead of escalating infinitely.
Critical fixes were made to the Spanish units; their attack power was being duplicated because of an error in the animations setup! their armors were also nerfed a little bit to make them a bit more beatable (they are still super challenging, don’t worry!). Their danger values were also changed to prevent a lot of them jumping at the player at once too soon.
The quantity of blowgunners per enemy party has been capped to two; this is both to avoid battles been too easy but also too many poisoned units. Enemy parties now can also have Muisca units on their side (traitors!) giving them much more variety.
Caverns are now populated with more enemies and sport some visual improvements; get ready for a bigger update for caverns on Full Release, or maybe before!
Let’s now check some changes on the UI/UX side, some of which were long-standing.
The biggest change comes in the shape of multi-step tooltips; hovering over an item or unit will now show some basic info about it, and then after 2 seconds you should see more detailed info; this helps navigate loot and inventory screens without the extended info cluttering the display, while at the same time obtaining useful info when needed. Detailed info for weapons and armor was also extended to include the strengths and weaknesses vs different damage types.
An indicator was added to the Quests button, it turns on whenever you have new quests available; this is accompanied by notifications when you are assigned a new quest or when you complete one, so you don’t miss them!
The title screen and the new game flow have been revamped for clarity. This also included rewriting the credits completely (they were severely outdated!)
Some more assorted bugfixes and improvements:
Improved image for the directional cursor in the minimap. Reduced reputation gained for discoveries. Death and injury sounds are enabled back The ages-old “unit skating” bug is hopefully gone now Knife attacks were causing no damage at all Upcoming improved Intro We are working to improve the intro of the game including a set of great illustrations made by Laura Rubio, as well as a voice-over in the Muyscamuy language, translated and acted by Jose Manuel Gómez. It’s going to be great.
Interview in National Radio Most of the devteam assembled again to be interviewed by a Colombian national radio station. I’ll share more about it when it’s available online!
NovaMundi – Battlegrounds [0.43]
It’s been over seven months since the last version of NovaMundi, I did a preview post back on May 31 of what was coming, but the new version is finally out! I will try to summarize what we are shipping here:
Combat Areas At long last, there are now several maps where combat takes place, based on whether you are close to a town, or the biome where the engagement took place (plains, forests, wetlands or even mountain “páramos”); additionally the maps are much bigger now, so instead of a simple faceoff you’ll have to maneuver your units around to meet your enemies.
Overworld Movement Time compression has been removed, instead you will be able to “sprint” in the overworld, to move quicker at the expense of stamina. This will allow you to maneuver and evade chasing expeditions or animal packs.
These chasing expeditions are now affected by terrain, as well as the visibility of your expedition (so they will move slower if they cannot see you while you are in a forest or during the night). Your party itself will move slower during nigh time as well, since you never know what you are going to step into.
A critical fix was implemented to the “lost track” checks, so it should now be possibly to lose them without walking for days.
Invaders Camps You will now see invader camps scattered thru the map. You can decide to raid them for some cool lot in exchange for a hard battle.
New Weapon: Blowgun Blowguns have been reintroduced to the new units model; you can now equip and use them. They have extra range and can inflict negative status effects in your enemies…
…however, you are most likely to suffer these maladies in your own party, as the enemy groups often have a couple of these guys at least. So keep some healing herbs around!
Combat Flow The combat flow has been improved with attack animations now playing continuously instead of breaking to idle status, this makes battles feel much more exciting.
Additionally, units now move MUCH quicker in battle, they actually run this time!
Icons and UI With her passage through Slashware, talented illustrator Alicia Mendez (who also did a lot of foundational work for Yuhalak) left us some sweet icons for:
The perks you can use to personalize your runs The status effects for units (poisoned, sick, healing, etc) The modifiers for items (magical, high/low quality, special, etc)
She also helped us with some UI art for the floating dialogs which make the game looks much more smooth.
The item modifier icons are also shown now in the unit detail panel, so it’s easier to check what kind of stuff you have on.
Camping Camping has been simplified: You no longer have to carry tents around, or pick up the camp manually when you finish using it. You can also now be ambushed by wild enemies, and they are no joke!
A cap was also introduced to prevent consecutive ambushes during the same night.
Discoveries Animal discoveries have been divided between big animals and small critters; small critters continue working mostly the same but are uncapable of causing a lot of damage to many party members (some of them won’t even do any damage).
Big animals will now spawn hostile wild animal packs that will attack you most of time time, and they are no joke! They have been integrated more seriously into combat, you can now see their remaining hit points and other stats when clicking on them.
Discoveries also now provide a reputation bonus (that you can use to hire units); their overworld icons have been changed and you will now be able to see them from afar. For plan discoveries you will now get a notification of the amount of items you grabbed as well.
UI Art Art by Inkiluana has been added to the game over screen which had been neglected for too long.
The main menu art has been replaced back with the beautiful art created by Simernio, years ago.
Caverns (Duitama Cave for now) Some small fixes were made before focusing in the “spelunking” facet, likely coming next month; giant spiders were fixed so they can actually attack, and other animals were added to the cave for variety. The number of spawned enemies was also increased. And a blue shimmering light was added to the altar so you don’t miss it.
And that’s it for now! I hope you find these changes exciting… we continue working towards the full release, keep an eye out!
NovaMundi - Icons of Status [0.42.3]
Version 0.42.3 has been in the works for a long time now, however it’s still a minor version because it's focused in a small but long requested UI improvement, as well as balancing the start game experience. There’s some ongoing work to add animations for the missing weapons, which you will see probably in the next version.
The biggest UI change is the status effects affecting the expedition members are now displayed as icons with tooltip instead of the text, so it should be much more readable now.
Special and Magical modifiers applied to weapons of enemies are now tied to the “danger level” of the game, i.e. they will become stronger as days go by. Spanish trailblazers are also now equipped with European armor.
Some improvements to the start game experience: Your first explorer will now start with a cursed charm that will resurrect him once. We added this to prevent early game situations that might doom you. The first battle against two raiders is now much less risky.
Minor UI improvements
Display a notifications when a expeditionary dies on an accident
Tooltip responsive size tweaks
v0.42.2 with small fixes
- Anxious Perk has been added - Throw in a couple of raiders at the player at the beginning for fun - When combat starts, pause after a little bit so that units don't look like statues - Special and Magical modifiers should now be correctly assigned to armor - Spanish grammar fixes - Prevent applying effects to dead units. - Prevent triggering effect while the combat is paused. - Balance changes especially vs. Spanish Units
NovaMundi – Clash on the Highlands [0.42.1]
NovaMundi is a procedural exploration game with tactical combat in which you lead a group of indigenous warriors and explorers to traverse the vast and dangerous territories of the Andean mountains seeking to unite the Muisca populations and prepare them to stand against the upcoming invasion efforts from European powers in the XVI century.
NovaMundi is available now on Steam Early Access! GET IT NOW (or wishlist it) if you like what you see!
Version 0.42 focuses in COMBAT, it’s the result of about two months of work of the team and, while there still some improvements to be done in the balancing, UI and visuals, it already changes a lot of how you much approach the game. Here are some of the most important changes brought by this version:
Combat As promised in the previous update, you will now be able to change the weapons, armor and accessory equipped on your units; we implemented nor only a bunch of base weapons and armor, but also many magical, special and quality modifiers that affect the stats and special effects associated with each. Shields were also added, adding the possibility of fully blocking attacks in exchange of sacrificing a stat boost. There are also now Cursed items you cannot remove with variations of the magical effects of the uncursed item.
Closely related to this are the concepts of weapon and armor types, for instance “blunt” weapons are effective against “hard” armor. This is also reflected now in the floating UI in combat.
Enemies with an equipped ranged weapon will fall back to a stone knife when the enemies are at melee range; they switch back after the combat is over or they are able to put some air between them and their enemies.
The responsiveness of selecting units and changing commands has been improved greatly.
The battle loot calculations have been changed to not include food, and give weapons based on these equipped by the defeated enemies, damaging their quality level randomy.
A new item, the Condor’s Blessing, is featured as rewards in towns and can be used to level up.
Exploration You can now be ambushed while camping, and you cannot camp or enter towns if you are being chased by an enemy.
The max number of units in your expedition is now 12.
Trade Each town will now value items differently, which can be helpful to know where to buy and where to sell.
The inventory of the wandering merchants inventory reduced and randomized.
Perks A lot of new perks implemented including Kiss of Chia, Follower of Huitaca, Gullible
And that’s it for now! I hope you find these changes exciting… we continue working towards the full release, keep an eye out!
The Combat System Open Beta is on! (v0.40.0)
IT IS TIME!
Time for what you say?
TIME TO BETA TEST!
The combat system is now feature-complete! At least mathematically speaking…
We’re still missing some models, UI elements, and sound effects. Some adjacent systems are also missing, but hey! You can whack things now in a much more fun way!
Of course, this means the update is not ready for an official release, you deserve a polished and great product! But we can’t do this alone.
While we’ve tested this update’s features a lot, we would appreciate your help to cover all situations; since the player’s skill influences whether a battle is hard or not, an experienced player will have a much easier time playing than a newbie, and we can’t balance the whole game as if all players are experts... that’s where you come in!
Right now, you can access the open beta by going into your Steam games library, right-clicking on NovaMundi, and following this menu route:
Properties…->Betas
On the “Betas” menu, you’ll see a “Beta participation” drop-down menu. Click on it and select “openbeta Open Beta Testing”. You can opt out of the beta at any time by following the same route and just clicking “none” on the drop-down menu.
If you decide to participate in the beta, we thank you! And we would love to hear all feedback from you!
To do this, just go to the Steam forums or better yet, to our Discord server at https://discord.gg/u8aZDw9
What can you expect?
You will now be able to find or acquire weapons and armor, and equip them to your units
There is, of course, a new set of weapons and armor types
The equipment can now be affected with quality and special effect modifiers, as well as Magical blessings and Curses.
The equipment for the enemies is also generated considering these modifiers, and the loot acquired is generated directly from it
Ranged weapon users carry a knife to defend themselves when enemies get too close.
You’ll also find that the leveling system has been revamped.
We are looking for feedback mainly in three areas:
Are the systems fun? Does combat seem fair? Are there weapons that are very OP?
Is the leveling system fun? Is it worth it to protect an experienced unit? Is a level-up an exciting thing? Do you perceive the increase in power from level to level? Is the pace of level-up good?
Are there any bugs? A bug is anything that you perceive shouldn’t happen or isn’t working as intended!
When reporting a bug, please provide as much information as possible! What were you doing when it happened? Can you reproduce it? How can it be reproduced?
We hope you have a lot of fun with this beta, and we’re looking forward to hearing from you!
Game on!
Combat system improvements info, Beta is coming soon!
Hello everyone! My name is Stoltverd, and I’m one of the developers here at Slashware. Today, I’ll be taking Slashie’s place to tell you about an upcoming update on Novamundi’s combat. And let me tell you… It’s big.
We’ll finally allow characters to change/equip weapons: no more will characters be limited in their weapon selection to what they were carrying at the moment of their recruitment. Archers will use spears and clubs if you need them to do so! That doesn’t mean they should… but they can. No more will you be screwed if your frontline is destroyed. And talking about ranged weapon users, all of them will now carry a knife to defend themselves when enemies get too close.
In regard to weapons, new types will be included. All are unique in how they work and look and the damage they inflict. Some inflict piercing damage, others slashing or blunt; and all of them interact in different ways with the new armors that are coming.
But that’s not all! Equipment pieces can now have many different modifiers. Quality, special effects, and magical blessings, all can modify how a weapon is used and works.
Watch out though… Some equipment pieces may very well be cursed!
Equipment and how combat works are not the only things we touched. We transformed every aspect surrounding them too, including how to acquire equipment, how enemies get it assigned, and how they use them, how the leveling system works, how much experience is awarded to characters, how to keep track of units and their effects during combat, consequences of combat outside of the battlefield, and a long ETC…
This update is really going to be huge, you can expect a changelog several pages long. It involves reworks of many different systems, UI, and more… It’s been a true labor of love from all of us here at Slashware, and we can’t wait for you to get your hands on it!
This beta will be available for players on the beta testing group of our discord who have already acquired the Early Access version during next week. We hope to see you there!
v0.41.1 - Small hotfix
This patch fixes an issue with ambushes and adds a popup to preview the guards of the encampments.
NovaMundi – Towns of the Muisca [0.41]
NovaMundi is a procedural exploration game with tactical combat in which you lead a group of indigenous warriors and explorers to traverse the vast and dangerous territories of the Andean mountains seeking to unite the Muisca populations and prepare them to stand against the upcoming invasion efforts from European powers in the XVI century.
NovaMundi is available now on Steam Early Access! GET IT NOW (or wishlist it) if you like what you see!
Version 0.41 focuses on improving the exploration experience in many ways, read below for full info.
The biggest change for this version is that Muisca towns have been greatly expanded, filled with life, and given each one a unique identity. You will find different craftsmen working on them, merchants populating the markets, and guards defending the fenced areas. This was a long time coming and I’m happy we were finally able to include it.
Doing this required some heavy refactors in the procedural generation and in the structure of the game initialization, to make sure all the critical places could be placed adequately without clipping water bodies and steep mountains, and allowing scrapping the process and restarting if needed.
Additionally, the dialogs for all the townspeople have been revised, and some additional sidequests were added to match what they meant since there were some loose chats.
We are already working hard on the improvements over the combat system; as a preview to the next version, you will see the equipment slots for weapons and armor for the party members; note that you will still be unable to change them… that’s coming up very soon! We are adding different types of weapons and armor, damage types, mystical modifiers, and special effects. You are gonna love it!
As you can see, the “morale” of each individual member of the Expedition is now displayed on the status screen; we have finally made it so that it affects the proficiency of the units in combat; in addition to having adequate sleep, you will now have to feed you expedition with varied food if you want to keep their spirits up.
Finally, Some changes were made in the economy so that these different kinds of food can be more easily procured in towns (amidst many small tweaks to make it feel more alive and changing)
And that’s it for now! I hope you find these changes exciting… we continue working towards the full release, keep an eye out!
PS: Bonus sneak peek… we are also revamping the intro of the game to better convey the story and the context of the adventure.
NovaMundi: Spiritual Experiences [0.40]
v0.40 contains the focus on sidequests which at the same time triggered some engine work. Additionally, out of nowhere, there was work in the zoomed exploration which may be significantly exploited in the future when more caverns are added.
Caverns Exploration Out of nowhere, I decided to add a minimap to caverns exploration including markers for the units, an indicator for the camera location, clicking on the minimap to warp to that location, and uncovering the minimap as units explore it; it was a lot of work that probably won’t be fully exploited in the current version.
Additionally, made it so that the battle music overlay only activates while in combat
Procedural Generated Discoveries Some of the sidequests we had designed required visiting a “kind” of place in the world, located nearby another place; to support that I included placing the markers in the world (for paramos and spots in the rivers), and then wiring together these places with the quests after procedural generation was done, so that when you talked with the quest-giver he could give you details on the direction and distance of the place.
Sidequests We worked on a bunch of sidequests (TI-5, TI-7, MQ-5, MQ-8, MQ-23), as mentioned, some of them were of a new kind, requiring you to visit places
As a new sidequest required a day counter, I added support to allow multiple of such type of quests. Some QA rounds revealed bugs in MQ-0 and MQ-4 that were also fixed.
Economy Modified the merchant restock routines to include a limited amount of “rare” goods they can have every day; they also refer to them in their greeting.
Assorted fixes
Add missing journal fragments for the main quest
Prevent exploration music cooldown from resuming music while town music is being played.
Make the mission briefing text area scrollable
Add a visible Tunjo slot for party members.
Fix issues selecting units in combat (conflict with minimap)
