Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Role-playing (RPG), Simulator, Strategy
NovaMundi: The Spear of Chaquén
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)
Fix raiders encampment prefab restoring issue.
Land places on terrain when restoring the game
NovaMundi: Take your time again [0.39]
v0.39.0 doesn't pack a lot of new features, but comes with some sweet balance changes, stability fixes, and three sidequests.
Balancing
Units now have 50% HP (both party and enemies); besides the impact in balancing, we hope this will also make the combat feel less dull.
Archers have 50% Attack
Spanish Trailblazers have 2/3 Attack
Spanish Trailblazers are now only spawned on Day 5+ (was 3+)
Spanish Trailblazers Danger Level is now 5 (Fewer units per battle) (was 3)
Pause is back
After experimenting with combat leaning more into real-time; the pause button is back. The experiment showed a lack of control over the combat that didn't make it enjoyable and greatly reduced its tactical aspects.
Even so, some efforts were made to make it easier to select units in combat, but there remain some issues to be fixed.
Side-quests
Three new side-quests have been implemented (MQ4, MQ6, and TI6). We also added journal entries for progress over the existing side-quests.
Smaller Caves
Cave systems have been reduced in sight to prevent them from being dull and the player from losing their way. A minimap is on the way to strengthen the cavern's exploration facet.
NovaMundi – Envoy of commerce [0.38]
It’s been six months since the last Early Access version release. There are still lots of things to Polish but I figured a release was in order for players to know we are still alive. We will continue working to complete the game and improve the players’ experience.
During these months, I have been discussing the possibility of partnering with a company to help complete the game and market its full release; there were some good developments but ultimately nothing has been decided.
Following are some highlights of the changes of the newly available version: 0.38.2
Audio – Wwise and Environmental sounds
We are pretty advanced in the process of migrating the audio implementation to Wwise; QuietGecko had been campaigning for this for months, and I gotta trust him it’s going to be worth it for the project.
After an initial setup and some smoke tests to make sure it wouldn’t cause issues with the game (version 0.38.1 was distributed internally for testing). Gecko then set forth to migrate all the sound effects, ambiance, and music.
This included the environmental bird songs, and the town spot ambiance (including adding variations depending on the size of the town), as some first points where Wwise would provide value. And also, the first real new development with the addition of environmental sound for each “biome” being explored by the player.
Some UI elements, like the volume sliders in the settings, were also hooked into the new system.
The migration is still not 100% complete, so you may find some sounds off around (especially for the dynamic music). We are working on fixing that.
Caverns
After the release of 0.37.0, I set myself to add a first iteration of zoomed locations, “dungeons”, dangerous caverns you could explore optionally if you wanted to risk for some good loot. Initially populated with giant animals, the idea is to eventually fill them with mythic creatures from the Muisca culture.
A lot of work went into this so that caverns with random loot could be generated procedurally, with enemies and rewards placed on them. Beyond an initial, simple procedural generator, changes were needed in the commands system to make this “zoomed exploration” mode work well besides the normal Combat mode (with which it shares many components).
Tweaks were made in the Enemy AI to work inside sprawling close spaces like cavern networks, which work pretty differently compared to open spaces like the overworld combat areas.
Some issues with pathfinding, usability, and required additional content caused me to halt development on it and switch to other stuff; it proved to be too challenging and depleted my energy to work on the project for some weeks. I marked and internal version, 0.38.0, with my progress, but still didn’t make these caves readily accessible to the players, exception for a single cavern you need to visit to complete the main game quest, visit it at your own risk!
I am still deciding if this is going to be a priority for the next release, or if we should ditch the work and focus back on the overworld.
Miniquests and Dialogs
It had been almost one year since Stoltverd designed a bunch of side quests to spice up the player experience within the game, so I decided it was about time to implement them. Initially, we implemented four side quests in which you will help tradesmen around, making contacts or neutralizing menaces threatening their business.
Besides all the dialogs related to the mini-quest-related characters, implementing them demanded improvements in the quests and conversation systems, like being able to mark dialog options as hidden based on flags, create groups of mutually exclusive dialog options, or hide quests that are just sub-stages of a quest (or just should not be visible to the player initially).
One of the side quests required reviving infrastructure for “Eliminate Enemy” type of quests, which introduced a pretty hard-to-track bug since these used to work in the pre-Early Access times (when we didn’t have Save/Load game working).
Additionally, the dialog system was improved with the ability to have hidden “unlocks”, so that options can appear without being explicitly mentioned in the parent dialog fragment, and the layout was changed to support dynamic dialog options (it had been hardcoded to 6 due to a previous redesign); this also required rethinking the layout of the conversation overlay, so I took the chance to make portraits bigger.
New traders were also added to some towns which had too few inhabitants, instead of having the procedural wayfarer do everything
Procedural Terrain and Exploration
There are not a lot of new developments on this aspect, however, I addressed three issues that had been in the backlog for long enough, haunting me,
The first one was fixing the “meteor holes” that were happening randomly in the high mountains; I finally found this to be caused by accidents when an additional Perlin noise applied to the existing geography pushed too deep. The solution was simply reducing greatly the strength of that additional noise so that it still added variety to the terrain but didn’t alter it that much.
Another fix was preventing mountains from blocking rivers, which didn’t look very good.
And finally, something that was haunting the game since a long time ago and for which we already had a solution in place at some point in time but deactivated for design reasons: the map borders.
The way I have solved them is by increasing the margin at which the party will hit the invisible wall of exploration, so you will not be able to get that close to the edge of the terrain to see the underlying artifacts. I had hoped we could come across a better solution like adding a procedurally generated mesh that would follow the slopes of the terrain and be painted either in full black or with a cross-section. But due to time constraints with so many other things on the table, I doubt that will ever happen.
In any case, I don’t completely dislike the current solution since it still gives the impression the map continues instead of being cut short. It’s just you cannot go there because of plot reasons.
User Experience Tweaks
Finally, a couple of tweaks originating from Stolverd’s playtesting sessions: Allow deselecting units and items by clicking on them in the inventory, and allow adding and removing items freely from barter offer regardless of carry capacity, with a check at the moment of the deal.
Full Release Plans
Alright, so it's been super quiet lately but that doesn't mean we haven't been working on the project!
We are doing a lot of design work and planning for the last phase of Early Access development of the game. I wanted to share with you a little bit of that plan so you know what's going to be coming up very soon for the game!
Improvements in the combat system: Adding 3 equipment slots per unit (melee/ranged/armor), damage types based on the weapon, and special effects (poison/sleep).
Improving and completing the existing animal unit types: Puma, Jaguar, Rabid Ocelot, Spectacled Bear, adapting them to changes in the combat system, improving their AI and visuals.
Adding new "fantastical" animal unit types: Giant Spider, Giant Scorpion, Giant Snake, Rabid Bat Swam
Adding "mythical creature" unit types: Blackbirds of Chiminigagua, Envoy of Huitaca, Victim of Tomagata, Mohan, Cucacuy
Adding equipable armor: Hard leather, lamellar, quilted jacket, golden plastron, wooden armor, layered cotton.
Allow making offerings at special places, or to special portable items (tunjos) to obtain advantages or heal the units.
Deeper effects of fatigue
Improved Camping System: Prepare camp based on available resources, Ambushes, Camping activities: Crafting, Cooking, Curing wounds, Telling stories
Improved predesigned first-time experience embedded in the systems of the game with a plot to make the player feel more involved into the game while he learns how to play.
Add sidequests for the player to achieve small victories for the player to keep them motivated through the gameplay, supplement the rewards given elsewhere, and make the game world feel more alive.
Illustrated cutscenes with parallax animations narrated in Muisca language (with subtitles for Spanish and English).
Replace the current outdated voices in Muisca for the commands, with the latest more accurate ones.
Add more roaming small animals
Wandering merchants and caravans
Permanent enemy groups in the overworld
Add activities to the map like chopping wood to sell or craft equipment (like better bows and arrows) and getting gold from the rivers.
Improve the procedural generation and inhabitation of the caverns with the fantastical/mythological animals, and rewards for exploration (these will be the "dungeons" of the game)
Add more discoveries that the player can make (animals, plants, wonders of nature), including drawings of them.
So, what do you think? let me know in the comments if you are excited about the changes or if there's anything else you think we should include in the list to complete the NovaMundi experience!
Work in progress - Caverns exploration revamp
We have been hard at work improving cavern exploration! ancient artifacts lie in their depths, but you might also awaken forsaken forces of nature and spirits of the land.
Development is on 🔥! can't wait to put this out and have people lurking in these dark caverns hoping not to meet one of these critters (or worse!) the next corner!
