I was travelling last week and had only intermittent internet connection, so I wasn’t able to write a timely post, and I will keep this short to catch up on work.
For context, I am currently working on updating some of the materials for the various online presences of the game for v0.8, and trying to address a very annoying audio bug (that luckily only occurs after about 2 hours of playing).
Until next week!
Weekly Update 190 - Soldier Attributes
Hi everyone,
As I already described in the post last week, I have added a bunch of additional tooltips and UI details that should help new players understand the game a little better even without playing the tutorial.
One part that was a little bit of a challenge was the soldier attributes. So far, the difference between soldiers was only described as “melee or ranged” and tiers 1-3. Of course a tier 2 melee unit is better than a tier 1 melee unit, but players could not tell how exactly. There are about 10 underlying variables that affect how units behave in combat, and of course these change slightly from unit to unit. Balancing of these variables is still not fully finished and I am expecting that research will add many additional changes (e.g. being able to increase damage or armour).
Nevertheless, I felt that players needed to know at least a little more about what the unit they are about to hire represents “under the hood”. As such, I picked out 4 stats (health, melee damage, ranged damage, and range) which are now shown when a player is about to recruit a unit. Health and range are the same for most units right now, but will likely change with further balancing, which is why I think they are sufficiently relevant to be included already.
There are a few more things I want to add to the UI, but I think I am already a lot closer to the UI being better understood without much experience.
Until next week!
Weekly Update 189 - UI Improvements and Tooltips
Hi everyone,
Testing has mostly concluded at this point, and I have not found any substantial further bugs. Any major issues I would like to improve on will likely already be fixed by things I am planning for 0.9, so I have decided to do some more polishing by improving on the UI.
UI has been a bit of a difficult task for me since the start of the game. I am by no means very knowledgeable when it comes to the design of UI and UX, but I certainly enjoy using well designed systems. As such, I often go down a rabbit hole of wondering what might be a “smart” way of designing something. Making it intuitive to use, visually appealing, and well-set within the universe. This rarely works out. As a result, UI decisions often take a long time, until I finally decide to simply implement something that gives the user the basic information I would want, and the basic interface to control the functions they are engaging with.
I think this has mostly worked, but there are some notable exceptions of systems I implemented quickly and without a specifically design UI, and I strongly rely on the tutorial to teach new users that these features exist and how to use them. One example would be the “follow” functionality of soldiers. It is possible to tell one or more of your barracks to simply have their soldiers follow the commander until they get new orders - but this is currently only implemented through a hotkey that users learn during the tutorial - which is far from a good user experience.
I am therefore currently trying to go through the various functions of the game, and to add missing UI elements and tooltips where those may be needed. Ideally, this will get the game to a point where new users don’t necessarily need to be going through the tutorial in order to learn how to play, and where interacting with the game becomes more intuitive than a learnt behaviour.
I will keep you updated on the progress as usual, but as usual, please reach out to me if you have any thoughts or suggestions.
Until next week!
Weekly Update 188 - Small Fixes
Hi everyone,
I will keep today’s post short, as testing is taking longer than expected. In good news, I have been able to replicate (or find) many obscure bugs, which I have been fixing one at a time.
Among the fixes are one for a multiplayer saving bug, where one of the building’s colliders being improperly handled could lead to the game not saving in multiplayer matches. Defeated pirate fortresses will also no longer respawn (without pirates) on reload, wagon makers will always empty their inventory on finishing construction of a wagon, and ranged towers should properly pull ammo from ammo depots now.
I have no doubt that I will find yet more bugs during further testing, but every bug needs to be fixed eventually, so this has been pretty decent progress.
Until next week!
Weekly Update 187 - Gradual Progression
Hi everyone,
With continued testing, I realised that one of the goals I had for 0.8, the more gradual progression of the game, is both working out well for now, and will get some needed upgrades with 0.9.
As some of you may remember from previous posts, the game’s switch from competitive to cooperative focus brought many challenges with it, and one of the things I addressed at the time was progression. Where there was previously a chance to get an iron mine close to the start, in the lead-up to 0.8, iron mines could only be found on the far side of the island - while stone was found from the middle on.
Through recent testing, I could once again confirm that this largely results in the sort of progression I had hoped for. As I got to the limits of the wooden tier, expansion to the middle became necessary. I had to decide whether I wanted to expand into a location that helped me defend my territory from the pirates, or preferred a more sheltered location that would give me access to more stone. Once I had access to stone, it became an important choice what to invest the first stone into: Improved food production (bread)? Towers and ammo production for defence? Improved healing infrastructure for my upcoming attack on the pirate fortress?
The choices and progression worked out well. Similarly, moving on from the stone area, the question of where to expand to next (Access to coal? Access to iron? A sheltered location with lots of food available?) became exactly as strategic as I had hoped it would. However, a lot of the progression seemed a little.. stark. Rather than having many small important decisions at each point of the game, there was some very tense moments with big important decisions I had to make, while I could coast on the outcome of those decisions afterwards.
This is something I am hoping to improve on for 0.9. With research, many more different resource nodes across the island, and additional construction materials (current ideas are linen, ceramics, and glass), the progression should already feel a little more gradual, and which type of industry to research next should be a continuous decision based on which resources one finds across the island. With that in mind, I am also intending to slightly reduce the abruptness of the stone/iron progression.
Rather than being able to only find iron at the end of the island, it will be “most likely” to find it there - while it will be possible to also find it in smaller quantities in the middle of the island. To make this possible, it will be necessary to reduce the yield of iron deposits, so instead of being set after finding a single iron mine, one iron mine (or iron rich rocks) will not be sufficient to sustain your village on the iron tier - instead, you will need to find multiple deposits, which will hopefully influence decisions on where to expand and where to place your defences even more.
I will likely finish my testing this week, and keep you updated on my findings.
Until next week!
Weekly Update 186 - The Runner Wagon
Hi everyone,
After last week’s quick introduction of fast travel, I decided to introduce another quick quality of life feature this week: the “runner” wagon.
The runner wagon is, at least for now, a slimmed down version of what will become the transport wagon in the future. It can be sent around the world similarly to the pioneer wagon, though much cheaper to build, and it obviously can’t create a village. The main reason for the runner wagon is to have more control over sending a variety of goods, and to collect a variety of loot.
Let’s take a defeated fortress, for example. The ruins offer lots of hard won loot to the player, but getting that loot to your villages was a frankly tedious process. The player’s inventory is small, so grabbing each piece of loot one at a time would take ages. An alternative, to simply add the loot to the closest village’s inventory would also be difficult - each chest would lead to a warehouse worker going back and forth, which could easily overwhelm the logistics of the nearby village.
The solution here is the runner wagon. It has lots of space, and can take more than one good at a time. Looting the individual chests and dumping it all into the wagon is pretty straightforward (and fun), and at the end, you can simply direct the wagon to go back to your chosen outpost.
Similarly, moving goods between outposts can be a strain on your logistics. Each warehouse worker will only move one type of goods, so moving 20 metal, 50 fruit, and 50 vegetables will take 3 trips by warehouse workers - or a single trip by a wagon. This gives you both an option to send many goods at once, and generally more control over the flow of goods in your settlements.
There are some obvious upgrades that the wagon could get - a function to automatically drop off the goods in the designated outpost and return to the player, for example - but for now, I think seeing how players will use the wagon is a good first step.
Until next week!
Weekly Update 185 - Fast Travel
Hi everyone,
As I’ve been extensively testing the current version of the game, I decided to introduce a QoL feature I have been planning on bringing in for a little while now: Fast travel.
Fast travel has been on my radar to add to the game for a few months. Ever since the long and narrow layout of Pirate’s Peak meant that the distance between the port and further outposts could be almost 3 kilometres, I thought that it would eventually be necessary to introduce “faster” travel. There were a few ideas in the mix, including a horse, cart, and teleportation - all of which had pros and cons, and would take a while to implement.
I am still toying with the ideas of the horse and the cart, but had settled on introducing an implementation of “teleportation” first. The “teleportation” was meant to be locked behind some research, as well as potentially a dedicated building (and certainly would not have been called teleportation), and as such, I was intending on incorporating it into 0.9. However, the long slog back and forth between my outposts and the port in my current test game got in the way. When I finally reached an outpost after 5 minutes of walking and realised that I had forgotten one of the materials I had gone to the port for - I knew it was time to at least implement a rudimentary version of fast travel.
And so, let me introduce to you: The village to village fast travel. Once you have at least one outpost, you can select any warehouse, and will find a dropdown for your fast travel destination at the bottom of the right page (see today's image). You can select either the original village (port), or one of your outposts, and will then be transported to the main (first) warehouse of the selected outpost. For now, fast travelling costs a quarter of the distance in coins (so travelling to a village 1000 metres away will cost you 250 coins). I will play around with the balance for this and will update it to adjust how it works out.
Locking the fast travel behind research and a dedicated building in 0.9, as well as UI updates on how to select the destination will probably happen eventually - but as usual, I will keep you updated. Fast travel is on the experimental branch as of last Saturday.
Until next week!
Weekly Update 184 - New House Model, Bug Fixes
Hi everyone,
Things are progressing nicely, and I wanted to just give a brief update on some of the developments of last week.
First of all, I brought the small house in line with the new building models. The small house is probably the single most frequent building to be placed, so bringing it in line with the new building style was I think pretty needed. I have created 3 slightly different versions of the small house, and once I get around to it for 0.9, one of the versions will be selected at random for each placed building. This should give a bit more variety to the village, and I think will add a lot for not too much work. There are a few things I will need to change around together with the mechanics for building upgrades for 0.9, which is why it has not yet been implemented - but it should be ready in a few weeks. For now, the house has been updated to the “garden” version of the new house, which is ready immediately.
(The old houses for comparison with the main image)
Additionally, I was able to test the game quite extensively for lots of the bugs that I had not been able to replicate yet and all sorts of edge cases I had not tested yet. Overall, the game is performing quite well, and I was able to fix a lot of the very obscure bugs (e.g. friendly soldiers attacking the initial 4 villagers of a new village; the wagon maker breaking if the game was saved/loaded during a specific part of the wagon construction, etc). The fixes will be uploaded to the experimental branch later this week.
I will continue to work on bug fixing and polishing, and keep you updated!
Until next week!
Weekly Update 183 - Production chains in v0.9
Hi everyone,
I want to take today’s post to talk a little bit about my progress and thoughts on production chains in v0.9.
As I have said in previous posts, I want the game to feel more dynamic, with players having to adapt to what they randomly find in the world. Likewise, I have previously mentioned that players should be rewarded for specialisation - so if a player finds a decent number of one resource in a part of the map, specialising in processing that type of resource should be a very good option for their progression.
While I haven’t fully finalised the production chains yet, I have decided on a general mechanic for it, or at least a way to think about it. Essentially, there will be 3 types of resources: Basic, common, and rare.
Access to basic resources will always be given in each game. You will always have access to the basic construction materials, food, medicinal plants, etc. While these won’t be giving you very much money if you sell them, there will also be some options for you to use an abundance of them, e.g. fruit, to make some money (turning it into jams, for example). Likewise, they will be able to provide some basic development points to your village. Access to basic resources will be somewhat staggered, so as you progress across the island, you will be able to find more of them, giving you access to higher tier buildings (wood - stone - metal, for example).
Common resources will also occur in each game. They will be very randomised, so maybe you won't find all of them in each game - but you should always find multiple types of common resources, with some sources maybe being more abundant than others. Common resources will provide you with strong money making opportunities (e.g. selling coffee), as well as gaining you many development points when provided to your village. There may be some combinations of common resources that can work in your favour (e.g. combining sugar and cocoa into chocolate), so if you gain access to the right combinations, they will yield better results.
Finally, rare resources won’t show up in every game. Like gems so far, they should be a rare find that will change how you approach the game. Rare resources will be combinable with common resources for very good rewards, and as such, finding e.g. a gem mine, may completely change what technology you want to research next.
While I have the basic mechanics of this figured out, I am playing around with different options for what shape these common and rare resources should take. They obviously need to work in their combinations (e.g. sugar and cocoa), while also adding to the tropical development vibe the game should have. I will keep you posted once I have made my mind up.
Until next week!
Weekly Update 182 - Intermission
Hi everyone,
While I have made a decent bit of progress on game related things, I am having a pretty busy and travel-filled weekend, so I will skip writing a long post this time.
Progress is being made on all sides, from improving buildings and graphics to a bug fix and creation of new production chains, so at least you can be certain that things are moving along!
