Welcome to November’s Dev Diary! Today we will focus on some new mechanics and additions, as well as overall improvements we introduced over the course of the last month. This entry is quite gif heavy, because I wanted to show you as much as I could with short videos, because they are cool 😊
Siege Weapons and Defences
We’re working on getting some defensive siege machinery set up! These will come in two forms – defensive towers, and buildable anywhere on the field. The latter is set up by siege engineers, which you can get from a Siege Workshop building. These guys will run around the field and set up defences anywhere you like.
Here are some Trebuchets in action on our test map
Some potential tower designs. These are buildable defences, just like your arrow towers. Of course, instead of arrows they will fire mighty siege weapons! Are there downsides to these? Of course! Arrow towers might have longer range, but can fire at enemies directly under them as well. These towers have a larger range, but also a range limit, meaning you can't fire at enemies directly underneath.
There are three tiers of defences now: Wooden, Stone and Reinforced. Each upgrade also unlocks new defensive options (you don't need cards for those). Wooden palisades unlock building of spikes which deal some damage back to the enemy. Stone walls give your archers protective shields, and iron-reinforced walls give them braziers, enabling fire attacks (stack-able DPS damage).
Prettying Up
We've worked on some new animations, units and gui improvements. It's easier to see where damage comes from and what kind of damage is being dealt. You'll see different colours pop up representing damage types such as fire, poison and death.
We've done some visual improvements here and there. The card shop now changes visuals depending on how much gold and how many card packs you have. The more gold in your treasury, the more will be scattered around. Card packs also get stacked at the back.
Content
We're working on some new bosses, a new race as well as a new map! Here are some sneak peeks.
That's all for now, and see you in the next one. Before we go, just remember:
Demo and feature update - 0.23
Hello everyone! It's been a week since our last update and today we can finally share some news with you! We will talk about some of the bigger features individually, and towards the end of the article you can find a condensed list.
Unit Collision
One of the biggest features in this update is unit collision and coherency. Units will now have weight, meaning they won't just all stack on top of each other, or run through each other. Units will clash, and attempt to push each other out of the way. Careful - if you are stuck between a wall and a horde of enemies you may no longer be able to easily get out!
Terrain improvements
Vastly improved terrain textures and details. Not so much of an eyesore anymore.
Info Log
You can now find an info log at the bottom left of the screen. It will show you most important info: incoming waves, any info about bosses, caravans arriving, units being killed and so on...
Resource Time Icons
Community request, and a very good one too! You can now easily see how long you'll have to wait until the resource is produced.
Better card info
Another community request. Players complained that they don't know how much a building will cost, therefore card choices felt more difficult and sometimes disappointing. You can now tell how much a building will cost you in advance!
Wood and Stone spot swap
Balancing change. Your wood is now a little bit safer, as it's been swapped with the stone spot.
Building icons with fixed places
One of the most annoying things were building icons that were all over the place. Sometimes repair was on the right, sometimes on the left. Now all buildings icons have predetermined, fixed places.
A host of other changes!
Lumberjack and Stone Quarry swapped positions
Added higher level enemies (Wolf Riders and Orc Archers) in case you do manage to get there 🙂
Units now have collision and can become trapped.
Description now appears telling you why you can't click a UI action
Added event log, giving you notice of important events (can be toggled off)
Various bugfixes related to unit movement and combat
Fixed various localization strings
Slightly improved performance on lower-end video cards
Vastly improved visual quality of terrain
Fixed various broken animations for Orc units
Added resource display notification on caravan arrival
Camera slightly repositioned, fixing some bugs that go with it
Improved enemy reaction times and recalculations
Improved pathfinding
Added level 3 to hero
Fixed mouse box selection over UI elements
Added game icon
Added resource costs to fate cards
Slightly decreased loot chance for common drops
You can now click on a unit icon to select it
Clicking on the hero portrait will now take you to their location
Fixed enemy walking animation not playing after combat
Disabled UI buttons now show click conditions
Fixed a bug where holding a left click on the building icon would cause repeated clicking sound.
Enemy missile units now attack buildings from a distance
Enemies will no longer get stuck after killing caravans
UI buttons now have their individual places on the GUI wheel
Demo update - 0.22
Hello everyone! We have just released our first major demo update. First of all, we'd like to thank everyone who provided feedback so far. We've listened to what you had to say and took it all on board. As a result, here is a list of major changes:
Player now starts with 1500 wood
Player units have auto-heal, beginning 3 seconds outside of combat
Walls and towers have more HP
Towers DPS increased
Holy Flame damage up
Stomp skill lasts longer (1 second added)
2 starting unit limits (up from 1)
Walls and towers now have poison resistance
DPS damage and heal have unique bars with appropriate colours
Waves 1-10 significantly weaker (later on it heats up anyway!)
We've also fixed a host of bugs. Major highlights are these:
Player can no longer select more than 1 card during fate draw
DPS damage now stacks properly
Walls and towers are buffed
Walls and towers now have poison resistance
Less enemy units on the field, giving you a little bit of a breather (later on it heats up anyway!)
Tune in for more soon! Remember to add the game to your Wishlist!
NEXT FEST STREAM!
Join the developers as we battle our way through the hordes of Orcs and Goblins. See some of our deck building and things that are not available in the demo! Find out a little bit about our team and make sure to play the demo yourself!
Warlords: Development Diary
Hello everybody and welcome to the first development diary for Warlords: Under Siege. We've been working on this project for the past few months - you could even say that the development of it began with our previous game, Citizens: Far Lands since both games share a significant chunk of the code-base (or at least they did before Warlords took an identity of its own!).
We announced WUS over a month ago, but generally kept it very quiet. The few screenshots that were there didn't show you much, but that's all about to change. First of all, if you prefer to get right into the action rather than sit and read my exhausting babble, you can go and play the demo right now. You can do so here, by clicking on that lovely green button. You can expect a lot of action from the first few minutes, resulting in a horde of little green goblins eventually overwhelming you. Remember - You will die... But what exactly is Warlords? Well - we tried to make something new by mixing some of our favourite genres. Few months ago I started playing Dawn of War once again - one of my favourite RTS games. I was battling on a modded survival map and thought "Heck, it would be cool to make a game like that, but fantasy...". We already had a basic combat systems done in Citizens, so we decided to take it, expand on it, improve it and see where it takes us.
Another genre I'm a big fan of are Roguelikes - specifically random reward systems that help you on your next run. We decided to add deck building to Warlords. As a player you can gather gold, and said gold allows you to purchase packs of cards. These unlock new possibilities on your next run: new buildings, new units, production boost, unit stat boost, hero skills... We plan for Warlords to have 150 different cards on release, and then more added thereafter.
You get a set of 5 starting cards, and can choose a new one from a selection of five, every time you defeat an enemy wave. This means every single one of your runs will be a little bit different. In the demo you are given a pre-made deck of 16 cards. In the future we will likely rotate the deck, so you are given a slightly different set of toys to play with before the full game releases.
Booster packs can be purchased with gold that can be obtained in a number of ways:
Building a gold mine which passively creates gold income while you play
Protecting caravans which arrive from edges of the map and give you resources if they survive the journey
Picking up gold from random enemy drops
It wasn't easy, but we made a ton of improvements since working on Citizens. First of all, we utilised something called Animation Instancing and Animation Baking. It takes away a little bit of freedom and makes our workflow a tiny bit more difficult as well as increases the size of the game significantly, but in exchange we get a MASSIVE boost in performance. Our benchmarks went from 20fps to 150 fps. It is likely we'll be able to utilise this in Citizens as well. We will talk more about other interesting technical aspects in the future.
That's it for now, and I hope you enjoyed this little write up. Please share your feedback - it's super important and we value every single one of your opinions - no matter how negative or critical. It helps us become better developers who make better games :)
