Greetings Commanders! Here are the changes for this patch: Changes:
Teleporters now teleport all friendly characters around them at once
Damaged props now display a health bar for better visibility
Tutorial has been streamlined for a smoother experience
Music changes on the roster screen
Bug Fixes:
Sound for damaging wooden props should now play properly
May the stars watch over you.
TurnBasedThursday Fest under Gemini: Tutorial and UI polish
Greetings Commanders! We're pleased to announce that Zodiac Legion will be featured during TurnBasedThursday from June 2-9, under the witty influence of Gemini. As always, we've prepared some meaningful improvements for the occasion. Since many of you have provided valuable feedback on the tutorial experience, we've focused this update on making the game more approachable: Tutorial & UI Improvements:
[] Less fiddly combat preview with cleaner presentation [] You can now select enemies to see their range and movement indicators now visible (when no friendly character is selected) [] Added UI sound effects for better feedback [] More varied triggers for tutorial progression (no more getting stuck!) [] Previous tutorial messages can now be reviewed [] Scroll speed has been toned down for better control. There are a few menu options to control it [] Reduced window overlap issues [] Tutorial VIPs are now more resilient to avoid untimely demise [] Opponents tasked with guarding a room won't chase the party through the whole level anymore until first contact.
We're also continuing work on the comprehensive armor overhaul mentioned in our previous update - body part-specific coverage, weapon effectiveness, and enhanced stamina mechanics, on top of extensive cosmetic armour customization. On the UI front, we're implementing a better help system to let you access any of the help topics from a table of content when needed. We will also cut down the "total walking time" in the tutorial, to make the experience smoother.
May the stars watch over you.
Hotfix: available missions don't get cleared on loading a game
Greetings commanders, Here are the changes for this patch: - Loading a game doesn't remove available missions anymore - Loading a game keeps the status of the tutorial and help texts - Steam integration (just for stats, like number of tutorial completions, missions played for now).
May the stars watch over you.
Zodiac Legion update for the Wargames Fest
Attention, knights!
Zodiac Legion is going to be featured during the Wargames Fest on Steam! Remember to drop by from April 28 to May 5 and charge headfirst into battle with Taurus, the stalwart patron of this time.
We’ve made sure to add a few things for the occasion that ought to be of interest to many of you. The first is a basic level-up system for your units. Now when the knights under your command return home from their perilous quests, they will use the experience to grow in strength. Thus, units may level up after missions, giving you a selection of attributes to improve. This is the first iteration of the system, and we plan to expand it with more than just statistics.
Apart from that, we’ve introduced a combat log that should make the battles more readable and give you a better insight into how the dice are rolled in the background. A major fix to memory-related issues will also make the game less prone to crashing.
We also made the first steps a bit more straightforward and made the tutorial separate from the "real" missions.
While these are the bigger news for the moment, we ride on to deliver more in the future. In our efforts to give you an authentic medieval combat experience, we’re now working on overhauling the way armour works. Soon, armour will stop being a “global” value for each unit, and will instead make use of our robust paperdolling to apply different coverage values for each body part, depending on how it is protected. The attacker’s weapon type and the armour’s quality will come into play here as well.
Furthermore, stamina will have increased importance for all characters, and not just mages. Shock damage from blunt weapons as well as certain actions will deplete stamina at a rapid pace, and once out of breath or passed out, a combatant will be easy pickings for anyone around. This should be particularly useful for bringing down enemies protected by full plate armour, as the world of Zodiac Legion still has to invent can openers.
For now, you can dive into the game and level up your knights while perusing the million D20s rolled in each encounter. But remember – to level up, they need to survive! And that, my friends, can be quite the challenge when you’re beset by wicked forces from the precipice of hell!
Until we meet again!
Demo update
Dear players, We went for a long time without update because I kept broking new things or finding new things I needed to patch. The current build should have fixed most stability issues. We will now focus on the addition of campaign elements.
Pathfinding corrections for AI: it had trouble moving groups over long distances
AI turn shortening: AI characters will attack one by one, but move in group.
Map generation fixes: Most broken preset (ie, missing rooms) should be fixed
Lighting bug correction
Archers can now swap weapons but cannot shoot bows into melee. It is still possible to shoot someone far away when in melee, but with a large penalty (I'll change it when weapon swapping is implemented for the AI).
Missing sounds fix : Fireball and wall destruction made no sound.
Scaling fixes: the game should revert to fit the screen size if scaling and resolution resul in a size larger than the screen.
Have a good month of Aquarius
Zodiac Legion Turn-based RPG fest demo update
Dear players, Since the last build that introduced randomized levels, we have mostly focused on fixing a few lingering UI and optimization issues. We have also added saves (only on the strategic map for now).
Here is the changelog:
Additions
Scaling: you can now scale at *2 or *3, as long as your resolution is sufficient (mostly for large monitors). The resolution needs to be larger than 1200*800 * scale
Saves and loads are now possible. You need to exit the game to load a save for now, and saves can only be done from the main menu.
Idle animations are active for all characters now (used to be only for the selected character).
Fixes
Fixed: Menu unreachable after returning from mission.
Fixed: Party fixed to the previous party on mission, even when changed with the roster window
Fixed: Characters from the active party not displayed on the roster after a mission.
Fixed: Characters who were killed on missions stay dead.
Fixed: The game window should not be larger than your screen (it might still be an issue for players with multiple monitors).
Fixed: Lighting should be back to normal.
Fixed:pathfinding should not freeze the game anymore (or at the very least, it should do so much less often!)
Sadly, the strategic and level up elements could not make it into the build. We will gradually add buildings and character progression in the upcoming updates.
We’re hard at work on our procedural map generation system, and as we get nearer to having its fully functional first iteration, we figured we could give you a little glimpse behind the scenes and show what the entire process looks like. I’m Maciej, the level designer/loremaster on Zodiac Legion, and here’s my approach to this part of the game.
The whole thing begins with a pencil and paper. I try to think of an arrangement that either feels interesting to me or which we don’t yet have in the game, and then I draw it, keeping in mind the level design constraints and a few gameplay considerations. At this stage, my thinking is only: “is this layout a good point of departure?”, and not “what will this map be?”
Suffice to say, some of my ideas are better than others.
After I get a satisfactory result, I draw a bigger picture, where I do the first major adjustments on things that are immediately obvious when viewed from a larger perspective. This entails switching around rooms, resizing them or changing the access points to get a layout that would be better in terms of the gameplay. Only after this is done, do I proceed to giving the map a “theme,” and assigning various environmental functions to individual rooms – that is, only at this stage does a map become e.g. a prison, with a guardroom next to a detention area by a torture chamber, and so on.
The process becomes both a little bit easier as well as harder with random maps. The start is the same – with pencil and paper followed by the big picture. However, I can no longer shape the arrangement of the map entirely to my liking. That’s because we use a separate collection of preset rooms to populate the procedurally generated levels. This puts a new constraint on the layout – since they have “standard” sizes that have to fit together – and also prevents me from figuring out the content of the map on a “micro” level. The most I can do is give it a theme that will then determine what types of presets can be spawned. But on the flipside, I no longer have to fill out every room by hand.
All the green plots in the map below are spaces reserved for presets:
The presets themselves are divided into a number of categories, for simplicity’s sake let’s name four: small, big, outdoor, indoor. Small ones are meant to be intermediate building blocks with less tactical significance whose chief purpose is to make the map less “geometrically uniform.” The big ones are the meat of the game – with the actual objectives, obstacles, collectables and all the rest that makes a good gameplay experience. Outdoor presets are surface areas, while indoor are individual rooms – for use in dungeons and outdoor buildings alike.
Some presets, like the one below, can even hold other smaller ones. I’d call these “fractal presets” if I were more pretentious.
Since we don’t have a custom level editor, the software we use for building our maps is Tiled. With that, we can fill out the maps with both automapping based on scripted rules, as well as with the manual placement of features. For example, putting a “wall” token on the ground type layer and letting Tiled handle the automapping immediately generates the appropriate wall sprite together with tokens for line-of-sight and movement obstruction as well as floor sprites. It’s a great tool that takes a while to get used to, but once you’ve learnt it, it makes your job a lot easier.
An example of the end result of working in Tiled is this guarded vault with riches to be plundered:
Once the presets are done and the map is laid out, all that’s left is to put it in the game for testing. This is the part that we’re focusing the most on now, because as you can imagine, the results of the procedural generation process are very susceptible to bugs. Presets don’t match, doors open into brick walls like in a cartoon, props vanish and leave behind gaping holes into oblivion... But apart from that, there are also mechanical considerations that can only be adjusted after a practical inspection. These include the numbers, types and locations of enemies, the number of “dead ends” that lead to long and unnecessary backtracking, or the distance from the starting spot to the main objective.
The bugs are easy to fix, because they’re usually just oversights in the map files. But the gameplay-related issues can be more tricky, especially since they need to be addressed on a few different planes. For example, the unit count available to the enemy is assigned to the map itself based on its difficulty, but the spawn points and class preferences are defined in the presets. Meanwhile the rules governing the dead ends and objectives are global to prevent anomalies.
A procedurally generated level, as viewed in the game. Please ignore the issues:
As we continue working on the random maps, we’ll be adding even more features to make them more coherent. At the very least, we’d like to have faction-based colouring on props such as banners, broader classification among presets to better determine what can spawn where, and a more robust mission system, where the randomized levels could be matched with appropriate objectives and narrative texts. However, right now our paramount goal is to lay down the foundation and make it function reliably.
We’ll be sure to come back with more news in the near future, and you can also expect to see the results of the process described in this diary for yourselves soon enough. It’s right there in your horoscope!
props destruction hotfix
Greetings commanders, Just a minor hotfix regarding dungeon props targeting
Fireball can now damage props
Targeting props can be done with the default attack from melee range
Some attacks still don't seem to do anything against props, but it is nly an UI issue (as the props HP are not displayed) that will be addressed soon.
May the stars watch over you.
Turn Based Thursday Fest demo update
Salutations, Commanders!
We’re happy to announce that Zodiac Legion will be featured this week in TurnBasedThursdayFest, from April 4 to 8 – a time under the auspices of the steadfast Aries.
We always try to bring you something new during these festivals, and this time is no different. Since the mechanics of Zodiac Legion are fairly complex, we’ve decided to focus primarily on easing players into the game by introducing an in-game tutorial and publishing a player’s guide on Steam. We hope that these will be sufficient to explain the finer details of rolling twenty D20 to land an attack!
Apart from that, we’ve also significantly optimised the pathfinding algorithms and applied a number of various fixes (hopefully without introducing too many hidden bugs that we’re not aware of).
We also got our first iteration of the new randomized map system working, with each room being accessible one way or another. Now, I need to control the placement of special rooms (objective, treasure, ...), and add ways to create various scenarios based on these.
