Expedition – November 7 / 2019 Update

It’s been almost three months since the last update. And many things have happened!

We are progressing thru the CREA Digital project (ending this month). We’ve been working for the last 10 weeks.

Doing a full changelog would probably be huge. Instead, I’ll share some pics of the more visible changes, noting that there are also great advancements in the music and sound effects.

As part of the work in the new UI, we have rearranged the transfer items dialog and implemented some visual enhancements on it and the other dialogs of the game.

One of the most visible changes from the last update is the appearance of forests, still a work in progress but it seems at long last we’ve found a way to represent them adequately and performing well. It’s no longer a flat texture and it still conveys the sense of scale that I’ve wanted to portray in this overworld view.

This is far from the definitive look we want. We are still working on the lighting of the scene, the colors, contrast, and other graphical tweaks. As well as creating more models for the overworld locations.

Landing and boarding, as well as linking the party units model and the inventory model, so that the units you have in combat actually match the ones in your inventory.

Another aspect that was worked on heavily was the UI, including the HUD elements, the appearance of dialogs, and the size of texts and elements. We also added new indicators for the day and night cycle, the weather, and made the minimap show the immediate surroundings (instead of a scaled version of the entire map)

The idea to use a vignette to simulate LOS has been discarded for now. Zoom levels are now fixed too, so we are not emulating LOS at all. I believe this was an unneeded level of complexity.

Speaking about the map, a lot of work was put into redesigning its look. Not all of it has been implemented inside the game already (only minor parts of it).

Below we can also see the helper character, our initial effort to enhance the onboarding for new players with a “soft” tutorial. We have also been working at updating the portraits system with a new style and new sets for the native people.

There has also been some progress in the illustrations for the campaign cutscenes, although we are reworking it with a different style.

Combat has mostly stayed the same. However, we are doing a lot of work in redesigning the units, modeling them and creating new animations. We are in the process of integrating them into the game so hopefully, this huge chunk of work will be more visible next update.

Now, for some work that is less visible:

• We have designed the entire layout for the Children of Bachué campaign, including defining 6 missions with different feelings and objectives, creating locations and populating them with over 50 NPCs with their dialogs and appearance. A lot of research and design work has gone into this.
• As noted above, creating music, sound effects, and integrating them into the game, has been quite a bit of work. I’ll post a gameplay video soon so this can be heard.
• Planning and casting for the voice over for the cutscenes
• Refactors in the engine to support multiple food consumers
• Support for the cutscenes with fading images and text, with automatic playback.
• Creating mining camps
• Returning to Spain sequence
• Discovering towns.
• Use procedural terrain for Children of Bachue missions.