Expedition – Children of Bachue: 3 Months of Dev

The last update was from January 20. Development intensity has varied thru these months but we haven’t stopped and we keep getting closer to a playable version. Here are some of the things we have done.

Overworld Visuals

• Changes in lighting and color grading.
• Add mist effect controlled by time of day and scenario.
• Add new model for explorer.
• Tween ambient light based on hour of day
• Activate town labels, fix scale and colliders.

Combat

• Tactical pause.
• Improved selected unit display
• Battle onboarding (First version)
• Pixel perfect unit selection in battle.
• Add Temple battle scene (and add support for multiple battle scenes)
• Support for both “party members” and “bulk” units.
• Limit camera movement to the combat area
• Separate combat scene and overworld lighting.
• Add shader to see units through obstacles.
• Add support for “ambush” and “faceoff” combat placements

Nueva Esperanza mode

• Restore access to hometown to supply expedition
• Display background image for hometown instead of 3D scene.
• Add some initial inventories to hometown
• Add quests to establish settlements with gold prizes on return
• Cash trade goods on return to hometown
• Preserve map between voyages.
• New settlement popup.
• New UI for Temple exploration.
• Reactivate camping with new UI.

Transfer Items

• Add icon and info for the location
• Highlight items that are being transferred
• Add icons for units
• Batch transferring for some items.

Content

• Start work localizing the Children of Bachue campaign to English (some infrastructure, still pending the bulk of translation work)

Music and Audio

• Integrate “Spanish” music to exploration and towns
• Remove “sailing” music (unified exploration theme)
• Add Sea Ambience

Procgen

• Place stones as rubbish in grassland
• Place mountain models in terrain.
• Refactors in generators.
• Add Coast type map
• Fix additive texture painting
• Place native towns (WIP)

Forests

• Tweaks on forest placement and growth
• Visual improvements in trees
• Tests with low-poly forest blobs (discarded for now)
• Disable shadows for trees (huge performance cost)

Rivers

• River shaders with animated texture and offset “flow” animation, as well as semitransparent blending
• Carve valley for river
• Add test river to generated terrain

Ocean and beaches

• Improved settings to allow translucency
• Improved seabed
• Tweak colors
• Limit ocean area instead of it expanding infinitely.
• Paint rocky beaches based on slope