I’ve neglected the blog for a bit! here’s a quick update on the work we did the past three weeks (Ending March 21). The 7DRL Challenge and its aftermath of course affected dev, but OTOH the impending Early Access release pushed things the other direction!
Anyways, here we go!
Week 106
We started work in the “villagers” looking forward to adding some life to the world, initially did some tests with a furnace and a guy doing metalworks. I was a bit afraid of doing this since it would detract from the idea of the overworld being an abstract representation of the cities (adding people into it takes it one step in the direction of it being a single scale representation, which I don’t like much). So I needed to test how it looked before digging into adding more types of villagers.
I decided it looked nice and one could think of it as an animated diorama of the village, so I greenlit the creation of new types of them to make the world feel more alive.
We integrated the new model for the Panche Raider (so far we were just using a recolor of the guecha warrior). The concept was more of a battle-worn jungle warrior wearing a wooden shield and a cudgel.
We also worked on some UI redesign, especially for the “Expedition Status” and the “Trade” modals. And updated the Muisca “compass” to mark the cardinal directions more clearly.
Finally, added a bit more control on the logic to check for encounters, to reduce its randomness (preventing full days of no battles followed by a day with 10 battles).
Week 107
Was the 7DRL Challenge week, so there wasn’t a lot of coding work. However, we created new textures for the grass to feel less plain (still pending integration) and started work on a new piece of cover art.
Week 108
There was a lot of work done here in preparation for our Early Access announcement and campaign, including integrating some of the UI redesigns and doing some priority fixes to ensure the quality of the Early Access Preview built to be sent to press and influencers.
The new cover art was finished and we even did an animation for it and integrated it into the trailer. Besides, the actual work of editing the trailer was a big chunk of work too, but it ended up great and now shares a bit of the gameplay (which is easier now that I feel more sure about it). More info about that in the next post!
Slashie's Journal 