Continued work in NovaMundi

Remember when this blog was more than just a collection of release announcements? I’d like to get back to that, even if it’s not in-deep postmortems or stuff… just sharing a bit of what I’ve been doing lately.

I’m again on a wave to try and finish NovaMundi; as much as I want to work in Emerald Woods and as much promise it shows, I got to end what I have started.

The last release was December 9, 2023. We haven’t been working on it continuously, granted, but we haven’t been sleeping either.

It’s been hard, with contract work and family happenings eating most of my time, I’m left with little time or energies, and then I stumble against big blockers that drain it. But have to push through. We have prioritized and removed a lot of what is initially planned, we are trimming down to an enjoyable, stable, polished thing.

In between balance tweaks, some of the cool things we are adding for next release include:

• Combat areas – Now not just one
• Invader camps in the map that you can invade
• Three new unit types / weapons (axe, sling, spear thrower)
• New icons for perks and status effects
• Changes on fatigue model and affected movement speed
• Improved attack flow, with less downtime between attacks
• Removed camping popup
• Tents are no longer required

Some of the other things in the list include:

• Placing caverns and populating them
• Integrate new intro art
• Being able to sprint away to flee from enemies or catch animals, consuming stamina

Adding new animations to the models has proven to be a particular pain. Every time we add a new animation to the units it shakes everything because of the versatile (ha) way our unit models work; we have a single object type that we use for all units and we customize it based on the equipment the unit is wearing, its class, and some other attributes.

We’ve also been planning the best to market the full release, which we will be doing on our own it would seem, for the lack of any publisher

I’ve also been working on a smaller fun project for a programming contest, just to reduce stress during downtimes or hightimes. I’ll be able to talk a bit more about it soon.