NovaMundi is a game of exploration and tactical combat in which you lead a band of warriors to defend their land from invaders. Delve into mysterious caverns to gain the aid from the spirits. A new challenge every time with generated landscapes of steep valleys and perilous jungle.

As of October 12th, 2024, NovaMundi is available on Steam as a Full Release. GET IT NOW if you like what you see!

The last push to make it happen was a big push which included many small fixes and tweaks in the user experience, far too many to list. So let’s instead take a look at some of the coolest, more visible stuff that was packed into it!

Changes inside the game

The Intro – Muisca Voices

This was a joint effort along with Manuel and Gecko, we worked together to get the script ready, translate it to Muysc Cubun, and record it professionally. You will now hear a voice-over of the intro in the language used by certain indigenous groups who used living in the geographical area the game is set on, in the XVI Century (at least based on the most recent research).

Many thanks to Manuel for his diligent work on this; being a leading figure in the academy in regards to this research certainly helped, but it was still a great challenge on his own words. Note that this language reportedly “disappeared” in the 17th century, making it extremely difficult translating complete sentences from modern languages.

In the process, we debated a lot on what the subtitles of the intro should be; should we show the story in modern English/Spanish? or should we be more accurate to the literal translation Manuel was able to provide? in the end, I decided to keep the Spanish one very close to the indigenous language translation, while the English one takes a little bit more creative liberties.

The Mysterious Caverns – A Magical Portal

This was the biggest gameplay change in this release; we added support for (simple) procedurally generated caves waaaaaay back on time starting on September 2020, and then doing some small pushes in April 2021 and February 2023. However, for a long time, they served a secondary purpose: I knew our implementation was just not complete enough, so they had been relegated to a single cavern you had to visit to complete certain quest.

However, we have always had big plans for the caverns; both thematically and gameplay-wise, they were bound to have a stronger role in the game. The problem? I wasn’t sure if we would be able to make them justice with the limited resources and time we had at hand.

But in classic slashie fashion (ugh), I decided to jump ahead and make them happen for our Full Release version.

So, what are the caverns in NovaMundi? well, they are basically very dangerous locations, most of them optional, where you step away from the historical setting into a more mystical domain, where you will be able to find great dangers but also great magical rewards for your expedition. They serve as “dungeons” so you have more activities to do from the overworld, and they are the main source of magical arms (they are now much rarer to find as drops).

An so, the overworld is now sprinkled with cavern entrances and we are populating them with enemies and rewards based on their difficulty level. For the cavern entrances, we are showing a big icon atop them so you don’t miss them, and I improved their appearance by reusing the mountain models and merging them with the previous cave entrance model (which looked a bit sad alone on its own).

One of the biggest challenges we had (and still have to certain extent) was pathfinding. It just wasn’t working with the closed spaces of the caves and we had to do lots of tweaks to make it work half decently (many thanks to Camilo Ramirez for popping back into the project briefly and starting the trail of bug-fixing); one of these tweaks was to make units serve as pathfinding obstacles ONLY when they were stationary, else they would block the thin passageways and cause lots of janky behavior. I also tweaked the parameters of the smoothing algorithm which was trying to take too many shortcuts.

Another big change was allowing the entire party to journey into the cave; we had previously only allowed “spelunking parties” of 5, randomly selected units, but this was mostly trying to sidestep the bad pathfinding issues. Well, this is no longer the case, so the entire jump can now jump in; this also meant we had to balance the caves so they posed some dangers to an entire, well equipped party, which meant adding more, and more dangerous cave dweller enemies.

The “field of view” system was also improved for smoother transitions when the “light” of an unit is activated (which happens when the unit moves away from the pack). It looks much better now.

Of course, in addition to the work on the caverns themselves, we needed to have a way for players to get into them; the entrances from the overworld were also great improved in appearance, and are now placed in concentric rings of increasing difficulty.

We are also now assigning some fun names to the caverns, and populating them with weird monsters based on their difficulty rating. I didn’t have a budget to include the fantastical creatures we had planned, so I had to work with what I had at hand (hopefully should be enjoyable, and we were able to add 4 new types of cavern enemies)

Gecko also pitched in for the caverns facet and we made the cavern ambience work again; it’s a mysterious sound that really fits the spooky exploration (maybe we should have pitched for a halloween event). He also added some effects for entering and leaving the cavern.

Dropping items

It might seems like a small thing, but the lack of the ability to drop items was really destroying the mid-game. It led to situations where you were full of valuables, yes starving because of being unable to trade them for heavier food and it was super frustrating!

I considered several options to fix this; at some point in the past, we supported creating camps where you could transfer items (cache) and even people! these camps could even grow into settlements ala Seven Cities of Gold, if you kept transferring people there. I thought on reviving this, but only for item caches, however after giving it some thought, I came to the conclusion that it would only make gameplay more tedious, with people dropping caches and then trying to remember where it was that they left a cache with X items or so, having to travel back there etc. It was just tedious.

Instead, I added the option to Drop items so it’s now a choice of the player: if they get into a situation where they mismanaged the inventory they at least have a way to survive at the expense of valuable items.

Gecko’s Audio Tweaks Crusade

Although life was super busy for Gecko the weeks prior to the release, he still managed to give the game a pass, adding and updating sounds in many areas.

For instance, some things that were already working years ago had broken when we made the transition to the inventory system for units; back when the combat audio was implemented, units were hardcoded to the weapon they were wearing, so the audio system was made with the assumption that a type of unit would always use the same weapon, and likewise, would only have a kind of armor. This was updated to the current model

Combat was further improved to include death notifications, sounds for pause and resume combat, fixes on the bow sounds and tweaks for battle start and end

Some of the areas where sound was improved included:

• Animal Discoveries
• Inventory Screen, including equipping the Tunjos
• Main and side-quest completion
• Jaguar sound pack

The Credits

The list of credits was updated along with some visual tweaks. It was fun going back in time and trying to list all the people who participated in the project. I tried to be exhaustive and analyze the contributions of each one, and even so missed at least one critical inclusion (to be fixed, apologies Mr. Paul Pereda, you are going in next version!).

Tweaks on Content

Another big chunk of work, also spearheaded by Manuel, was a review of all the dialogs and other textual content for for inaccuracies, typos, and weirdness / being outdated; for instance, I removed something that had bothered me for a long time: our creative license to add “wooden armor”, which was not only historically incorrect but also… weird. I replaced this with wooden shields. (Sorry Stoltverd, I know you fought long for this but no)

In-Game Settings Panel

It might not be as exciting for the amount of work required, but still something needed and asked for players; you can now set the quality level and resolutions from inside the game (no more ugly startup screen!). You can also now enable and disable tips from there.

Marketing work

Social Media Work with Frecuencia Gamer

I worked with the guys at Frecuencia Gamer to create social media content for the release, it’s been enlightening learning how to improve the quality of our posts and have more engagement with the audience; it’s also been an iterative work… initially we were doing most of the content in Spanish, but we are now pivoting back to English since that’s where there’s more potential for an audience.

The Trailer

We had a lot of plans to produce a new trailer for the full release, but unfortunately we fell short of time and budget, and I ended up doing it mostly myself.

I reused the voice-over from the original trailer, updated the gameplay cuts and changed one of the “cinematic” sections to instead show more gameplay. I also decided to use a different music track. Gecko managed to do a pass over it, adding some cool audio ambience effects.

The Stories

In the weeks prior to the release, we released some short stories we had prepared just for the occasion. The idea with them was to engage more people into the setting of the game, especially people that had never heard about this indigenous culture or this particular story. In that sense I think we succeeded because they have been mentioned already in the reviews.

Media Coverage

Around the time of the release, we had some media coverage and opportunities to speak about the game.

• (Spanish) Radio Interview for Colombia “Radio Nacional” Exploremos – Sadly I has to skip most of it but Gecko and Manuel managed to share a lot about how the game was made.
• (Spanish) Interview for Frecuencia Gamer

• I visited Japanese Cultural Center “Haru no Hinata” in Medellín, to speak about my gamedev journey and NovaMundi as well.
• We had a great article in El Colombiano (Spanish, local newspaper from Medellín, Colombia), talking about the game
• We also had a very nice story in Noticias Caracol (Spanish, one of the main media of Colombia)

We also had three streams on or around the Release date

HereBeCush: Our first sponsored stream, we actually did two parts and they were pretty good and informative. Cush really did a good job delving into the game going past the surface of things and highlighting the game features. Sadly this was on twitch and the VoD will be gone pretty soon.

Nookrium: One of my favorite streamers. He didn’t fail and covered our game next game after release. I think this is probably the way most people have noticed the game. Thank you!

Launch Day Stream with the Dev Team (in Spanish). I managed to bring QuietGecko, Esteban, and Manuel in for the moment when I pressed the button to transition the game from Early Access to Full release, it was a very nice stream with lots of info, history, and closing thoughts. I also got an error from Steam when I tried to press the button live (of course)

Changing the key art

Some days after the release (maybe a bit too late) I decided to change the key art on Steam to the “faces” cover art, which I think is more iconic and eye-catching.

Participation in the Roguelike Celebration Celebration

We chose the roguelike celebration celebration Steam event to launch the game, since it was really close in spirit to what NovaMundi is, unfortunately the event didn’t have any front page presence, so it didn’t really drive a lot of traffic into the game. Still, long live Roguelike Celebration!

Closing thoughts

With this, a chapter in the history of Slashware closes. Developing NovaMundi was a great challenge with lots of turns and twists (which have been described in detail in many interviews but I may compile some day). Many thanks to all the persons who helped make NovaMundi a reality that can be enjoyed now by thousands of people all around the world.

Also, my wife prepared a healthy dessert to commemorate the occasion.