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.

It’s been 44 days since the last update so let’s go!

CREA Digital winners

We were selected as winners for “Crea Digital”, a program from the Ministries of Culture and Information Technologies of Colombia, with “Expedición: Los Hijos de Bachué”. This will be a scenario based on the Muisca legend of Pacanchique, and the last years of the Muisca Confederation in the central Andes highlands.  We expect to make good use of these funds to enhance production, art and UX aspects of the game while producing quality content to be distributed across the country, inspiring children to become game developers in the future and teaching people about their history.

Changes in Exploration

After a lot of experimentation with the forests, including tests with 3d meshes, I decided to tackle the forest issue with a change of perspective. Of course, this isn’t a magical solution but I believe it’s closer to the sense of scale I want to portray.

For the “New Expedition” mode, the player now starts on land in the southeastern-most part of the map, using an adequate sea vessel based on the selected culture.

Regarding field of view, our first approach was to use zoom levels for this so that if for some reason your field of view was restricted, the game would zoom in so that what you could see would fit all screen. I found out this to be a bit confusing and troublesome from the art part, so we are now using a “vignette” effect instead.

We are also now detecting if the expedition is transversing a forest, in which case it moves slower and the field of view is also limited.

Procedural terrain

Worked further in procedural generation, adding controls to ensure a percentage of the map is above the sea, and smoothing out the mountain peaks to make them look more natural.

Hometown and Transfer Items

For the “New Expedition” mode, the player adventure will start at his “hometown”, where he must stock his Expedition to the unknown. He may come back to town to trade and restock.

The UI is still very early but finally settled on a design for this multipurpose interaction, which will also be used to trade with native towns, and to transfer things between the expedition and locations such as ships and outposts.

Voyage mode

The current approach for the long voyages in the open sea. It will be a separate mode in which events will be simulated and things will be handled at a higher level. Will probably add some navigation and weather aspects, as well as events with the crew.

Combat – Pathfinding

We implemented pathfinding in combat using the A* Pathfinding Project, it’s looking much better now.

UI Tweaks

Added a permanent minimap on the lower-right corner of the HUD, and compressed lots of UI info into the status panel in the lower-left corner. Also increased the size of the Town and Conversation dialogs and relocated them.

Also, after lots of research and experimentation, we were able to add “markers” for the command destinations, painting them over the terrain using “projectors”.

Rivers

After evaluating different alternatives we settled on handling rivers as meshes generated from polylines (sequences of points), in order to provide more flexibility for their procedural generation. We also added animation to their flow. Their appearance is still work in progress.

Sound effects tests

We introduced speech effects for “commands” as well as random “expressions” from the expedition members during exploring, as well as new sounds playing when the units are injured or die. This is all still in test.

 

It’s been about three weeks since the last update so let’s go!

Don’t forget to check out the forums and discuss there, as well as follow the blog!

Cartography – Automap

We had made progress on this some months ago, but with all the changes in the design and now that we have procedural terrain, we practically had to remake it from scratch.

We are now generating the base map from the generated (or loaded) terrain, taking into account the heightmap to draw the shoreline as well as icons for the mountains and forests, and then displaying it as the player explores, including the position of the player and adding the discoveries he has made (see below).

I must say that it looks pretty cool.

Discoveries and Findings

This facet of the game is meant to provide the players with a motivation to explore the map. As you walk around you will find things such as animal or plant species, ruins or new cultures. When you find a new one you will have a chance to name it and will earn “stars” based on its rarity. You can always check your discoveries in your journal.

This facet is still very early in progress, it will be heavily based on procedural generation for the description and (2D) appearance of the findings you are making.

Procedural Generation

We invested a serious amount of dev on terrain generation, we are now generating islands using midpoint displacement fractal with preseeded key points and a lot of tweaking to make them look nice, be more controllable, and play well with the base procedural generation we had in place which was 100% Perlin noise.

We are also affecting the base heightmap so that plains look plainer and mountains look more dramatic, by scaling specific portions of the heightmap.

Combat

Combat now takes place on a separate “scene”, so when for any reason the player engages in combat (right now there are just random ambushes) he transitions to a separate area with a higher level of detail

Exploration

Small tweaks on how things are portrayed in the overworld, to give a better sense of scale now that the combat has been moved to a separate scene.

Also, further additions to mouse movement so you can now move in the ocean and enter towns.

Title Screen

Working in the flows for both the Campaign mode and the New Expedition mode, you can now select the campaign (but there’s a single one, the Pacanchique one), or select the “civ” you are going to use for the procedural mode.

 

Procedural Generation

• Make individual features of towns “land” into irregular terrain when placing them.
• Allow setting the tiling sizes of the terrain layer’s textures.
• Paint terrain with rock texture based on its slopeness.
• Place towns in grass band.
• Prevent trees from being placed in steep slopes.
• Select between premade or procedural terrain based on the selected game mode.
• Paint “dirt” below trees and towns placed in the map with a semitransparent texture mask.

Combat

• Release camera lock on the main unit when entering combat mode.
• Add visible arrows as projectiles for archers.
• Transition to Game Over scene when the main unit dies

Exploration

• Mouse movement in Exploration mode

Strengthened the clouds particle effect, so it looks foggier.

Did some fixes on the “RTS-like” units selection system and some cleanup on the UI.

Speaking about Combat, you can now commanding units to move somewhere or attack a given unit while in combat mode.

I still continue experimenting with the visual style for forests… it’s an endless conflict between preserving the intended “scale” of the world, while avoid it looking too flat while dealing with achieving adequate performance. Fun.

This week we hope to push hard in order to have a playable version of the game that can be tested since we are applying for a government grant.

Behold, the cabbage forest!