Hi! These two weeks I did a bit of streams where I’m adding some new sacrifice-themed content and some gameplay changes!

Hi hi, it’s been a long time! It’s time to lift the veil on the development a bit! :) Now I do periodic live coding sessions on twitch where I play Colossal Citadels until I encounter an issue, and then proceed to fixing it. You also have a chance to play the game at periodic public playtest sessions at Game Habitat in Sweden :)

There were so many changes since last time! I tried to list them at the bottom of the page, but you also can have a glance over them in this video. I also told a little about what other games and genres inspired me to shape Colossal Citadels as they are right now. Here it is:

So, here it is. Another huge update with mechanics that change the gameplay completely.

This period consisted mostly of rebalancing and changing numbers randomly until I feel better! As a result, we got much more challenging and stable gameplay, but still there are a lot of issues and now I want to steer player a bit from exploration to town-building. And of course there was a lot of bugfixing - I solved A LOT of old issues, including some game design ones. Anyway I’m starting to be happy with the result, which means I’m going to draft some new people to test it out. BONUS: some soundtracks in the end of that post.

The most important and impactful (and sort of spontaneous!) change that I just made and that appears to fit quite well was procedural passives. I’ll explain what shortly what does that mean. But it’s funny that they extend the extensive list of procedurally-generated things Colossal Citadels already has, and I didn’t quite plan that!

Hey hey! Happy new year! It’s been a long time. But now I finally finished signing a contract with my new employer so that I’m allowed work on this side project in my free time, and now I’m returning to my workflow (yep, that’s how it works with some big companies). So I’m back!

And I bring lots and lots of new changes, some of them are quite fundamental.

“Waiting for player2’s turn” message on a black/locked screen is boring, you should at least try to do something about it.

I just made a tiny post with some thoughts around sim-turns and parallel gameplay in turn-based games. There are some well-known (and not so well-known) ideas such as next turn predictions, alternating turn phases, planning by controlling enemies, and some major and minor concerns about simultaneous turn game design.

Super important implementations of long-awaited features related to Understandings are arrived this week. Now the system is much more deep and role-play-capable than it was before and now is quite close to the design I intended: your people can now be, for example, xenophobic exocannibals, or vegetarian destruction-magic communists, or any other weird combination. I’ll describe the improvements to the system in this post.

Two years have passed since I first showed the game and an unbelievable amount of work was done - surprisingly, it’s still super fun me! So, I counted some pieces of work content that this game uses already, and it’s quite a lot!

This tenday brought a lot of handy updates. The most important, I finally fixed quick world reloading, and now you don’t have to relaunch the game when you to load or start a new run, haha! This also allowed me to fix some issues related to Replay Last Turn functionality and to implement the long-awaited undo button (which resets the state to the beginning of the turn). Due to unforgiving spell effects and combinations, where one little mistake might ruin everything (yes, this is intended), the game has become much more fun with “undo”. At first, Thinking of limiting it, like Into The Breach does, but I see no reason to do this without such cool narrative tricks like in Into The Breach, and now I find myself using it a lot (didn’t try with playtesters yet). Anyway, player turn in Colossal Citadels is more like “a planning stage”, even though you can see applied abilities.

Here how “Revert Turn” looks now:

Living through some extremely stressful legal stuff, I didn’t make anything highly important this tenday. Instead, I was calming myself by casually polishing and improving the clarity of battles and abilities: this is as always a very fun thing to do. Besides increased juiciness, now there are fewer awkward things like too fast and frequent abilities, unrhythmical delays between attacks, and so on. If only I knew how to fix these stupid ragdolls so that they won’t occasionally fly away to another continent… Yesterday, one of them hit right in the camera somehow (I didn’t even know it has collision on), sadly I wasn’t recording.

However, in addition to bugfixing and doing not-so-meaningful visual improvements, I came up with a couple of things that are quite a big deal in terms of improving the strategic view. First, I got rid of old movement prediction lines and replaced them with these animations I shown before. The lines weren’t visually finished, but even if they were, they caused insane visual overload anyway (a screenshot from a terrified player), when there are a lot of creatures. Second, strategic view now shows unified aggro ranges of enemies. It got a bit more convenient to quickly inspect the situation. Does the strategic view still look crypthic, though?