Dev Diary 66 - Expeditions

This time has brought some cool new features for Colossal Citadels and a lot of fun for me! I added legendary rewards for bosses, level transitions, technology blueprints, actual dungeons (!), and some other small things

Other Worlds

Inspired by some titles by Illwinter Games and some old school adventure strategies, long ago I thought it would be really cool to be able to travel to other worlds with workers you already have. Moreover, it’s one of great ways of giving opportunities for lore progression. Dungeons, various hells and heavens, underwater - it’s really exciting to explore new environments with their special encounters and resources, and then trying to find the secret of the place.

Therefore, from time to time I’ve been working on in-game world transitions and alternative level generators. So, from now on it’s possible to travel to other continents and descend into dungeons.

There are already some level designs done before, such as the desert world

and the primeval forest:

I’ve also been working on the dungeon. For now it looks simplistic as hell, but it will come some day. So, now some dungeon entrances lead to this world:

There is also one more screenshot from dungeon below in this post. Another kind of world is of course a fully procedural world, just like the starting world (but with reprioritized regions and difficulties). This is where you get to when you are travelling without Cartographer’s directions - The Infinite Ocean will take you to an uncharted place and you will never find the way back.

There are also plans for a couple of absolutely wild environments, but I’m going to postpone that until after Early Access release.

Legendary rewards

Defeating any boss should pay out, giving the player unique rewards. For that, I introduced legendary passive abilities. They are still partially procedurally generated as usual passive abilities that you can roll on enchanting any worker, but these are very strong and can intruduce some interesting strategies. Most of them make some aspect very powerful, but also have a big tradeoff or weakness. They are depicted by an upside-down triangle with golden border, and creatures enchanted with legendary passives now glow red:

Later on, I may also think on more rare legendary active abilities, also with tradeoffs.

Machinery

To travel to other continents, players will need to build some kind of transport - now there are ships and cloudships for that. But also for quite a while there were some secret production types that didn’t made much sense to be spawned into the usual weaponry. These are:

• war machinery, such as “siege mechanism” (a robot that requires fuel instead of food), or a catapult (not implemented yet)
• advanced resource types (parchment, pottery, and other auxiliary things not available from start but useful)

Now the player will be able to roll these as a “Invent Technology” Understanding, along with older “Invent Weapon” and “Invent Building”

Level Transitions

This actually took the most work: now you are able to choose how to travel to other worlds mentioned above.

The standard way of travelling between continents in The Infinite Ocean is going by cloudships. They can do the necessary maneuvers as instructed by cartographers to not fall into the abyss. You need to build more ships to be able to take more resources and workers with you. You will also need to stock up with A LOT of food for your journey.

Another, super risky way of travelling is regular ships. They are much cheaper, but they have 50% chance of not reaching the destination!

Here is what travelling menu looks like

There is still some coding to do to make it work with the multiplayer, so this feature is single-player only for now.

Blueprint Rarity

There are countless (actually 82) blueprints in the game now - Weaponry, Buildings, and new one - Technology. Some are better than the others. Now each one has rarity - this is small feature related to spawning rate through the game progression.

Changelog

• Added level transitions
  • Travelling menu, ability to transfer esources
• Cloudships and Ships productions
• Technology blueprints
  • 6 productions
• Resource rarity
• Improvements in world generators for:
  • Primeval Forest
  • Desert
  • Random world
• New world generator for dungeons
• Legendary rewards for bosses
• Updates in lore and descriptions
• Fixed bugs
• New bugs