This tenday I made even less features and even more insectoidquashing than the week before. A lot of big problems come from google’s protobuf library, which I’m using in this project. They couldn’t make it to work with dynamic loading and even refuse to try, and Unreal Engine, as well as a lot of other software, makes use of it. Problems come in form of memory leaks, since certain functions don’t work (such as releasing arena buffers with strings). I was hoping to fix it soon, but looks like it’s not an adequate task, because this library is bigger than my game :) So, I started to rewrite related code and already changed over 7k lines of code to get rid of the library. The best replacement is Unreal Engine’s serialization and RPCs, even though I’ll have to give up some cool things such as proto definitiona. This rewrite branch is still work in progress, and the memory is still leaking now! But I guess that’s ok for pre-alpha, unless you have 4G of RAM.

Back to more interesting stuff: I redesigned how armor works to make it clearer. At first, there was an idea of turning armor into “hp bar extension” that will restore each turn: it would work like something between Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Slay the Spire. This would allow trickier combos and underline the feeling of “a perfect turn”, when you carefully plan to take no damage and do an effect on the battlefield. Armor-gaining skills would getting much more juicy (see Slay the Spire), and some other features like denying cold damage with fire damage and backwards would work more intuitively. It’s also much clearer to player than the previous system of “defense points”, that non-linearly added to damage percentage cut. For example, 1 point was 5%, 2 points was 9%, and it never gets to 100%.

But there are problems with it: we have a lot of types and damage/defense in design: pierce, blunt, fire, cold, lightning, poison. All of these can’t be shown on a healthbar at once, and there are dozens of units on the screen at the same time. Information needs to be clear and go as fast as possible. It would be inconvenient repeatedly open popups to see defenses; damage predictions on healthbars won’t show damage due to first few strikes taking armor instead of health points. So, this defense style doesn’t fit for this scale of the game. If there were 4 units on screen and not 20, it would make a greater experience. Maybe I’ll leave this idea for future games.

There is much simpler solution. Because there are six types of damage, it’s perfectly fine to have 100% defense for one of them. So now armor is simply adding flat damage block! It linearly stacks with skills, resource effects and everything else. For physical damage armor, it would be easy to gain big defense, but almost impossible to gain 100%. Against elemental damage, it would be not uncommon to have 100% defense against some type of damage and vulnerability to some other.

Besides from armor, I improved menu design and made it more eye-candy; also, more turn prediction visualization work. Here is the full changelog.

Hey! Colossal Citadels is going to have more unsupervised pre-alpha tests, and I need more people for that. If you want to participate, fill up this form and wait a until the end of the week!

Disclaimer: this will be a limited version of first N turns with fixed maps and less procedural generation - it will be easier for me to judge about the experience of tutorials and first steps in the game. Also, of course, a lot of bugs and feature placeholders.

When it starts I would be thankful if you play the game and destroy it: your critique can be used to improve the game.

Thanks a lot!

This week I’ve been working on bugsquashing a lot, but I also added some important automation features. One of them is mostly targeted for the lategame when you’ll want your towns running on their own and providing your adventurers with supplies automatically. Another of them is an overhaul of scouts which now explore surroundings automatically. Both features are not completely working yet (e.g. big towns also produce useless old weapon types sometimes, and scouts run into enemies with higher action range than them), but that’s a subject of long improvement.

Watch out, I’m going to make a broader test soon before the demo. Depending on test’s results, I’ll make a decision of postponing the demo: because having proper financial state (I’m not in a one because of forced immigration) at the time of demo release would allow this game to gain more from this steam next fest; there are a lot of things to improve yet. Anyone who would be frustrated by the fact that it’s postponed, can request to become a playtester (that for that!). But if everything about understandability and stability will turn out fine as it is, the demo will happen this nextfest!

Also, this week two very cool important games came out: Cantata and Songs of Conquest. One of them features turn-based factory-building too (but in different approach), other one is a continuation of Adventure Strategy gameplay. I advice checking out both.

Thanks for reading! Here is the changelog:

The most important feature added in this list is a battle engagement effect. Now when you place a movement order, it will immediately display that battle is about to happen. Because now all battles are visible in advance, it became much easier and convenient to play. I’ll show the effect soon in a video.

I won some reddits again with a simple low-effort post about item rarity colors. I always loved feelings item rarities gave in ARPGs and I was intended to do a similar thing here from the beginning. Now finally here it is.

Item rarities will be as: Common (white) < Uncommon (blue) < Rare (gold) < Legendary (red, animated)

Here is a changelog. Not so big as previous ones, though.

Past two weaks I’ve shown the game to multiple new people and done a lot of playtests. They seem to like it ^_^ Steam NextFest is really soon, I hope I’ll be able to deliver good enough experience for you guys.

I also partially got back to work, so less changes this time: but there is still a lot of important bug fixes, such as movement algorithm fixes; small details and improvements; shortcuts (you can increase production using only keyboard now); some new content (different kinds of scrolls for Spell Scrolls), features and rule changes (advanced productions take one house now).

That was really motivating four days with a lot of new ideas and implemented features. From important things: spell scrolls now are implemented - these are group-wise spells that consume items on use. They need to be created from scrolls. Other thing is projectiles for weapons like bows. Now you’ll have to supply different kinds of projectiles like in factory games.

Here is a huge changelog.

Immigration is hard, and also putin now threatens to attack country I moved into. But I’m working on this project, playtesting and designing stuff is great as always. Preparing demo build requires a lot of old issues to be solved so that the game will feel closer to what I want. Here are this week’s changes:

Good/bad news! Due to moving to Sweden as an asylum seeker and waiting for a exemption from a work permit, I’m now officially unemployed! But on the other side, my dream of becoming a full time solo indie game developer has fulfilled. So, this week’s changelog is going to be really big

Now I can finally work on the game while I’m waiting for some legal steps to happen. We did a first playtest in a while, the last one was 1.5 months ago. A fresh look (sort of), allowed me to get lots and lots of new ideas and usability improvements, but I started to implement only some of them, because my main task now is working on a public demo. There was a demo long ago, but I want this one to be an awesome, controlled experience with procgen stripped out.

Colossal Citadels will participate in the next Steam NextFest in June - an event where people publish and play a lot of demos. I wanted to participate in the last one (in February), but creating a Steam page took a lot of time.

I also changed my text editor theme to white. Wow. So, here is the next changelog.

This month there were no updates because these terrifying events happened. A full scale russian invasion beginned with series of rocket strikes on my beloved Kyiv. I’m not a soldier, so I left Ukraine after 10 days and now only participating in the information war.

As I settled after a very long path through Europe, I could make some tiny updates to the game as a rest activity. Long delay also means a fresh look, I’ve got new ideas and implemented some of them. I also started to learn Swedish and asked people about their local folklore. So, maybe some deeper Scandinavian lore is coming later.