Changelog #49 - Postponing the Demo

Hello, I’ll start with not so good news (though, I already said it week ago at Discord). Colossal Citadels won’t participate in this summers Steam NextFest. It’s good that I made wider playtesting time last weekend: a lot of useful conclusions were inferred from the tests. Thank you guys!

The most important conclusion (and the primary reason of postponing the demo until the nextnext fest) is that the game needs a better tutorial. The percentage of players struggling with basics with current hint-based tutorials is quite significant, and some players skip tutorials, thinking that the game is too intuitive and misunderstand some parts of controls. Sometimes the density of information in tutorial windows is too big to be remembered/processed at once, and players forget/don’t prioritize the most important points.

For example, the movement controls are non-traditional and have some unusual things about it. Here is a video I made that captures the essense of it:

I want the first few runs to be a smoother experience, so I’m going to make a separate tutorial level that teaches the basics by forcing players to do certain actions, read hints and click certain buttons on the screen. I designed most of that tutorial long ago, but I won’t be able to finish it before the NextFest. Quite sad to see that a lot of awesome games have published their demos right now :( But I believe this decision will make the game much better.

If some of you really wanted to try the demo, you’ll be able to test the new tutorial (and main gameplay) when the tutorial is finished: I’ll just send you a message/email when it’s time, if you applied to a playtest.

I also made a very important feature for strategy games: tooltip extensions. Here is demonstration video. So, now you can hover tooltips and they will be extended into more tooltips, and you’ll be able to learn the whole game starting with just one popup!

Here is a changelog. It’s not long, but meaningful:

• working on big tutorial
• tooltip extensions: you can hover mouse over to lock them on screen
  • text now supports tags that easily triggers other tooltips
  • tag database to easily get information about every game aspect and mechanics
    • already 80 entries in there, and a lot more missing
• bare bones for world generation style system that will be used to generate other continents
  • desert generation
  • WIP colossal forest generation - video
• fog coloring interface
• improved UI in many places
• bugfixes
• new bugs