Dev Diary 56 - To The Sky

January 7, 2023 · 4 min · Vsevolod

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.

The biggest change that we’re testing right now is a movement system rework. It’s an idea that can possibly make the game multiple time faster and increase the tactical depth while preserving original simplicity and chillness. Here it is:

So the thing is:

  • you can freely reposition your troops in your action range during your turn. They will move and act as usually if you order them to move out of your action range.

  • enemies block your action range

During exploration, this change seems to make it much simpler, as now you just choose a direction to expand and not care about moving troops. And during battle, you have a little bit more card-game feel, where you have “hand” (creatures in your action range"), table (enemy action range - especially intersection with your action range), and “played cards” (creatures that you decided to move into enemy action range).

This is quite a fundamental change, but I won’t miss a chance to test it out, because it opens space for a lot of other interesting mechanics.

Besides that, a lot of other cool things were added. For example, goblins faction (they don’t consume elemental gems but still can use them), or owl people who have shared resource pool.

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Here is how a redesigned Opinions screen looks, this space effect was very fun to make:

It’s also different depending on which time of day it is

There are lots of new content (spells, creatures, structures) and even some tiny visual improvements, maybe you’ll notice them:

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It’s nice that my inspiration is also returning after having some more shitty personal issues in a previous couple of months (to sum it up, first 4 lines of this song fit so much haha). Even though, I have less time now (due to being in AAA-gamedev with in-office job now), I’m continuing working on it slowly and steadily :)

I probably forgot to list half of the changes, but here is the full changelog.

Changelog

I probably forgot to list half of the changes, but here is the full changelog.

  • New content
    • New factions:
      • Stryg, the owl-born
      • Goblins
    • New creatures
      • Darkstalker
      • Skeleton
    • New skills
      • Shape of Water
      • Scry
      • Divination
    • New music
      • Hand Of Winter
      • Tyrant
    • New structres
    • Changed some Opinion effects
  • Effects overhaul
    • More scriptable effects
    • Reworked effect label generator
    • “On mining” effects are now scripted in resource type entities and not hard-coded
  • Enchanting food with elemental gems now gives funny effects
  • Improved tutorials
    • Tutorial window queues so that they won’t appear on top of each other
    • Tutorial UI improvements and fixes
    • Worked on tutorial level
  • New inventions screen
    • Work in progress tech tree - this will be the primary way of getting Understandings for most factions
  • When you pick loot up, all nearby loot is gathered - you don’t have to click each resource anymore
  • Removed stamina
  • Redesigned status bars - exp is now third yellow bar instead of stamina
  • Hovering strategic view button now peeks it
  • Highlighting towers when dragging a gem to enchant them; no highlighting of not-enchantable structures
  • Area around creatures is slightly brightened to try to guide attention correctly
  • Removed health predictions by default
    • You can still display them by getting “Divination” spell
  • Reworked movement system
    • Now you can reposition creatures inside your action range by dragging them
    • Placing a movement order will automatically reposition creatures closest to the movement target
    • You can’t reposition creatures covered by enemy action range
  • Longer daytimes. Instead of a day-night mapping to 6 turns, days and nights are much longer
    • Invaders attack only during the night and more intensely
    • Player has periods of peace during the day
  • Daytimes work differently now. They are no daytimes, but are “world states”. These can be “day”, “night”, “blood moon”, “winter”, “zombie apocalypse” and so on
  • Difficulty increase events on timeline now explicitly says which new powers enemies will get
  • Super cool background and animations for unerstandings
  • Balance
    • Movement speeds decreased
    • On enchantment, tower height now affects attack range too
    • Playable species won’t have too little endurance now (which makes it very hard to produce food in beginning)
    • Changed some spell effects
    • Neutral creeps are stronger
    • Towers are stronger
    • More walls are built per worker
    • All spells have less range and scale differently
  • Fixed a lot of bugs
  • Added a lot of bugs