Dev Diary 65 - Tree of Life

Happy New Year! I had a lot of very positive happenings in my personal life, including FINALLY getting the residence permit in Sweden. Now I can proceed with some legal steps that will allow me to release this project.

For Colossal Citadels, this time there has been a huge lore overhaul. I dreamed about Cartographers, world & cosmos structure, Distortion, Trees Of Life, The Abyss, false and true deities, and fallen civilizations, and some secret topics you’ll be able to unravel by finding clues in the world. Some of the new developments were transferred into the game immediately.

Tree Of Life

I’m not going to say much about it lore-wise yet, but a civilization’s tree of life is significant, and one of the secret objectives would be growing and protecting your tree of life. Some factions start with it and are played in more of a tower-defence-like fassion.

Elves will be a playable faction that has the Tree of Life from the start. Therefore, I did a pass on elves game design and implemented their looks:

(at the left: an elf protecting the settlement from Distortion)

I might divide wood elves and high elves for gameplay reasons (and I also came up with funny lore for both of them!)

Aether

In an attempt to streamline learning, I introduced new magical resource called Aether. It’s possible to distill elemental crystals into Aether and use it for magical awakening (when workers gain active abilities). User experience-wise, now, instead of weird tutorial and unintuitive drag and drop controls there are just buttons for awakening and acquiring abilities. Even though drag and drop was kinda cool, it was totally undiscoverable and it was hard to give players clue that abilities are not so hard to obtain.

Awakening:

Learning abilities:

Aether can also be used for more advanced magical purposes later in the game.

Other Changes

I finally took time to implement this: now monster packs around world structures are limited by themes. For example, you’ll find some kind of spiders around a spider nest most likely. Some monster types are very rare now or even can be found only on other islands.

Another useful update was related to worker controls. After several dozens of turns you might get hold of 15+ creatures. Sometimes seeing a lot of portraits below creates a feeling of a mess, even if you never have to (and can’t) microcontrol them. Now, there is a button to hide “unimportant” workers - that don’t have any abilities and are producing something. This small detail made late game quite more comfortable.

Besides that, a million of bugfixes and other UX improvements were made.

Changelog

• Aether resource and related productions
• Buttons for awakening in the skill wheel (with Aether and Gems)
• Buttons for learning skills in the skill wheel
• Monsters around world structures are now limited by themes
• New mosters: white wolf, green dragon, white stag
• Creeps rebalance
• UX improvements
• Hide workers button
• New tutorials
• Tree of Life and related productions
• Tree of Life-related events
• Lore overhaul
• Elves overhaul
• New understandings
• A lot of bugfixes