Dev Diary 70 - Demo Release!

Here comes the biggest update after the demo release! Besides a million of bugfixes there are actually a lot of new features and content now. One of the most important things is the production prioritization! It’s now possible to assign better workers into specific productions still without having to microcontrol all the workers. Read how it’s done in the full post!

Colors

Among cute things with this update - I finally finished the color system and now all players are able to choose their colors which will be used for clothing and user interface. Moreover, each faction has their own color. For example, Greeks are white, Wood Elves are green, Egyptians are Yellow.

Behold, Greeks in White:

Goblins in Purple:

Speaking of purple… The starting faction Rome, is Red. I was thinking if Romans should be purple as this is kinda imperial/royal color.

But for a starting faction red is a cooler choice + Romans actually used red a lot in military, so I kept the red. The Tyrian purple is still available to select.

Prioritization

It is against this game’s design pillars to allow assign chosen workers to different tasks. The system assigns them automatically instead in the “best way”. Turns become 15 times faster and the game feels much more roguelitey to play.

But the “best way” might not always align with the players intention… Of course, sometimes a player might want to make more food than wood at some point, and more wood than food at another point. Before the automatic assignment did the most probable thing, but I always thought it would be cool to provide a simple control to make one productions more important than the other productions. So, here is the solution, you simply drag to rearrange productions!

This adds next to no time to turn time and no option paralysis. Also, it’s possible to rearrange whole production categories:

World Structures and Understandings

I want to emphasize the joy of exploring the world. Like some adventure strategies, you can unravel random things in the fog of way and they will give you some unexpected. At some point in development I thought that player gets too many Understandings and they devaluate. So getting Understandings from world structures would add them to the pool of learnable Understandings. While this was okay balance-wise, it was really confusing for new players because they always thought they got the Understanding immediately. Now I made it to adhere to player expectations, and exploring world structures feels much more satisfying now!

I also added two “Metamagic” understandings which boost all conditional effects on workers. For example, if there is a weapon that poisons an enemy on critical hit, “Metamagic: Midnight” will apply the poison the second time, or for more peaceful effects, like +1 HP every time a worker produces, “Metamagic: Dawn” will make the effect result build up quicker. Granite, for example, adds +1 piercing damage to a random creature every time you mine it:

Demo Reception

Months after release the demo, some people still eventually download it, but popularity has expectedly went down. I expect it to rise again when Colossal Citadels finally enters Steam Nextfest.

I also presented the game at some local events such as Game Habitat Gamedev Meetup.

So this update also affects the demo (excluding full-game content, such as Egyptians faction).

Full Changelog

This was only a small portion of changes. Full list is here:

• can select color for you faction
• working on story mode (no spoilers)
• fix being able to interact with world when loading
• add hints about development milestones (not the Colossal Citadels milestones, but Empire development in the game…)
• pressing esc will cancel targetting for all targeting modes now
• hovering workers will now also display their production and efficiency
• improved some tooltips
• can now right click portraits and do usual functions
• can now unassign workers from right click menu
• added Egyptians faction
• added Pyramids structure
• some random-rolling productions now can only appear for specific factions
• production priorities
• production category priorities
• world visibility is saved and loaded correctly now instead of being forgotten
• cursor color now also tells about visibility
  • Colored: fully visible
  • Grey: badly visible/old
  • Black: unknown
• workers can now be assigned to soldiers also by clicking portraits, not only the map
• slightly decreased visibility range for all creatures
• fixed bug where enemies walk out of fog and you don’t see who’s attacking
• performance improvements
• fixed some bugs with Undo Turn
• some spells now apply before the production happens
• fixed issue with creatures not receiving multiple level ups when they receive huge amounts of exp
• new understandings: “Metamagic: Midnight”, “Metamagic: Dawn”
• fixed crash when pressing space in main menu
• fixed bug with some structures not adding understandings to the deck sometimes
• new conditional modifier “on redraw”
• redraw button is added to the belief choice (the Ban Production menu)
• “on production” conditional modifier is now separate from “on mining”
• fixed bug where weapons acquired in batches were not always equipped
• fixed bug where soldiers were assigned differ on server and on client
• added tutorial message about experience
• significantly boosted “monument”/“library” would structures - they add 2/3 random understandings to the deck of learnable understandings
• all remaining world structures that gave choice of understandings now apply them to you instead of adding to the deck of learnable understandings
• when something adds an understanding to your deck or to acquired understandings with a timer (e.g. from a Library event), there is now a windows that shows you all added understandings
• dagger production doesn’t require fuel anymore
• fixed some sounds not affected by Master volume slider
• fixed issue with blueprint names not displaying in inventions
• creeps on far locations on the map have slightly less hp now
• fixed colors of neutral creatures
• improved gameover screen
• fixed buildings and ships appearing outside of borders on production
• added an error notification when a production can’t find a place to build