Dev Diary 71 - Mounts and Rivers

It’s been a while, but this IS the biggest of the content updates! Since the demo, the game changed a lot - it’s much more streamlined now, and the world itself is completely transformed. There are rivers, fissures and snowy lands, and it’s full of new life: wandering beasts, neutral herds, and mounts you can actually ride. On top of that there’s a big food overhaul, stockpiles, and a much cleaner production interface. As always, read the full post for the details, and the complete changelog is at the bottom.

Mounts and Creature Sizes

ow there are big and huge creatures that physically take up multiple tiles on the triangular grid (a Bone Giant takes 2 tiles), and - most importantly - you can mount some of them!

Mounting is based on classes and species: small goblins can mount boars or wolves, while bigger folks can become bear riders or even dragon riders!

Horses come in different breeds with different stats, and there are new productions around them - Wild Herds and Deer Groves now roam the map as living sources of beasts. You can produce them the same way as other beasts (wolves, etc) - pay X food per turn and get one beast per turn.

Btw, not everything on the map wants to kill you anymore. There are now neutral, non-aggressive creatures wandering around, which makes the world feel much more alive and gives you the choice of hunting them, taming them, or just leaving them be. Aggressive wandering creatures are still there, ofc.

Females

And the biggest news of all - I finally added FEMALES into the game! Now it’s a proper world.

They aren’t just cosmetic, either. Some factions will have women much more common among their fighters, so the composition of the armies you meet (and raise) will vary depending on who you’re dealing with. Depending on species, males and females might have different stat biases.

Here are some of the recently added female bandits and bear riders in action:

Food Overhaul

Food used to be a single abstract resource. Not anymore! The food category now has multiple types and advanced productions, and each food type provides a different temporary effect on consumption with its own quirks:

• Fish is now a separate resource (and you can produce it from rivers, not just the ocean)
• Wild fruit, bread and other food types
• Hunting food from wandering beasts - it adds dexterity, and it stacks

Hunger is also simplified: at the start you just get 20 food, and it no longer depends on whether a creature is working. This removed a lot of early-game confusion for new players, which was actually a prerequisite for making the food types interesting.

Productions

Two big system improvements landed here. Excess resources are now stored in stockpiles and warehouses instead of workers’ inventories - and you can block or destroy enemy storages as well!

The production interface also got a proper overhaul: sorting, categories, and the ability to exclude concrete resource types when a production requires a whole category. For example, if you want a specific wood type in your houses, or you want to save up a good wood for spears, you can just uncheck boxes in the dependencies list.

Productions with structure dependencies now scale with territory - if a worker produces 3 bread, it will need 3 fertile tiles instead of 1. Suddenly, owning good land really matters, and you will have huge wheat fields.

Rivers, Fissures and Bridges

The terrain generation got a major upgrade. Rivers and fissures now cut across the world, along bridges to cross them. Fissures serve a similar purpose to walls, and eventually they’ll be creatable by some powerful spells.

These aren’t just decoration. Territory won’t expand over rivers and fissures, so they act as natural borders and chokepoints. You can still fish on the water tiles (or do other water production) within your borders, but claiming the territory on the other side requires you to actually cross it somehow.

On top of that, action range - the owned zone that expands every turn around every worker - no longer propagates over walls and massive structures. You are finally safe from your enemy behind your walls. I was delaying writing this algorithm for quite a while.

Ruins and Citadels

This game was missing some CITADELS in the overworld despite being called COLOSSAL CITADELS! So now there are much cooler, procedurally-generated neutral citadels in the world, built with an L-System generator.

Citadel generation in general got improved, and destruction now leaves something behind: ruined houses and ruined fortifications can remain when a structure is destroyed. There are also procedural ruined citadels scattered across the world to discover and reclaim.

Other things

There are three new cold biomes: snowy plains, snowy forests, and snowy mountains. Water in dungeons is now black instead of sky-blue, which fits the atmosphere much better. To go with the new environments, there are new spells related to snow and desert, plus a whole set of spells for controlling and handling beasts - very fitting now that the world is full of them.

Demo?

The game has changed so much since the demo - it’s MUCH more streamlined now - that the old demo build no longer represents it well. So I’ve delisted the current demo, and a fresh version will return just before the early access release. The new version is coming in October, so stay tuned!

Full Changelog

As always, here’s the complete list of changes since the last diary, bugfixes and all:

• footsteps instead of a weird particle for movement trails
• fixed crash when player accidentally clicks both mouse buttons in some cases
• fixed wrong UI messages when awakening creatures
• fixed annoying bug where you sometimes can’t highlight worker models and have to aim for the tile under them instead
• tutorials now point the camera above the object of interest (this prevents “soft locking” for new players when the tutorial message is offscreen)
• when starting a game, the loading screen starts a bit earlier so there’s no visible hitch in some cases
• replaced starting pilums with gladiuses. The “Throw” ability from the pilum isn’t used much and it only confuses new players (but if you’re skilled, it can be very useful for finishing enemies)
• fixed Watchtower being usable again on the same turn
• separate notification for beasts instead of “enemy spotted”
• fixed pathfinding algorithm in battle
• can’t equip shields with bows and other two-handed weapons anymore
• all humanoid creeps can get weapons and shields now
• improved citadels generation
• roots can only be cast on trees
• water in dungeons is now black instead of sky-blue
• food types
  • Fish is now a separate resource
  • Wild fruit, bread, and other food types
  • Hunting food from wandering beasts - adds dexterity, stacking
  • Each food type has a temporary effect on consumption
• exclude dependency categories
• stockpiles and warehouses (you can block or destroy enemy storages too)
• trees regrow again
• productions with structure dependencies now require more tiles to produce more output. If a worker produces 3 bread, it will require 3 fertile tiles instead of 1. Now territory is important.
• hunger is now simplified: in the beginning you just receive 20 food and it doesn’t depend on whether a creature is working anymore
• player has a wooden house blueprint on start
  • different house for other factions
• increased default map size
• action range is now blocked by walls and structures
• production sorting
• production categories
• resources are grouped by category when there are too many types
• right click menu
• fixed neutral creeps aggro
• when a worker doesn’t have projectiles to shoot, he switches to unarmed attacks now
• big creatures (they physically take multiple tiles - a Bone Giant takes 2)
• small creatures category (for goblins, hobbits, etc)
• mounts
• horses
  • different horse breeds
• Wild Herd, Deer Grove, productions
• neutral non-aggressive creatures
• small creatures can mount some small beasts
• females
• fissures
• rivers
• dried rivers
• bridges
• fixed region map label contention (now big regions of the same biome join together)
• confirmation when targeting own creatures
• new type of island edge style
• new biomes: snowy plain, snowy forest, and snowy mountains
• new spells related to snow and desert
• new spells related to controlling and handling beasts
• fixes with production algorithm
• ruined house and ruined fortification: they can be left in case of destruction
• procedural ruined citadels in the world
• territory will not expand over rivers and fissures
• can now create movement orders by dragging creatures outside borders
• resolution selection
• improved tutorials
• improvements to procedural name generation
  • now every faction has a set of male and female names
• battle balancing improvements
• stat balancing improvements
• changed the way you draw random spells to learn
• ten million bugfixes and crash fixes
• new bugs

Have a nice day!