Dev Diary 72 - Dwarven Mines

This is another quite transforming update! It is the last update before the updated demo release on October 19! This day, Colossal Citadels will FINALLY participate in Steam NextFest. After that, release date will be announced. And it will be not very far away from the NextFest!

Digging

Addition of rivers and fissures during the last update has led to an upgrade in the terrain technology. Now tiles can be multi-level, and so there can be deep holes and elevation.

With this, I could add digging production. If you have this technology, you can dig (1+ tile per turn per creature) and uncover what lies under the earth:

• clusters of ores
• treasure
• some other ancient artifacts
• entrance to the dungeon world

You can dig really deep quarries, and the deeper you go, the more elite stuff you can find

Dwarves

This means that I could do a massive upgrade for one of the factions that didn’t really have a good hook before.

DWARVES! Yes, I accidentally turned this game into Dwarf Fortress….

These guys start the game with digging production, they are good at it and can have additional benefits. But there are less of dwarves and they really don’t like horses (and other mounts). And they have huge beards.

Other Factions

Other factions have gotten a plenty of upgrades too. I took time to work on unique looks for some factions - males and females.

For example, Egypt looks really egyptean now. Or a newcomer, Crete (Minoan civilization).

These guys will have huge expensive bulls that will either add a lot of fight power, or a lot of production power (for farming and extraction)

Items

Moreover, some specific items will have unique looks for their items (for example, “metal armor”). This is a lot of work and I’ll be adding unique meshes long after release.

I added helmets as separately producible item type. They provide a bunch of armor, but break after 2-3 hits. And they look cool!

Other things

Spells can now break ground and leave craters. There are natural structures involving holes in the terrain. Like, meteor craters:

Creeps and invaders were rebalanced again. Moreover, now you don’t have this situation where you go into the fog and suddenly get attacked by enemy! Creatures that are really close and behind fog of war now display as silhouettes:

There were many other improvements and even more are coming with the demo!

Full Changelog

• digging
• dwarves faction
• beards
• lava and poison rivers
• new skins and armors
• egypt faction
• crete faction
• bull, minoan bull
• less and more
• specialized gear
• digging understandings
• ores improvements
• helmets
• new shields, armor, and weapons
• cool new faction selection menu
• seahorse and orthocerida monsters
• new horse types (kepli, nightmare, etc)
• refining lore and text
• invaders difficulty overhaul
• procedural map difficulty overhaul
• improved other islands and worlds generation
• fixed death animations for creatures that didn’t have them - now they’re ragdolled
• fixed rendering of ores when they’re not on stone
• now there can be holes in terrain and some structures look better because of that
• improved elves and orcs
• working on hobbits and greeks
• fixes with multi group factions
• new active abilities
• different starting house type for each faction
• improvements in ore balancing
• some alloys in Understandings, such as bronze
• new Understandings
• fishing visuals
• creatures at the edge of fog of war are now dimmed. No more sudden death jumping out from the fog!
• distortion overhaul, they distortion creeps and their models are grading
• some destructive spells now remove layers of ground
• bugfixes
• new bugs