Past two weaks I’ve shown the game to multiple new people and done a lot of playtests. They seem to like it ^_^ Steam NextFest is really soon, I hope I’ll be able to deliver good enough experience for you guys.

I also partially got back to work, so less changes this time: but there is still a lot of important bug fixes, such as movement algorithm fixes; small details and improvements; shortcuts (you can increase production using only keyboard now); some new content (different kinds of scrolls for Spell Scrolls), features and rule changes (advanced productions take one house now).

That was really motivating four days with a lot of new ideas and implemented features. From important things: spell scrolls now are implemented - these are group-wise spells that consume items on use. They need to be created from scrolls. Other thing is projectiles for weapons like bows. Now you’ll have to supply different kinds of projectiles like in factory games.

Here is a huge changelog.

Immigration is hard, and also putin now threatens to attack country I moved into. But I’m working on this project, playtesting and designing stuff is great as always. Preparing demo build requires a lot of old issues to be solved so that the game will feel closer to what I want. Here are this week’s changes:

Good/bad news! Due to moving to Sweden as an asylum seeker and waiting for a exemption from a work permit, I’m now officially unemployed! But on the other side, my dream of becoming a full time solo indie game developer has fulfilled. So, this week’s changelog is going to be really big

Now I can finally work on the game while I’m waiting for some legal steps to happen. We did a first playtest in a while, the last one was 1.5 months ago. A fresh look (sort of), allowed me to get lots and lots of new ideas and usability improvements, but I started to implement only some of them, because my main task now is working on a public demo. There was a demo long ago, but I want this one to be an awesome, controlled experience with procgen stripped out.

Colossal Citadels will participate in the next Steam NextFest in June - an event where people publish and play a lot of demos. I wanted to participate in the last one (in February), but creating a Steam page took a lot of time.

I also changed my text editor theme to white. Wow. So, here is the next changelog.

This month there were no updates because these terrifying events happened. A full scale russian invasion beginned with series of rocket strikes on my beloved Kyiv. I’m not a soldier, so I left Ukraine after 10 days and now only participating in the information war.

As I settled after a very long path through Europe, I could make some tiny updates to the game as a rest activity. Long delay also means a fresh look, I’ve got new ideas and implemented some of them. I also started to learn Swedish and asked people about their local folklore. So, maybe some deeper Scandinavian lore is coming later.

This week I’ve been mostly working on fixing bugs: I got rid of a lot of them, but there are a lot more. Besides from that, I’ve done quite many small improvements and additions. Most important one, I think, is an improvement of melee battle movement algorithm. I showed how it works in this tweet. With latest improvements, creature are more likely to form lines, while not missing an opportunity to attack. Before, they could often jump through the enemy line to attack them, and that looked a bit strange. And lines are essential for wall shield abilities that I’m planning to implement soon.

Time for a new changelog update! I’m returning to pre-covid efficiency (got sick in January), though, it’s hard to say if I done less when I was sick, because I was making a Steam page and finishing a trailer. By the way, that kind of work is much harder than programming!

This week I conquered a subreddit with one post, Characteristics in /r/magicbuilding. Also, I fixed quite big amount of bugs and made something essential for a 4X game: sound a visual effect for fog of war reveal! See it here. This video also shows another visual update: new animation of next turn movement visualization when you assign movement order for your creatures. This makes simultaneous turns gameplay more convenient, and adds a lot of feedback when you right click.

Here is this week’s changelog. It includes important improvements for next turn prediction visualization, making it much more responsive. Since this game has simultaneous turns, this visualization greatly improves quality of life and makes player’s actions more deterministic. There were also some atmospheric changes.

I also updated the trailer and added some assets to press kit on the website.

Yesterday was an important day, I announced the trailer and published a Steam page, got some questions and discussions. I’m especially happy about my post on /r/4Xgaming gaining a lot of upvotes and making on top of their main page. I will be thankful if you retweet this.

Back to the main topic, it’s really inspiring to write changelogs, so I’ll post them periodically. Open full post to read it!