22cans would like to share important news regarding our games, Godus and Godus Wars. Regrettably, due to an upcoming technical change to Amazon Web Services, affecting our ability to serve necessary game files to new users, these titles are to be withdrawn from the Steam store. Please be assured that existing players can continue to enjoy these games without interruption.

We sincerely appreciate the incredible support from our players over the past decade and extend our heartfelt thanks to you all.

Right now! With the release of Godus Wars, combat finally makes it’s full introduction into the Godus universe. Peter has always considered Godus being two games: one tranquil, peaceful and the other war-like with bloody battles taking place across the unique lands.


Not at all! The release of Wars proves that we are still dedicated to Godus and everyone who owns or has previously purchased Godus, already has Godus Wars! Yes! Godus Wars is free for all previous Godus Kickstarter backers & owners.


11 people have worked on Godus Wars.

• Peter and Konrad - Design
  
• Dimitri, Gary, Ryan & Richard - Programming
  
• Annah - Art
  
• Ian - Audio
  
• Anthony & Turner - Production
  
• Martin - QA
  
• Tony - GUI

Bryan is featured in Godus Wars! He can be seen as an opposing deity on one of the continents.


We’re using Early Access to gather balancing feedback and gauge player reaction as we work towards a feature complete release.

Early Access will allow our users and loyal Kickstarter backers to try out and provide detailed feedback in order for us to deliver a more polished, optimised and balanced game upon release!

The release of Wars demonstrates that we are still dedicated to Godus.

Everyone who owns or has previously purchased Godus, already has Godus Wars! Yes! Godus Wars is free for all previous Godus Kickstarter backers & owners - It should auto-magically appear in your steam library, if it doesnt please let us know!


We're continuing to work through the release of the Kickstarter backer rewards. The Art of Godus backer book was sent out to the appropriate tiers last year and the Early Access launch of Godus Wars brings with it a large collection of Godus design documents and Documentary has been completed.

We will be collecting all detailed and relevant feedback posted and while we won't be replying to all posts individually, we will be reading everything. Be sure to keep an eye on the Announcements board for Feedback updates!


Now that Godus Wars & Godus are both available as one package, we will be closing the Godus Store page and removing the higher price from sale. The discussion boards will be left untouched.

Right now! With the release of Godus Wars, combat finally makes it’s full introduction into the Godus universe. Peter has always considered Godus being two games: one tranquil, peaceful and the other war-like with bloody battles taking place across the unique lands.


Not at all! The release of Wars proves that we are still dedicated to Godus and everyone who owns or has previously purchased Godus, already has Godus Wars! Yes! Godus Wars is free for all previous Godus Kickstarter backers & owners.


11 people have worked on Godus Wars.

• Peter and Konrad - Design
  
• Dimitri, Gary, Ryan & Richard - Programming
  
• Annah - Art
  
• Ian - Audio
  
• Anthony & Turner - Production
  
• Martin - QA
  
• Tony - GUI

Bryan is featured in Godus Wars! He can be seen as an opposing deity on one of the continents.


We’re using Early Access to gather balancing feedback and gauge player reaction as we work towards a feature complete release.

Early Access will allow our users and loyal Kickstarter backers to try out and provide detailed feedback in order for us to deliver a more polished, optimised and balanced game upon release!

The release of Wars demonstrates that we are still dedicated to Godus.

Everyone who owns or has previously purchased Godus, already has Godus Wars! Yes! Godus Wars is free for all previous Godus Kickstarter backers & owners - It should auto-magically appear in your steam library, if it doesnt please let us know!


We're continuing to work through the release of the Kickstarter backer rewards. The Art of Godus backer book was sent out to the appropriate tiers last year and the Early Access launch of Godus Wars brings with it a large collection of Godus design documents and Documentary has been completed.

We will be collecting all detailed and relevant feedback posted and while we won't be replying to all posts individually, we will be reading everything. Be sure to keep an eye on the Announcements board for Feedback updates!


Now that Godus Wars & Godus are both available as one package, we will be closing the Godus Store page and removing the higher price from sale. The discussion boards will be left untouched.

This week we’re very happy to announce that the team has been making some good progress in regards to the combat gameplay! As you may already know, we’ve recently spent some time tuning and fixing the Warbands pathfinding. We have now reached a very good result that we want to playtest before continuing working on this. That’s why recently we moved onto a new exciting feature: Combat God Powers.

In combat, God Powers will help you change the course of the battle. You will be able to set your enemies on fire, slow them down or give your troops a bonus to maximise your chance of victory!

This novelty in how powers are used in Godus is also presented to players with a new UI visualisation. The power cards are looking more aggressive to better convey the combat theme.

Annah has been working on this for the past few days and we’re happy to show some of the new visuals today.

Rain of Purity is a power you probably already know. You’ll be able to use it in combat and its card now looks more beautiful than ever:



Another cool new power is Military Settlements. It will allow you to build a special type of structure necessary to create Warbands. Here’s how it looks:



A bunch of new exciting powers and visual improvements are part of the combat update and we will begin showing them to you very shortly.


Let us know what you think!

The Godus Team
22cans

This week we’re very happy to announce that the team has been making some good progress in regards to the combat gameplay! As you may already know, we’ve recently spent some time tuning and fixing the Warbands pathfinding. We have now reached a very good result that we want to playtest before continuing working on this. That’s why recently we moved onto a new exciting feature: Combat God Powers.

In combat, God Powers will help you change the course of the battle. You will be able to set your enemies on fire, slow them down or give your troops a bonus to maximise your chance of victory!

This novelty in how powers are used in Godus is also presented to players with a new UI visualisation. The power cards are looking more aggressive to better convey the combat theme.

Annah has been working on this for the past few days and we’re happy to show some of the new visuals today.

Rain of Purity is a power you probably already know. You’ll be able to use it in combat and its card now looks more beautiful than ever:



Another cool new power is Military Settlements. It will allow you to build a special type of structure necessary to create Warbands. Here’s how it looks:



A bunch of new exciting powers and visual improvements are part of the combat update and we will begin showing them to you very shortly.


Let us know what you think!

The Godus Team
22cans

"This week we are going to step back a little and take a closer look at our vision of how we see players using Warbands."

"The ever shifting terrain and the verticality provide by the many land layers makes Godus a unique landscape for battle. We really want to play on these features to provide an experience that is very different from what players might expect from a RTS title."

"Directing troops and exploiting the landscape (and even altering on the fly) in any meaningful way proved to be a very challenging feat of multi-tasking once more than half a dozen units were on the field. The decision of using Warbands grew out the desire to retain a sense of scale to conflicts without forcing the player to manually control large numbers of individual soldiers."



"We really want to encourage smart and tactical gameplay, where players are rewarded for paying careful attention to the actions of individual Warbands.To this end we have reinforced the effects of the landscape on the performance of the soldiers. Height advantage and tree cover for example have a powerful effect on the outcome of battle. Players able to exploit the landscape with clever positioning of their Warbands will have the upper hand even over far superior numbers."

"Players will also notice that veteran Warbands will become stronger (potentially a LOT stronger). The goal is to encourage and reward players to use and preserve their soldiers carefully rather than seeing them as completely disposable. We are currently experimenting with how to make these veterans visually distinct on the battlefield to reinforce their status as elite units."

Here's a a couple of new screenshots of a recent Combat build showing off some of the new military props around Settlements.

"This week we are going to step back a little and take a closer look at our vision of how we see players using Warbands."

"The ever shifting terrain and the verticality provide by the many land layers makes Godus a unique landscape for battle. We really want to play on these features to provide an experience that is very different from what players might expect from a RTS title."

"Directing troops and exploiting the landscape (and even altering on the fly) in any meaningful way proved to be a very challenging feat of multi-tasking once more than half a dozen units were on the field. The decision of using Warbands grew out the desire to retain a sense of scale to conflicts without forcing the player to manually control large numbers of individual soldiers."



"We really want to encourage smart and tactical gameplay, where players are rewarded for paying careful attention to the actions of individual Warbands.To this end we have reinforced the effects of the landscape on the performance of the soldiers. Height advantage and tree cover for example have a powerful effect on the outcome of battle. Players able to exploit the landscape with clever positioning of their Warbands will have the upper hand even over far superior numbers."

"Players will also notice that veteran Warbands will become stronger (potentially a LOT stronger). The goal is to encourage and reward players to use and preserve their soldiers carefully rather than seeing them as completely disposable. We are currently experimenting with how to make these veterans visually distinct on the battlefield to reinforce their status as elite units."

Here's a a couple of new screenshots of a recent Combat build showing off some of the new military props around Settlements.

"This week has seen the start of some upgrades to the movement arrow system. Up to this point we’ve been using the movement indicators from the leashing system. While those indicators are fine for moving followers about in Homeworld, they didn’t reflect troop movements accurately enough for our liking. You can see the problem below:"




"The first thing we did was take not normally seen debug navigation pathing lines which look something like this."




"And use them as a basis to draw the movement arrows to make them look like this:"




'There is some work still to be done to produce smoother, more visually appealing arrows, but they now accurately reflect navigation."

"The current leash arrow drawing system also wasn’t really designed to handle drawing and tracking movement arrows for multiple units. We polished up the system to only display movement arrows for currently selected Warbands and be able to wipe and redraw the arrows at any time."




"What’s left now is some smoothing and visual polish of the arrows. We’ve implemented a system to allow us quickly and easily replace the textures used to draw the arrows themselves and playing around with different looks have produced some rather fun results."



Also - Check out Annah's 3D printed Archer!

"This week has seen the start of some upgrades to the movement arrow system. Up to this point we’ve been using the movement indicators from the leashing system. While those indicators are fine for moving followers about in Homeworld, they didn’t reflect troop movements accurately enough for our liking. You can see the problem below:"




"The first thing we did was take not normally seen debug navigation pathing lines which look something like this."




"And use them as a basis to draw the movement arrows to make them look like this:"




'There is some work still to be done to produce smoother, more visually appealing arrows, but they now accurately reflect navigation."

"The current leash arrow drawing system also wasn’t really designed to handle drawing and tracking movement arrows for multiple units. We polished up the system to only display movement arrows for currently selected Warbands and be able to wipe and redraw the arrows at any time."




"What’s left now is some smoothing and visual polish of the arrows. We’ve implemented a system to allow us quickly and easily replace the textures used to draw the arrows themselves and playing around with different looks have produced some rather fun results."



Also - Check out Annah's 3D printed Archer!

Over the coming weeks, Konrad will take us through a range of different topics as we continue progressing with Combat. First up is one of the more annoying problems the team has faced recently - a memory issue that has been causing any build to crash quickly after launching.



"Godus has seen a great many changes to its code base in the last few months. As we were expecting, at some point this would mean trouble. Recently this really caught up to us - builds were becoming so unstable that it was time to roll our sleeves up and do some serious maintenance. Just imagine how annoying it has been trying to develop game that crashes every few minutes! Unfortunately the root of many of these issues have proved to be very difficult to track down, the debugging tools we've been using so far insufficient. Richard has been tracking down and dealing with it"



"The first step towards solving memory issues of this sort is to hook up some powerful diagnostic tools. As with any game codebase, Godus is far too big and complicated for us to go through by hand finding these issues - it would take years! Instead, the tools have given us a load of data pointing towards potential issues. Lately, I've spent time sifting through this and fixing issues where necessary. We're starting to get the benefit from this as we uncover more issues, but there's still more work to be done to get to a point where we're happy with the game's stability."





"So what does this mean for Godus? Well, it's but a mere setback of course! These kinds of challenges are part and parcel of game development. We've been hard at work creating a special build of Godus to run on a specialised debugging and memory logging machine which will provide us with highly detailed data allowing us to identify the source the instabilities. While it has meant we've had to divert a significant portion of Richard's time from the development of features, it will ultimately mean a far more stable and robust game going forward."