Oct 27

Master of Command - Rez

Master of Command — FULL RELEASE!

It’s official: Master of Command is out now on Steam!

What you can expect compared to the demo

(Full list below)

Campaign flow & economy: HQ timing fixed and standardized; act-based rewards, prices, and prisoner/plunder reworked; anti-infinite-money exploits removed; difficulty presets tightened.
AI & battle feel: New defensive stance, better target/charge logic, less shuffling, smarter artillery/cavalry/light infantry behavior; more camera/hotkey control and QoL.
Artillery rebalanced (major): RNG bug fixed (AI no longer 100% accurate), calibers differentiated, reloads/ranges retuned, pricing reworked, counter-battery toned down.
Maps & pacing: Every map expanded ~33% vertically; larger deployments, better cover zones, less corner camping, biome-aware map selection, new urban/village variants.
Units, items, doctrines: Muskets standardized on effective range; grenades/sabres buffed; many doctrine tweaks (e.g., Hanover casualty restoration), cavalry baseline weapons, nation/unit stat passes.
Progression & achievements: Easier, fixed achievements; new renowned-unit gallery; Act/region clears now unlock additional army comps to encourage roster variety.
Customization overhaul: Taller UI, 4 color rows, per-part uniform coloring, historical palettes, save/load & share presets; many new emblems/patterns; UI readability fixes.
Stability & performance: Building/forest optimizations, memory-leak fixes, numerous bug fixes (HQ rally, retreat/despawn, terrain tags), plus audio/music system polish.

KNOWN ISSUES:

There is a new AI defensive stance but because this was added in a mere week from release due to popular demand from our NextFest players, we will need more time to refine this post-release.
The new localization is in but it will take some time for us to iron out any mistakes. It seems like the Russian localization has the poorest implementation at the moment. We are working quickly to get a fix for that.
Balancing is an ongoing process. You will find certain weapons to be too powerful or not powerful enough. Similarly, you may find certain units or classes of units to be under or over powered. We’re working on ironing out the balance, and this will be done through frequent updates throughout the rest of the year.

CAMPAIGN CHANGES

HQ timing has been made far more consistent. The HQ no longer spawns in half-strength, builds up, and is then on a delay timer before it comes. Now it just spawns full-strength and the delay timer slowly ticks up until it reaches day 150. It may feel a little less realistic but the consistency helps us balance the acts much better.
A major bug has been fixed which was causing the HQ to rally sometimes months before it was meant to.
Field armies in act 1 now only have 3 brigades instead of 4, making them easier.
Encamped armies in act 1 now have better cavalry and artillery, making them more of a challenge
HQ army in act 1 fields slightly better infantry in its 2nd brigade now
Made prisoner rewards and plunder scale depending on the act you’re in so you automatically receive better rewards in more difficult regions
I increased all the sale prices of the generic “loot” items like fur but then made them sell at only 60% of their base price. I did this because previously they sold at 100% of their base price. If you got the right doctrines and town conditions that increased sale price and made buying items cheaper, you were able to infinitely buy and resell for infinite cash. But now that it only sells for 60% like the rest of the items (but I compensated by making the price of it higher) it should be good now.
If a settlement has the "Recently Looted” condition it now increases the cost of all purchases by +60% instead of +40%. However, the “recently looted” condition no longer affects sale cost at all. So in Act 3 (when all settlements are looted) you can sell off your items for a MUCH better price.
The player should be earning about +50 more thalers per battle now. The unit prices have all been increased by +50. So in effect this just makes all non-unit purchases cheaper (opening up a brigade, buying an item, getting manpower, etc).
French early-game armies will no longer bring a “Royal Recruit” spam brigade, that’s been removed from a possible brigade type they can bring. They also now have a slightly higher weight to bring a double French fusilier brigade which is tougher.
Russian army compositions in Act 1 contain less “Russian Musketeer” units who were extremely difficult to break.
I’ve removed the “gimmick” army compositions which had a chance of bringing double brigades of artillery or double brigades of cavalry. They were fun on paper but annoying to fight against.
Logistics collapse modifier increased to +20% consumption of food/ammo instead of +15%
The “Incomplete Maps” modifier has been removed since it wasn’t that interesting. It’s been replaced by a difficulty modifier that speeds up enemy armies which I think will definitely contribute to greater difficulty.
The presets for the difficulty settings have been slightly updated. Difficult now turns on enemy combat effectiveness, provision consumption, and lowered replenishment rate. Brutal has all of those but also includes the new modifier that speeds up enemy armies, doubles a regiment in every enemy brigade, and increases officer death chance. Legendary is all of those but adds on the shattered unit modifier, resource and item cost increase, the recruitment cost increase, and the unit upgrade cost modifier. Ultimately this should make “Difficult” and “Brutal” more challenging so that you can still feel some difficulty without needing to bump up to legendary or have to custom-define the modifiers yourself.
You can now preview a unit’s unit tree when at the barracks shopping for a unit
Enemies now start with a higher chance of having an improved weapon in Acts 2 and 3. I believe the chance was only set to 50% meaning ½ of their troops just used basic quality weapons.
Hanover now starts with an additional Landmiliz, so you now start with four units total
Hanover and the British Expedition had a few items swapped so that British Expedition can play more into XP gain and Hanover can play more into casualty replenishment.
British land pattern carbine has been made “Good” quality so their initial starting cavalry is less weak to use. They also have gained an excellent quality spontoon to really lean even heavier into experience gain. The surgeon they used to have (which auto-replenished losses) was moved over to Hanover whose gimmick is now restoring as many casualties as possible after battle.
Changed the enemy HQ to now gain speed over time so it’s no longer possible to outrun.
Fixed a bug where certain farmland was being registered as attrition terrain
Supply wagon no longer comes with infinite ammo which meant players could exploit the game by getting supply wagons and never buying ammunition on their troops
There’s now a 25% chance per day of raiding that it alerts the HQ and speeds up its growth! The growth is minimal, it only speeds up the HQ by a day.
Foraging only reduces movement speed by -20% instead of -30%
Chance of higher-tier skills appearing on low-level officers is lowered
Chance of finding muskets as loot from encounters and battles has been lowered
Experience gain for mid-tier and high-tier units slightly increased
Cavalry experience gain slightly increased since hunting down prisoners is no longer as encouraged
The “Precise” officer trait no longer reduces melee by -20% (which was higher than the bonus of +15% accuracy). It now only reduces by -10% melee so that the positive outweighs the negative.
Night marches now gives +15% campaign move speed instead of +10% since it contains a negative. The negative has also been updated to be a stamina reduction instead of visibility reduction on campaign.
Cadenced Marching now gives +10% infantry move speed in battle instead of +15% campaign move speed
Gunsmiths now generates 8 ammunition per day instead of 10
Renowned units that you’ve unlocked now have a slight chance of appearing at a settlement. We didn’t restrict the amount of them or limit them either so you could end up getting multiple of the same renowned unit, which I think is fun. If it becomes overpowered in any way we can look into changing it later.
Fixed a bug where if an enemy retreated from you on the campaign map it would despawn instantly meaning you couldn’t properly pursue it.
Fixed a bug where if you starved the game wouldn't end and your army was just listed at 0/0 strength on campaign map
New filter system added so you can filter items by type in case your inventory gets cluttered.
AI will now utilize renowned units in all of their encamped armies
Officer threshold to receive a promotion made easier
Quality of life feature, your veterancy badge now glows if a unit is ready for an upgrade
You can now adjust what your default enemy nations are when you start a campaign. By default it’ll only select your historical enemies of the Seven Years’ War, but if you aren’t playing the game to recreate the Seven Years’ War you can turn all enemies on by default

ENCOUNTERS

Many encounters have been updated so that big rewards now come at a greater cost. Previously, it was possible to take the “Delay the HQ” choices at minimal cost even though it’s extremely beneficial. Some encounters were also patched or fixed, like the Gambler’s Den which didn’t work if you took the highest bet.
We’ve updated all of the encounter images in the game, there are over 100. Here’s just a preview of some of the new art:

DOCTRINE CHANGES

Hanover felt a bit boring to play so I’ve changed their national doctrine to “Casualties restored after battles +20%” which essentially replaces losses you get across your whole army constantly and this can be played into. You can stack more items like medicine/surgeons to get this higher. And then you can take the “Field Hospital” doctrine and pretty much get up to a 90% casualty restoration rate if you play into it correctly. Sounds very powerful but fun! It also reflects well historically since Hanover exited the war due to crushing defeats by France but quickly re-entered the war and had its army back up and running and was able to perform extremely effectively under command of Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.
Russian doctrine “Experimental Artillery” now gives +15% accuracy instead of +10%
Unit Professionalism now provides +2 veterancy per recruitment not +1, but it increases recruitment cost by +10%
Frontier Skirmishers doctrine for Austria buffed to give the range modifier +30% instead of +20% and the melee debuff is -15% instead of -20%.
“Saboteurs” doctrine reduces enemy campaign movement speed by -20% now instead of -25%
Russia’s “Hungry Bear” national doctrine now only consumes +20% more food instead of +25% more food which felt too punishing, especially for newer players.
Fixed a game breaking bug where if you had the officer corps doctrine which auto-promotes officers recruited, the game broke if you recruited a max level officer which caused him to go to level 6/5.
France’s Grand Levee doctrine only costs 1 thaler a day instead of 2 but their brigade cost is now only a -25% discount instead of a -50% one.
Image used for “Light Infantry Tactics” doctrine switched to the one that contains the light infantry horn.
The old “Light Infantry Tactics” doctrine image is now used for the “Observation Forces” doctrine which has been renamed to “Scoot-and-shoot.” Scoot-and-shoot now features the soldier crouching while another one runs and gets you faster reload speed and reduces fire damage received.
Flying Camp changed from +2.5% move speed per horse in inventory to just simply being +10% campaign move speed. This is because the old doctrine called “Cadenced Marching” used to give +15% campaign move speed but was swapped to an infantry movement speed buff in battle. So I gave its old effect over to “Flying Camp.”
Salary reductions now make recruitment costs -35% instead of -40%. And instead of removing -4 recruitment options in the following region, it now just lowers your army morale by -5% which is more thematic and more balanced.
“Extended Training” doctrine now gives +50% veterancy in drilling stance rather than +35%.

ACHIEVEMENT CHANGES

Many achievements have been made easier to collect and we’ve bug fixed a lot of achievements that weren’t triggering even if the player had met all the conditions.

We’ve added a new gallery to directly view the unlockable renowned regiments you get from achievements and you can see what achievement is associated with unlocking them. You can also hover over a unit to see its stats.

Split the “Unlocks” regiment into two separate buttons so you can view achievements or view the aforementioned regiment gallery

Playing with different army compositions is such an important part of this game. For that reason, we took the easier achievements (conquering the first region, and beating the first act) and made those two achievements tied toward unlocking the 2nd and 3rd armies for each nation. So, as long as you beat one full campaign, you will get all the army compositions for that nation. And if you’re stuck and can only get through Act 1, it will still trigger the achievement to unlock your 2nd army composition which is contingent on beating Act 1.

ITEM CHANGES

Many items have come down in price by about 10-20 to make them easier to purchase. But this will also mean that selling items will get you less money since they’re worth less. So to compensate we increased the amount of loot you get from battles by +2. So there’s more loot but it’s cheaper which allows you to pick and choose what items you want and sell off the stuff you don’t want, and because they’re cheaper you can pick up items you care about instead of the go-to being always buying units. Should make playing “tall” more effective.
Have done an overhaul to the muskets. I previously had certain muskets with a proficiency or deficiency to “effective range,” which is a stat pretty much hidden from the player. The effective range determines when the damage begins to drop off shooting at far ranges. But because this isn’t displayed anywhere in the game and is a more passive mechanic, I rebalanced the muskets so they all use the same effective range which makes the muskets feel consistent when firing at closer ranges. I think this makes more sense from a historical perspective anyways since none of the muskets are rifled and so they’ll all mostly have a similar effective range. Here’s the new chart of weapons, and I believe I made some of the lesser-used weapons like the Delft more viable.
Pocket bibles & the “PUYSEGUR” treatise now reduce fire damage taken. The explanation for the former change is a little reference to old war films where the bible in the breast pocket blocks the bullet. The primary reason for this change though is that no item currently reduced fire damage taken but now that there are items that do it, it opens up a new opportunity for you to lean into a strategy about reducing damage which is particularly useful for compositions like the Blue Shield (because it stacks) as well as the Observation Corps

OLD WEAPON CHART

UPDATED WEAPON CHART w/annotations. Notice “Effective Range” is just consistent now.

Grenade damage increased by +30%, throw range increased by +50%. The grenade throw now has a preview of where your regiment needs to move to in order to throw.
All sword/sabre items have been buffed by +2 charge, +2 melee.

BATTLE & UNIT CHANGES

Open order firepower increased from 1.25 -> 1.2x multiplier. All light infantry base accuracy has been increased though. This way light infantry don’t have bad stats that get largely multiplied by open order and instead have good stats that become slightly better in open order.
Open order incoming fire reducer increased from -50% fire damage received to -60% fire damage received making the light infantry less killable with gunfire.
The prisoner grinding meta seemed pretty lame and was hurting newer players who didn’t grind down every possible kill before a battle ended, and buffed pro players who knew how to exploit and min-max their prisoners captured by leaving one regiment alive while they racked up kills.
^ You can see in this image the regiment left alive while thousands of prisoners are racked up. What we’ve changed is now you earn plunder/prisoner rewards based on how many enemy soldiers were left alive by the end of the battle (and are therefore captured). So now you actually earn less money for killing every possible guy on the battlefield. That said, we don’t want to discourage getting really impressive kills. So we’ve retained it so that XP gain is based on kills, but plunder gain is based on how many enemies were left alive and therefore count as captured. So if you want to play into XP gain you can slaughter as many enemies as you can. If you want to get a high ransom, leave the enemy soldiers alive and when you win the battle they will be counted as prisoners to be ransomed (and turned into plunder too).
Cavalry morale damage received is now -25% instead of -20% which means they should break slightly less frequently on impact of a charge or when shot at.
Max speed in battle has been increased to 300% speed instead of 250% speed. The 2nd highest speed is now 200% speed instead of 150% speed.
Russian observation troops have had their accuracy reduced by -5
All cavalry units now start with an actual item called “Worn Sabres.” If you remove it, they have a fallback weapon called “Reserve Swords” in the exact way that recruits have. If you remove the “Worn Muskets” from a recruit they have “Reserve Muskets” underneath, and so now cavalry is consistent with this system. I also buffed the “Worn Sabres” by +2 in charge damage so that early-game cavalry is better marginally.
Water terrain in battles now slows your units down even more. Previously it reduced speed by -75%, now it’s -80%.
Dutch artillery accuracy brought up by +10 but their walk speed brought down by -5. So now they’re very stationary but a good emplaced gun unit.
Light infantry melee stats brought up a bit so they are less targeted by AI cavalry so much and also so they are less weak when the AI uses them since currently they just get annihilated in a charge.
Prussian Horse Artillery no longer loses -5 accuracy and now has gained +5 speed
Prussian fusilier morale +5
More customization to hotkeys in battle especially for the camera
Prussian veteran grenadiers no longer 1,400 men (was a mistake) and cost 5 veterancy instead of 4
We bumped up the general’s morale he provides from +6 to +8. The general also now helps units who are retreating recover much faster
The morale loss units suffer from the global casualties sustained has been increased by +5 to the temporary morale loss (so if many soldiers die, you’ll suffer slightly greater blue bar morale loss) and then I also increased the permanent morale loss by +5 based on global casualties (so if many soldiers die, you’ll also suffer slightly greater permanent morale loss). This applies to both the player and enemy to prevent fights from going on too long where units are constantly returning or fighting to the death.
I did a pass on all the maps to add more clutter/cover on the northern ends of maps which felt kind of empty and boring to play on.
Improved cavalry movement code so they don’t feel as compelled to reform a perfect formation with short-to-medium distance orders

ARTILLERY OVERHAUL

A giant bug in the game’s RNG system has been fixed which previously made it so all AI artillery units were getting 100% accuracy. This is why your artillery has felt weak relative to the AI. You can see in the image below they went from a 100% hit rate to a 56% hit rate.
Artillery cannon ball spread improved so they aren’t all landing on one end of the regiment. Look at the new spread here:

VS the old version:

All of the stats in the game can break 100 in skill and continue performing better. For just about all stats it’s not really possible to go above 125 and if it is, you don’t really notice much of a difference in performance beyond that point. Artillery was stuck at scaling to 1-100 accuracy. 100 accuracy meant 100% hit rate, which also seems odd. Because by the end of the game you’re hitting every single shot. So we’ve scaled it out so that it’s 1-125 and if you eventually get to 215 accuracy on your artillery, only then could it give you a 100% hit rate. This is very challenging to do, however.
3-pounders have been altered to be accurate, fast-firing guns that do very little damage. So they will consistently pepper the enemy. 6-pounders and 12-pounders actually lose accuracy now instead of gaining it, but their damage remains high. So this means you need a well-trained crew (one with good accuracy stat) in order to actually take advantage of high-caliber guns. Previously, you could stick a 12-pounder or Shuvalov on an untrained battalion crew and they’d rack up 1k kills.
All the bronze guns have been buffed so they give +10 more accuracy than their iron counterparts.
Howitzer reload time reduced by 2-3 seconds. Field guns increased in reload time by about 5 seconds. Should make the howitzer more viable and the 12-pounder less of an obvious choice.
Howitzers are no longer modeled after siege guns and therefore now have less range than the field guns but much greater damage
Counter-battery fire further nerfed. I didn’t reduce the amount of casualties it inflicts, I instead reduced the amount of morale damage is inflicted since artillery naturally has low morale and technically artillery gets a bonus toward morale damage which was resulting in artillery duels ending too decisively.
Lower-tier battalion artillery now starts with basic canister shot by default which will help them early-game until they’re trained up enough to utilize the higher tier artillery guns. This is important because the higher-tier guns now have slightly less accuracy and so it’s no longer possible to put a really expensive gun on an untrained crew, as they won’t utilize it well.
Pricing of artillery pieces massively overhauled, 12-pounders are no longer incredibly cheap to pick up
Artillery no longer continues auto-targeting against retreating/shattered units, it’ll instead pick a new target
AI artillery will no longer target light infantry if it has other better options

MAP OVERHAUL

MAJOR update. Every single map in the game has been expanded by hand to include 33% more vertical play area. Here’s an example:
^ This makes the large battles feel way more epic and gives much better room for maneuverability. I made this change after noticing players and streamers stuck at their spawn just trying to defend against an onslaught by the AI. I think this change gives you way more time in order to seize key positions. It also means you’re not playing at your spawn every map and you can experience more terrain variety. A cool knock-on effect is that because we randomize the deployment areas based on the scale of the battle, it means that small-scale battles will happen in random parts of the expanded map in ways you’ve never played before. This makes the small and medium sized battles have way more variety by spawning the player in vastly different areas on a map each time they play.
Deployment zones are now much larger for all scales. I also loaded into all of the possible spawn positions to make sure there were not cases where your troops are deploying so far back that the camera is in the fog like in the screenshot below. All of the aforementioned changes have been made to make the player feel less claustrophobic and pressured to fight in the map corners/edges. You should now have enough pressure relieved in order to properly take up good positions on the map before the enemy engages you.
All cover zones have been expanded to be easier to utilize. Instead of needing to fit a regiment in a specific block of houses, you now get the cover of the buildings for just being in their general radius. Hedge cover has also been expanded to feel more consistent. Green zones in the picture below are hedge cover, yellow is for the town.
Many forests and cover in the bottom left/right corners of maps have been replaced with unfavorable terrain to discourage “corner camping.” The issue of corner camping I found was primarily that the map size was so small that you’d be forced into whatever corner you can get because the AI would come barreling down on you very aggressively. So the map extension should give you breathing room, along with our new AI defensive stance which is mentioned in the next section.
Maps will now be selected depending on where the battle was fought in the campaign. It’s not perfect, but if you fight in a forest you won’t spawn in a map with no trees now for example.
Added a new urban map that appears only if you fight a battle in a city
Made a variation on the aforementioned map that has a village inside instead for when you fight directly on top of a village on the campaign map
System updated so that a map can never be generated two times in a row to ensure you don’t have a repetitive back-to-back battle

AI CHANGES

Improved an AI behavior about adjusting targets. Previously, anytime the AI would update for a new target they ended up reshuffling and moving their line forward which resulted in AI regiments getting way too close to your line. It also meant that when you charged them, they would sometimes walk forward into your charge. Now they will hold their ground, and simply swivel to face you if you try flanking around them.
AI will no longer shuffle and run forward into you if you attempt a rear charge. They will only shuffle to face you if they have no other target. But previously they were hardcoded to attempt to form a line against you if you charge and this resulted in nearly all rear-charges being disrupted by the AI spinning around and walking into your unit which looked awkward and removed the satisfaction of pulling off a flanking charge.
AI can no longer move units outside the map zone. If they end up running out of frontage and have no room to flank because the player is corner camping, they will now place regiments in reserve.
AI can now utilize a “defensive” stance. If they have artillery superiority over the player they will advance in formation until in range and hunker down to barrage the player. If the player pushes forward or inflicts lots of casualties with its own artillery, the AI will engage.
AI now forms assault columns when conducting charges. They don’t form anything Napoleonic-looking, but they do just make their formation a bit denser to make use of a speed buff and charge buff before going in. This also helps the AI unit stay contained, because previously when charging in a long line they might run into another unit.
AI target prioritization improved. The aforementioned changed about adjusting targets also has helped. Notice in the following screenshot I ran my cavalry forward, but the AI quickly swiveled its two regiments to fire on me from both sides. They also toggled off volley fire so that their men fired as soon as they were in position. The artillery also switched targets and utilized canister shot which finished off the cavalry.
AI cavalry no longer is forced to attack the front of your unit. They previously went to the center-front of your unit if they wanted to charge. Now they can go to the rear and side of your unit in order to get a charging bonus.
AI cavalry can now use its carbines while charging. The player can do this too.
AI artillery will now automatically retreat if they run out of ammunition instead of sitting there
AI light infantry no longer rushes ahead and gets itself killed anymore
When the AI is in an aggressive stance it now advances as a whole force instead of trickling in units. This has also improved their pathfinding so when the battle is finally engaged they aren’t scrambling around as much.

VISUAL CHANGES

Pretty massive change, customization has been completely overhauled. The panel is now taller so you don’t need to scroll very far. There’s also 4 rows of colors to choose from now instead of just 2. The color palettes are different for each country based on historical colors that were used for both flags and uniforms by each respective nation.
The most exciting thing however is that you can now the color of every part of a uniform. There’s also a reset button handy in case you want to return to default. The reset button is also useful because it will randomly generate new flags for you (based on historical parameters, so the flags don’t come out too wacky when you randomize them) and it will also randomize the soldier’s facial hair, skin color, etc.
The next exciting update about customization is that you can save and load your creations. They also get placed into an easily accessible folder so you can share units with friends. When you load a unit, you can also choose if you only want to load the flag, or the uniform, or just the name of the unit.
Fixed the Polish eagle to be more historically authentic
Changed the preview for unit positions to look nicer (notice the dark blue hollow circles). They used to be a solid cyan color which also made them hard to view in winter.
Popup notifications are finally finished being drawn and colored. There are now unique images for every type of popup including “War is Upon Us,” “Temperatures Plummet,” etc. We also fixed the “Scorched Earth” image which was cut up and bugged out.
Updated all 15 army composition screens. 8 are brand new completely redrawn, and the remaining 7 have been color-corrected and given contrast and a better color filter to be more thematic. Below are some examples:
Added a collection of new emblems. Some unique to Russia, France, Britain, Austria, Prussia. And many generic. Here are just some of them:
Added a collection of new patterns. All generic, here are some of them:
Major fixes implemented to help prevent the cohesion of formations from disintegrating like in the screenshot below.
Flag emblems are now mipmapped so they are no longer pixelated when shrunk down.
Fixed a UI bug where your stats weren’t displaying correctly when you upgraded a unit. Notice in the bottom image the Freikorps Grenadier is displaying as 26 charge damage despite having 46.
New visual change added that makes a units’ veterancy badge glow when they’re ready to upgrade so you know!
Added a new weapon comparison tool
Acts 2 and 3 now have their own unique images and the uniforms of the soldiers/officer on the images changes dynamically based on the nation you’re playing as

SOUND CHANGES:

Replaced a song called “Dance of Armies” which sounded too whimsical with a new one called “Fire & Fury” which fits more of the tone of combat.
Added a new sound effect that plays when two armies clash on the campaign map
Added proper stance sounds that play
Fixed a bug where the stance sounds wouldn’t play sometimes
Made sure music fades in and out more gradually when changing
Main menu music now plays during composition selection too
Rise of Frederick now has its own theme song
Selecting ironman comes with a new sound
Some buttons in battle at the bottom of the screen had no sound and now do
Loading screen music now plays more consistently
Fixed a bug where no ambient sound was playing in mission selection the 2nd and 3rd time you went to pick a region
Music stems are hooked up and working properly on campaign. You’ll hear war drums kick in if an enemy army is nearby as the third stem enabled. The other 2 stems play by default but only 1 stem will play when at camp/city, which is just a solo guitar.

OPTIMIZATION CHANGES:

Better optimized buildings, so any map that has a lot of buildings should run smoother
Optimized trees so maps with big forests will run better
Memory leak fixes

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Oct 27

Diary #63 - Semi-Automation

Iron Village - Chappington

One thing that comes up a lot in any sort of software engineering is the concept of automation: how can we take repetitive, error-prone tasks and automate them? This is where you get things like automated testing and automated build systems. It's also part of why the LLM nonsense known as "AI" has taken over billionaires' brains: the idea of replacing their "entitled workers" with slop is just too enticing, apparently.

There's also the idea that in a lot of projects, especially programming and game development, that the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time. (Sometimes it's 80 out of 100, sometimes it's an additional 80%, but either way it's a lot.) So combining these two ideas: what if we could get away with just doing that first 80% of the work? Or to put it another way, can we get away with half-assing automation?

I would argue, yes. Especially in "solo" development, there are so many things to do, and only so much time to use, so you have to at least try and use your time wisely. I'm going to go through two examples of what I call semi-automation, one I did for Iron Village and one that I'm working on for project OY.

Some of the platform-specific work that isn't mentioned here: different sizes of images are required for the logo depending on the store.

To start, Iron Village. As you may know, Iron Village is available for a few different platforms: Windows, MacOS, Linux, and Android. (Technically Android is built on top of Linux, but it's different enough to require its own build. On the flip side, the Steam Deck just runs Linux, and can handle a lot of Windows programs as well, so that gets covered pretty easily.) Each of these platforms works differently, so the actual executable program needs to be built differently for each one. That's 4 different builds so far.

Next though, there's three different stores: Steam, Itch, and Google Play. The fun thing is that each one gets built differently: the Steam version has its SDK plopped in so that you get achievements and cloud saves. Same deal for Google Play, it gets its own SDK that works slightly differently, although I haven't been able to get cloud saves to work. (I might need to tinker with the plug-in that allows Hoodie to use the Android SDK to get more debugging info, but it's been low priority.) The Itch version doesn't need any of that, so it builds without the extra stuff. Not every store supports every platform, but that gets us up to 8 different builds: Steam Windows, Steam MacOS, Steam Linux, Itch Windows, Itch MacOS, Itch Linux, Itch Android, Google Play Android.

But wait! There's also a demo. Similar build system there, but there's a flag that gets set and some assets from the later levels are stripped out. So multiply the earlier number by 2 and you get... 16 different builds. There's no way to do that one at a time and keep your sanity, especially when you have to repeat the process for every update.

An expertly drawn diagram showing all of the build variants, as well as the scripts described below.

So ok, this has got to be automated, what are the easiest wins we can get? I was having issues running Godot from the command line, for some reason, but the export section allows you to "Build All", so that's what I did. It's a little annoying because there MacOS build on a Windows machine seems to be broken, but everything else works. This means the computer wastes time on making builds it doesn't need, but it saves us from having to click and wait 12 separate times, so it's still a win.

Before that, I do also have to manually update the output location for each version (that's how I have my output folders structured). That could be automated in the future, but it's a little trickier because you have to read through and modify an existing file, so that work gets indefinitely postponed. Making the folders is automated though, it's a pretty simple batch script.

The Lunar Chippy Games MacOS "Build Server"

So we have the folders set up, everything is built and in place, and... Oh right, MacOS. If Lunar Chippy Games were a larger company, we might have a separate build server (potentially on the "cloud"), probably running Linux (although MacOS could be an option if the MacOS build is also broken on Linux), and everything would be in one place. However, that requires more setup work, as well as money, so our semi-automation system will skip all of that. Instead, I open up my MacBook (shout out to Toast for letting us keep those when they laid off half the company at the start of the pandemic), pull all the commits, build x4, and paste the results in Google Drive. Is this efficient? No. But it's a harder thing to automate, and it's only 4 builds, so it's not worth the effort to automate it.

Once everything's made it onto my desktop, and I've pasted those 4 builds into their folders the earlier script created, we're ready for the next step: uploading them to the stores. Steam comes first, since it's the biggest platform; 6 of the builds are heading there. It is possible to just upload builds through the online dashboard website, but there are limits to what it can handle, and they heavily encourage you to use their Steamworks SDK as well. It's also setup so that you make a config file describing which files are which, and then run commands that look at those config files and do the uploading - basically forcing you to automate things anyway. The only extra step I needed to add was a script copying the builds from my releases folder to the folder where the SDK reads from. Then it's just copying and pasting one command (well, a few commands chained together into one), wait a couple minutes, and done!

Itch is still manual uploads for each build. It also has a separate command line interface available, and honestly it's probably worth investigating. That's just my own fault for being lazy. (In some ways you could just call semi-automation "justifiable laziness", haha.) Google Play is just two builds, and if there is a command line interface, it's not at all obvious.

Overall then, this turns a painful highly error-prone process into a slightly painful less error-prone one, with relatively little effort. There's still some low hanging fruit (zipping up and sending itch uploads, mainly), but anything else connecting those steps is going to take quite a bit more effort. It also means you understand the process better, and can more easily pick up on issues: if something goes wrong, just look at the last task you ran, rather than digging through a full confusing pipeline to find the one issue. Especially in the context of "solo" game development, I think that it's the sweet spot.

Intermission: I'm partway through writing this dev diary, and it looks like it's gone on way longer than I thought it would, oops. I did promise to talk about an example from Project OY, so instead of going back up and deleting that promise, I'm going to follow through and make it way too long.

Probably the most revealing teaser for Project OY yet. Very much a work in progress of course.

Now, project OY. Despite the use of the Z dimension in this game, I'm still making and using pixel art. To animate something in pixel art, a common method is a spritesheet: basically draw every individual frame, line them up in one image, and then in the game engine specify which section is which frame. Just like with the Iron Village builds though, we've got some multiplication coming in. For people/characters in the game, they can be drawn in six different directions: the diagonals, straight forwards, and straight back. Right now, since I'm just getting the very basic gameplay framed out, there's only two animations with four frames each. That's still 48 different sprites that need to be sliced out of the sprite sheet and organized into separate animations.

The spritesheet in question, a 6x8 grid of people in various states

I did try a plugin someone else made for importing images directly from Aseprite (the program I use for making pixel art), but it didn't quite meet my requirements and had a few bugs. After sinking a lot of time into trying to modify it, I realized my best option would be to pull back and make something myself. Sure it won't be as powerful as the existing tools, but it doesn't need to be. Instead of automatically reading from Aseprite file, I can export the spritesheet (one extra manual step), and write a much simpler plug-in up to slice up and organize it.

That's in progress right now, if people are interested I could probably generalize the logic and release the plugin. Either way though, it's a fun little sidequest to work on.