Here it is, the final module for Crest! Monuments, tons of skeletons & many more features, besides an overall improved experience, await you in the Community Module. The very long list of all changes, which are based on your countless feedback, can be found below.

To start off the celebrations, we got a new cinematic trailer in store for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egP9grBQr3w

Here's a list of all the new features & updates:


Remnants of the world

• Animals & followers now leave behind skeletons when they die
  
• Cities leave behind slowly degrading ruins after its last follower has died

Graveyard

• Upon death the Chronicler will tell you about the world's history
  
• New end screen that lets you explore the world after your legacy ended
  
• Revisit past playthrough's world spirals & stories

Monuments

• A new type of building that followers will build over time to commemorate you, if they have enough materials & faith in you, which will provide an additional boost to the city's faith.

Renaming

• It's now possible to rename your cities & followers!

Event Notifications

• A notification bar on top of the screen informs you when something has happened in the world & let's you navigate to the location it happened by clicking on it.

Faith

• Faith interface completely overhauled with new visuals
  
• Faith system reworked for more insight

Influence

• Influence max cap now at 100
  
• Influence gain now dependent on number of faithful followers

Tutorial

• Tutorial updated with new visuals & improved flow
  
• Now explains all mechanics properly without being (too) overwhelming

Chronicler

• More events added to the spiral
  
• Filter added to the spiral

Advisors

• More tips added to advisors

Expertise

• Gaining an expertise now make followers create a specific expertise building in that city
  
• Expertise buildings are upgraded over time and give their city a boost to said expertise

Words

• Removed: Food
  
• Added: Middle aged
  
• Updated Verbs:
  
  • Destroy: now primarily uses warriors to destroy their targets
    
  • Consume: has been tweaked to not as easily lead to cannibalism
    
  • Don't: verbs have been tweaked to have a stronger impact on your followers
    
  • Explore: has been tweaked to affect to word discovery rate

Visuals

• Each season now has a unique look

Animals

• Hippos have been nerfed and shouldn't win fights with followers as easily anymore

Commandment Tablet

• Sorting & filtering of commandments now possible

Diplomacy

• Updated UI to better display city relationships
  
• Balances made to city trading
  
• Balances made to city warfare
  
• Updates made to city relationships

Loading Screen

• Loading screen now has an animated progress bar
  
• Displays helpful tips while generating the world

Camera

• The camera has been updated and is now a lot smoother to control

Audio

• Many new sound effects
  
• New background songs
  
• Added ambience sounds to each biome

That should cover most of it, left aside the countless performance improvements & bug fixes. We hope you'll enjoy the update and are happy with the choices we made. Let us know if you encounter any bugs or have feedback via the Steam forums or write us on discord.

Thank you all for your support & have fun playing!

Cheers,
Eat Create Sleep

Here it is, the final module for Crest! Monuments, tons of skeletons & many more features, besides an overall improved experience, await you in the Community Module. The very long list of all changes, which are based on your countless feedback, can be found below.

To start off the celebrations, we got a new cinematic trailer in store for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egP9grBQr3w

Here's a list of all the new features & updates:


Remnants of the world

• Animals & followers now leave behind skeletons when they die
  
• Cities leave behind slowly degrading ruins after its last follower has died

Graveyard

• Upon death the Chronicler will tell you about the world's history
  
• New end screen that lets you explore the world after your legacy ended
  
• Revisit past playthrough's world spirals & stories

Monuments

• A new type of building that followers will build over time to commemorate you, if they have enough materials & faith in you, which will provide an additional boost to the city's faith.

Renaming

• It's now possible to rename your cities & followers!

Event Notifications

• A notification bar on top of the screen informs you when something has happened in the world & let's you navigate to the location it happened by clicking on it.

Faith

• Faith interface completely overhauled with new visuals
  
• Faith system reworked for more insight

Influence

• Influence max cap now at 100
  
• Influence gain now dependent on number of faithful followers

Tutorial

• Tutorial updated with new visuals & improved flow
  
• Now explains all mechanics properly without being (too) overwhelming

Chronicler

• More events added to the spiral
  
• Filter added to the spiral

Advisors

• More tips added to advisors

Expertise

• Gaining an expertise now make followers create a specific expertise building in that city
  
• Expertise buildings are upgraded over time and give their city a boost to said expertise

Words

• Removed: Food
  
• Added: Middle aged
  
• Updated Verbs:
  
  • Destroy: now primarily uses warriors to destroy their targets
    
  • Consume: has been tweaked to not as easily lead to cannibalism
    
  • Don't: verbs have been tweaked to have a stronger impact on your followers
    
  • Explore: has been tweaked to affect to word discovery rate

Visuals

• Each season now has a unique look

Animals

• Hippos have been nerfed and shouldn't win fights with followers as easily anymore

Commandment Tablet

• Sorting & filtering of commandments now possible

Diplomacy

• Updated UI to better display city relationships
  
• Balances made to city trading
  
• Balances made to city warfare
  
• Updates made to city relationships

Loading Screen

• Loading screen now has an animated progress bar
  
• Displays helpful tips while generating the world

Camera

• The camera has been updated and is now a lot smoother to control

Audio

• Many new sound effects
  
• New background songs
  
• Added ambience sounds to each biome

That should cover most of it, left aside the countless performance improvements & bug fixes. We hope you'll enjoy the update and are happy with the choices we made. Let us know if you encounter any bugs or have feedback via the Steam forums or write us on discord.

Thank you all for your support & have fun playing!

Cheers,
Eat Create Sleep

Today it's just you and me. In order to not distract people from their work I decided to do this week's Dev Blog alone, but I can sum up the week in a nutshell for you:

Emma & Martin: working on the trailer
Emelie & Marcus: playtesting
Johannes, Tomas, Jens & Johannes W: bug fixing

We're all giving our best to deliver a polished build until next Tuesday, which will be our final module launch before we transition into the pre-release phase and we'll start releasing updates/patches every 2-3 weeks. The perfect time to look back again how far we've come in the last 4 (!) years.

It's no secret, if you've read the Development History of Crest, you know about all the hardships we've been through - from the initial hype to bankruptcy and now; our Indian summer - we always pushed through.

It's incredible to see how much Crest has changed since the beginning. You can still check out our initial prototype over at Gamejolt to see for yourself. Here's a small montage how Crest evolved over the years up until the Exploration Module:



Like many of you, when I first played Crest I saw the potential it had and was very fond of the philosophical approach to the classic god game genre but everything had still been very raw. Now, with the release of the Community Module, we're getting one step closer again to fulfill that potential.

I'm pretty sure you'll will be impressed by how much the game has evolved in the last four months but also bare in mind: it's still early access, we're not finished. There will be performance issues, bugs and unbalanced features that will get smoothed out over time.

But we've only come so far thanks to the support and feedback of all of you, hence the name of the module; to commemorate you. Most of the new features and improvements in the module are based on suggestions from you. So please keep that feedback coming to make Crest even greater in the coming months.

Next Tuesday a new era will start. Until then, thank you for taking this journey with us & I wish you all a splendid weekend!

Today it's just you and me. In order to not distract people from their work I decided to do this week's Dev Blog alone, but I can sum up the week in a nutshell for you:

Emma & Martin: working on the trailer
Emelie & Marcus: playtesting
Johannes, Tomas, Jens & Johannes W: bug fixing

We're all giving our best to deliver a polished build until next Tuesday, which will be our final module launch before we transition into the pre-release phase and we'll start releasing updates/patches every 2-3 weeks. The perfect time to look back again how far we've come in the last 4 (!) years.

It's no secret, if you've read the Development History of Crest, you know about all the hardships we've been through - from the initial hype to bankruptcy and now; our Indian summer - we always pushed through.

It's incredible to see how much Crest has changed since the beginning. You can still check out our initial prototype over at Gamejolt to see for yourself. Here's a small montage how Crest evolved over the years up until the Exploration Module:



Like many of you, when I first played Crest I saw the potential it had and was very fond of the philosophical approach to the classic god game genre but everything had still been very raw. Now, with the release of the Community Module, we're getting one step closer again to fulfill that potential.

I'm pretty sure you'll will be impressed by how much the game has evolved in the last four months but also bare in mind: it's still early access, we're not finished. There will be performance issues, bugs and unbalanced features that will get smoothed out over time.

But we've only come so far thanks to the support and feedback of all of you, hence the name of the module; to commemorate you. Most of the new features and improvements in the module are based on suggestions from you. So please keep that feedback coming to make Crest even greater in the coming months.

Next Tuesday a new era will start. Until then, thank you for taking this journey with us & I wish you all a splendid weekend!

We continue teasing you about the forthcoming update, but for a change we also present a little treat for your ears. Find out what it is and what everyone's been working on this week:




We found a lot of bugs at last weeks QA session at the university and more importantly, what causes them. A lot of them already got smashed but we're going to dedicate the entire week before the launch of the Community Module to fix as many as possible.

By the way we're now less than two weeks away from the release of the Community Module! Here's the song that will accompany the new trailer, made by Tuomas Nikkinen:

https://youtu.be/_4srlXAeXmA


Martin
The trailer is nearing completion, or at least the setting up part, I've created a lot of scenes, which I will now start animating. I usually split my time between all of the work I have to do. If there's several deliverables for the same project (in this case a trailer) I divide my time.

So for example, if there's five scenes I've got to do, I split a day for 1-2 hours per scene. This keeps me focused on the big picture and I don't get lost in the details. What happens otherwise is that I might spend a day on one scene and the other ones are completely underdeveloped. Below you can see another work in progress render!



Emma
This week has been about 2-3 days of UI work and the rest on the trailer again! It's closing in on the animation phase, with some last touches to the setup of each scene. While I've been working on the trailer, the programmers have made some changes to how some of the UI works; which means that some of the original layouts didn't work anymore. So, small fixes to layouts and new graphics for the tutorial was on the agenda for this week.




Johannes
After spending several days debugging a big freeze bug, I finally ended up fixing it by adding a single character in the right spot.

That's programming for you.

For the rest of the week I started working on making saves work again, as they always break during the development of a module.

Jens
This week my focus has been on getting alliances and war to work properly. Alliances are now working fine, rewarding the cities with a sense of fellowship, better trade agreements, and free movement within each others borders. The war has been a harder nut to crack but it is getting there.

Some unexpected bugs were also found and fixed which will result in reliable looting and raiding if the attacking nation wins the war. We have also made sure that the player commandments now have a lot more impact on how cities treat each other. Even though a lot has been improved, there is still a lot of balancing and tweaking left to be done before the module release.



Johannes W
This week I fixed the code for the new UI window that shows which cities are faithful, faithless, or undecided towards the player. The design for the faith and influence system was slightly changed, which I made sure was implemented in the code.

Influence is now based on the total amount of followers in faithful cities and faithless cities, where every follower in a faithful city adds 1 influence point as reward and every follower in a faithless city subtracts 1 point. Undecided followers add zero influence. A base influence value is added to make sure the player always receives influence points no matter what.

Tomas
I have worked closely with Emelie this week on continuing the development of the new tutorial. It is coming along nicely. The new tutorial should have a much better flow than the previous one and it is in the world, pointing to UI elements and in-world objects that are being described. It should be easier to learn the game with this iteration of the tutorial. Hopefully it's the last major rework of it! Most of the tutorial is actually completed, only minor tweaks remain for next week.


Emelie
This week I have been working on the tutorial, working closely with Tomas. The text and the position of the bubbles have been iterated quite a bit and there are still things to be done, the structure is there and the focus now is to make the flow better and more guiding for the player. Other than the tutorial I've been playtesting in order to find bugs.



Marcus
This week I have been going through the results from the playtesting we did last friday and documenting any found bugs to be exterminated. I have also done some additional playtesting on my own to make sure the new stuff we've been working on isn't broken. Together with this I have been setting up the planning for our final push to the Community Module, while also doing some company stuff.

_____________________________________________________________

Have a nice weekend!

We continue teasing you about the forthcoming update, but for a change we also present a little treat for your ears. Find out what it is and what everyone's been working on this week:




We found a lot of bugs at last weeks QA session at the university and more importantly, what causes them. A lot of them already got smashed but we're going to dedicate the entire week before the launch of the Community Module to fix as many as possible.

By the way we're now less than two weeks away from the release of the Community Module! Here's the song that will accompany the new trailer, made by Tuomas Nikkinen:

https://youtu.be/_4srlXAeXmA


Martin
The trailer is nearing completion, or at least the setting up part, I've created a lot of scenes, which I will now start animating. I usually split my time between all of the work I have to do. If there's several deliverables for the same project (in this case a trailer) I divide my time.

So for example, if there's five scenes I've got to do, I split a day for 1-2 hours per scene. This keeps me focused on the big picture and I don't get lost in the details. What happens otherwise is that I might spend a day on one scene and the other ones are completely underdeveloped. Below you can see another work in progress render!



Emma
This week has been about 2-3 days of UI work and the rest on the trailer again! It's closing in on the animation phase, with some last touches to the setup of each scene. While I've been working on the trailer, the programmers have made some changes to how some of the UI works; which means that some of the original layouts didn't work anymore. So, small fixes to layouts and new graphics for the tutorial was on the agenda for this week.




Johannes
After spending several days debugging a big freeze bug, I finally ended up fixing it by adding a single character in the right spot.

That's programming for you.

For the rest of the week I started working on making saves work again, as they always break during the development of a module.

Jens
This week my focus has been on getting alliances and war to work properly. Alliances are now working fine, rewarding the cities with a sense of fellowship, better trade agreements, and free movement within each others borders. The war has been a harder nut to crack but it is getting there.

Some unexpected bugs were also found and fixed which will result in reliable looting and raiding if the attacking nation wins the war. We have also made sure that the player commandments now have a lot more impact on how cities treat each other. Even though a lot has been improved, there is still a lot of balancing and tweaking left to be done before the module release.



Johannes W
This week I fixed the code for the new UI window that shows which cities are faithful, faithless, or undecided towards the player. The design for the faith and influence system was slightly changed, which I made sure was implemented in the code.

Influence is now based on the total amount of followers in faithful cities and faithless cities, where every follower in a faithful city adds 1 influence point as reward and every follower in a faithless city subtracts 1 point. Undecided followers add zero influence. A base influence value is added to make sure the player always receives influence points no matter what.

Tomas
I have worked closely with Emelie this week on continuing the development of the new tutorial. It is coming along nicely. The new tutorial should have a much better flow than the previous one and it is in the world, pointing to UI elements and in-world objects that are being described. It should be easier to learn the game with this iteration of the tutorial. Hopefully it's the last major rework of it! Most of the tutorial is actually completed, only minor tweaks remain for next week.


Emelie
This week I have been working on the tutorial, working closely with Tomas. The text and the position of the bubbles have been iterated quite a bit and there are still things to be done, the structure is there and the focus now is to make the flow better and more guiding for the player. Other than the tutorial I've been playtesting in order to find bugs.



Marcus
This week I have been going through the results from the playtesting we did last friday and documenting any found bugs to be exterminated. I have also done some additional playtesting on my own to make sure the new stuff we've been working on isn't broken. Together with this I have been setting up the planning for our final push to the Community Module, while also doing some company stuff.

_____________________________________________________________

Have a nice weekend!

Lots of sneak peeks in this week's Dev Blog, let's cut straight to it!


The Community Module will launch on 28th November! But hopefully you've already seen that by now. Once again, here what's going to be in there: Community Module - All the Infos

Today we're having a QA day at the local university, where we're trying to find as many bugs as possible together with the help of the students. Since this is still going, I can only show you a picture from the final preparations in the morning:





Martin
Another week with the trailer and now I'm starting to see some real progress! It's pretty hard to make a trailer for Crest since the gameplay is not something you can understand at a glance like say a platformer or fps game. But our solution is to make cinematic trailers with some gameplay bits.

Creating a cinematic for a game where most of the story is procedural and made by the player requires some finesse, you can't really tell a story of the characters in the game, because they're not important to the story, so what I can do is use symbolism, to try and tell an allegorical story that fits what you can experience inside of the game. Below you can see a test render of one of these symbolic scenes.



Emma
This week has been all about the trailer again, I am still new to Blender so a LOT of time this week has been about trying to figure out different systems and handling weird bugs(?). It's been a tiring week, but I learned a lot!

Below is a funny setup in one of the scenes, inspired by the world in Animal Crossing. The mines are supposed to appear after the second character joins the first character, so this was a try to see how it would look if it rotated into view!





Johannes
This week I've finished implementing Unity Analytics in the game. This allows us to see what commandments are being used, how long people survive and so on. It also allows us to capture crashes and errors. It will be a great help to make sure that the game is balanced and bug free in the final release.

Johannes W
This week I've completed the new story builder, graveyard, and end-screen feature. As this is the first complete version, it may need a revisit later for additional tweaks and added functionality. I think it works great at the moment and I look forward to see what stories our players will create when it's released!

The next thing I'm working on is for a new UI window that will show information about the players Faith from cities and followers.

Tomas
I have implemented an entirely new tutorial system from scratch. It will be a more fluid approach, that wont interrupt gameplay as much as the old one did.

I am especially pleased with how the tutorial window behaves when it is attached to objects in the game world, it follows them around.

The basic functionality of the system is done but more is needed to finalize it and I will continue with it next week.



Jens
I have continued working on the disposition system, and now have finished the foundation. This means that I can move on to the branching subsystems which are trade, forming of alliances and waging war.

The trade is almost finished, but some testing and balancing remains. Trading is now less convoluted and will emerge later during the gameplay to not overwhelm the player as soon as new cities start to form. We want the player to have more control of how and when trading occurs and it is now better tied into the disposition system.



Emelie
I have been working on some design tasks from our big meeting a few weeks back, specifically on some special cases with hunger, looking a bit more into associations and the pacing of the game.

It's essentially for the full release of the game and not for the community module, so it's not really our biggest priority now, which was why I went back to my other duties as QA for the last half of the week.



Marcus
This week I have been busy with making sure that we are on track with the development of the game and preparing for our open QA session. Lots of playtesting on the schedule!

_____________________________________________________________

Have a nice weekend!

Lots of sneak peeks in this week's Dev Blog, let's cut straight to it!


The Community Module will launch on 28th November! But hopefully you've already seen that by now. Once again, here what's going to be in there: Community Module - All the Infos

Today we're having a QA day at the local university, where we're trying to find as many bugs as possible together with the help of the students. Since this is still going, I can only show you a picture from the final preparations in the morning:





Martin
Another week with the trailer and now I'm starting to see some real progress! It's pretty hard to make a trailer for Crest since the gameplay is not something you can understand at a glance like say a platformer or fps game. But our solution is to make cinematic trailers with some gameplay bits.

Creating a cinematic for a game where most of the story is procedural and made by the player requires some finesse, you can't really tell a story of the characters in the game, because they're not important to the story, so what I can do is use symbolism, to try and tell an allegorical story that fits what you can experience inside of the game. Below you can see a test render of one of these symbolic scenes.



Emma
This week has been all about the trailer again, I am still new to Blender so a LOT of time this week has been about trying to figure out different systems and handling weird bugs(?). It's been a tiring week, but I learned a lot!

Below is a funny setup in one of the scenes, inspired by the world in Animal Crossing. The mines are supposed to appear after the second character joins the first character, so this was a try to see how it would look if it rotated into view!





Johannes
This week I've finished implementing Unity Analytics in the game. This allows us to see what commandments are being used, how long people survive and so on. It also allows us to capture crashes and errors. It will be a great help to make sure that the game is balanced and bug free in the final release.

Johannes W
This week I've completed the new story builder, graveyard, and end-screen feature. As this is the first complete version, it may need a revisit later for additional tweaks and added functionality. I think it works great at the moment and I look forward to see what stories our players will create when it's released!

The next thing I'm working on is for a new UI window that will show information about the players Faith from cities and followers.

Tomas
I have implemented an entirely new tutorial system from scratch. It will be a more fluid approach, that wont interrupt gameplay as much as the old one did.

I am especially pleased with how the tutorial window behaves when it is attached to objects in the game world, it follows them around.

The basic functionality of the system is done but more is needed to finalize it and I will continue with it next week.



Jens
I have continued working on the disposition system, and now have finished the foundation. This means that I can move on to the branching subsystems which are trade, forming of alliances and waging war.

The trade is almost finished, but some testing and balancing remains. Trading is now less convoluted and will emerge later during the gameplay to not overwhelm the player as soon as new cities start to form. We want the player to have more control of how and when trading occurs and it is now better tied into the disposition system.



Emelie
I have been working on some design tasks from our big meeting a few weeks back, specifically on some special cases with hunger, looking a bit more into associations and the pacing of the game.

It's essentially for the full release of the game and not for the community module, so it's not really our biggest priority now, which was why I went back to my other duties as QA for the last half of the week.



Marcus
This week I have been busy with making sure that we are on track with the development of the game and preparing for our open QA session. Lots of playtesting on the schedule!

_____________________________________________________________

Have a nice weekend!

Clocks have been rewound once again in Europe and days gotten shorter, but even in the dark season, the moon is here to cast its light upon us and guide our way. While the whole path might not be visible, the next few steps are always clear and can be approached with confidence.

I don't know where I'm going with this, let's just hear what's been happening at Eat Create Sleep this week:



The month of the Community Module has started! Launching a big update is always exciting but right now feels a bit like the calm before the storm; where we're preparing our ships and make sure to have enough food on board.

In that regard, we''re going to work together with the local university next week and have a QA day, where a few hundred students will try to find as many bugs as possible.


Martin
I've been spending this week with blocking out the different scenes I have for the trailer, thankfully I share the burden with Emma, would've been a lot of work to do all of the 19 scenes alone!



Emma
After two days being home sick, I came back and started working on the new trailer for the Community Module. We are starting out with just blocking out each scene, to get a general feel of how it will look like and if something needs to be changed. After that, the polish starts; removing placeholders and starting the animation work.





Johannes
This week I did a tiny bit of progress on improving the island generation, namely, I implemented a random function that can be assigned a bias towards certain values.

I've also started implementing Unity Analytics in the game. This will help us with QA and balancing.

Lastly, with the help of Jens and Emelie, I found the root cause of a major bug that's been haunting us.

Johannes W
This week has mostly been about the new ending screen and generating stories, kind of like the previous week for me. Sentences in each story are now selected by the rate of events that had happened in the game, for example how often alliances between cities occured, the number of commandments the player made per hour, how many advices from the advisors that where followed, and more. We want the stories to tell the things that stuck out the most in the game. Our designer Emelie will decide what the normal number of events are per hour for each event that the story needs. These numbers are then used to calculate the rate of which the event occurs.

We will also have this page in the main menu, called the "Graveyard", where the player can see all the previous games and re-read the stories in the ending screen. This is the last step for this feature. I began working on it this week and I want to be finished with it the next week!

Tomas
I have made it so that certain tasks require targets. Tasks such as cannibalism, killing followers, and hunting animals should now work more like one would expect when writing commandments.

I have also finalized the solution for making followers with high faith unable to perform actions that the player tells them not to do. For example, if the player writes "... don't fish for food.", followers with high faith will not only deprioritize that task, but they will be forbidden from doing it.

With those tasks complete I have begun working on the new tutorial. The first step has been starting to create a tutorial message window. I will continue with creating the basic functionality of the new tutorial next week.

Be advised! The tutorial window art is placeholder.




Jens
A lot of progress was made on the disposition system. We clarified the design goals at the start of the week and I have begun implementing it. These changes will hopefully give a better view of the relationships between cities as the system now tracks current direction of the relationship and what exactly is affecting it.

It also keeps track of the complete history of the relationship. The affecting events are for the most part tied to faith and doctrine such as commandment interpretations and associations. Other areas concern in-game actions such as sending priests to convert, or other followers intruding on a cities border, as well as alliances and war.


Emelie
This week started with a discussion between me, Johannes and Jens regarding the disposition system. How we want it to work and everything that comes with it such as trade, war and alliance. Previously the system has been overly complicated so we talked about scaling it down a bit so we have the bare minimum which will make it easier to add more values and easier to balance.

I've also worked on the new faith system, not much has changed design-wise but I needed to write it all down so I could wrap my head around it and see if there was any system that needed to be changed as well.


Marcus
This week I've been organizing the open QA session that we will hold at the local university next week. I've also been playtesting our latest developer build quite a bit to see what we have accidentally broken.

_____________________________________________________________

Have a nice weekend!

Clocks have been rewound once again in Europe and days gotten shorter, but even in the dark season, the moon is here to cast its light upon us and guide our way. While the whole path might not be visible, the next few steps are always clear and can be approached with confidence.

I don't know where I'm going with this, let's just hear what's been happening at Eat Create Sleep this week:



The month of the Community Module has started! Launching a big update is always exciting but right now feels a bit like the calm before the storm; where we're preparing our ships and make sure to have enough food on board.

In that regard, we''re going to work together with the local university next week and have a QA day, where a few hundred students will try to find as many bugs as possible.


Martin
I've been spending this week with blocking out the different scenes I have for the trailer, thankfully I share the burden with Emma, would've been a lot of work to do all of the 19 scenes alone!



Emma
After two days being home sick, I came back and started working on the new trailer for the Community Module. We are starting out with just blocking out each scene, to get a general feel of how it will look like and if something needs to be changed. After that, the polish starts; removing placeholders and starting the animation work.





Johannes
This week I did a tiny bit of progress on improving the island generation, namely, I implemented a random function that can be assigned a bias towards certain values.

I've also started implementing Unity Analytics in the game. This will help us with QA and balancing.

Lastly, with the help of Jens and Emelie, I found the root cause of a major bug that's been haunting us.

Johannes W
This week has mostly been about the new ending screen and generating stories, kind of like the previous week for me. Sentences in each story are now selected by the rate of events that had happened in the game, for example how often alliances between cities occured, the number of commandments the player made per hour, how many advices from the advisors that where followed, and more. We want the stories to tell the things that stuck out the most in the game. Our designer Emelie will decide what the normal number of events are per hour for each event that the story needs. These numbers are then used to calculate the rate of which the event occurs.

We will also have this page in the main menu, called the "Graveyard", where the player can see all the previous games and re-read the stories in the ending screen. This is the last step for this feature. I began working on it this week and I want to be finished with it the next week!

Tomas
I have made it so that certain tasks require targets. Tasks such as cannibalism, killing followers, and hunting animals should now work more like one would expect when writing commandments.

I have also finalized the solution for making followers with high faith unable to perform actions that the player tells them not to do. For example, if the player writes "... don't fish for food.", followers with high faith will not only deprioritize that task, but they will be forbidden from doing it.

With those tasks complete I have begun working on the new tutorial. The first step has been starting to create a tutorial message window. I will continue with creating the basic functionality of the new tutorial next week.

Be advised! The tutorial window art is placeholder.




Jens
A lot of progress was made on the disposition system. We clarified the design goals at the start of the week and I have begun implementing it. These changes will hopefully give a better view of the relationships between cities as the system now tracks current direction of the relationship and what exactly is affecting it.

It also keeps track of the complete history of the relationship. The affecting events are for the most part tied to faith and doctrine such as commandment interpretations and associations. Other areas concern in-game actions such as sending priests to convert, or other followers intruding on a cities border, as well as alliances and war.


Emelie
This week started with a discussion between me, Johannes and Jens regarding the disposition system. How we want it to work and everything that comes with it such as trade, war and alliance. Previously the system has been overly complicated so we talked about scaling it down a bit so we have the bare minimum which will make it easier to add more values and easier to balance.

I've also worked on the new faith system, not much has changed design-wise but I needed to write it all down so I could wrap my head around it and see if there was any system that needed to be changed as well.


Marcus
This week I've been organizing the open QA session that we will hold at the local university next week. I've also been playtesting our latest developer build quite a bit to see what we have accidentally broken.

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Have a nice weekend!