The pressure is on this month as we prepare for the upcoming Steam Game Festival. We know quite a handful of you were disappointed at the delay so it was very fortunate that Steam is hosting another festival this June. This will allow us to at least show you a taste of the game via a short teaser demo. Read further for details about that as well as other new stuff we've done over the month.
Demo
The bulk of our month's work involved preparing a teaser demo for the festival. Players may not know this but giving players access to a game demo is more often detrimental to a game's sales. This is a good explanation of why. However, we think the upside of joining Steam's Festival where Steam could potentially show the game to a much wider audience for the first time trumps the downside. Also, it should hopefully tide people over who were disappointed at the delay.
Knowing the pitfalls of having a demo, it was a deliberate choice to significantly limit what would be available - in terms of both features and playtime. It will be quite short, but it should give you a very clear idea of how the game plays.
Another important thing we added at the end of the demo is a link to a google form where players can send feedback and suggestions. We haven't been able to test out the game yet to many first time users so we expect a lot of balance issues. This is a great opportunity to get player feedback so please use the form if you have any criticisms or suggestions!
Tutorials
Of course, one of the most important thing to include in the demo is the tutorial. We've decided to go for a non-intrusive "quest-type" tutorial, peppered with a few pop-ups for important notes. We think the tutorials should provide the players with enough idea of how to play the game and then they can spend the remaining few days of the demo to experiment and play around with the unlocked options.
For tutorial-haters, there is an option to skip these in the Main Menu!
Demo Secret!
We have a small secret feature included in the Demo and this is an example of the type of content we will continually add once we are on Early Access. I'll just give one hint: villagers with Evil or Treacherous Trait.
I hope a lot of players get to encounter it and that it plays out well during the limited in-game days available of the demo!
Farming and Mining
Villagers now actually tend to crops and dig into mountains to find Metals, Gold and Diamonds.
Wolf Hunts
We intend to give most monster types some unique and interesting behaviors. For example, wolves will now sometimes get out of their lair to hunt small animals for food.
Spider Abductions
Giant Spiders may also ensnare and abduct villagers and bring them to their lair.
Angels
There may be instances when the player's Threat Meter reaches 100 but there are not enough combatant Villagers to mount a counterattack. In this case, we spawn a few Angels and they will mount a "Divine Intervention".
Revised Kennel
In a previous iteration, Kennels are used for future playthroughs so it doesn't feel that useful. We revised it so that players can now breed monsters that they seize and drop inside Kennels, and that will give them 1 Charge of that monster type that they can then summon for invasion or defense.
Revised Torture Chamber
This is still mostly the same as before but with some revised UX. The structure now has 3 smaller rooms and the player must drop Villagers inside one room, then click on that room structure to trigger the Torture action. Once it finishes, a skeleton minion is spawned to carry the prisoner out of the Torture Chambers and leave him outside.
Danger Reaction - Surprise/Flight
Before, Villagers don't really react much if you cast a Lightning or a Meteor right next to them. Now, they may act surprised or flee from various dangerous objects (including Poison Clouds, Brimstones, etc). We may have to enhance this even further in the future as I think we missed some stuff.
Stamina
We've replaced Comfort Meter with Stamina and this will now be a Meter that is consumed whenever a character is running. Once it depletes enough, they are forced to move much slower and will only be able to run again once the Meter has been fully replenished. This will be improved upon over the coming weeks as it is now a key tool to differentiate how often some characters/monsters can successfully flee in combat.
Sound Effects
We've started adding sound effects into the game but it's probably not yet of a high quality. We're hoping to improve on this in the future.
We know that a few of you were disappointed that we decided to move Ruinarch’s launch to August, but we teased that we had an exciting announcement coming soon. Well we’re devilishly delighted to share that we will be part of Steam’s Summer Game Festival!
That means you little demons will have a demo on your hands in less than a month, along with a chance to chat with the dev team that we have chained to their desks to complete this demo. Just kidding, they’re chained to their desks so they don’t break quarantine.
Overlords, we need your help to make this Steam Festival a success! We need you to help us harvest souls...to check this game out! If you have a friend or foe who you know would love this kind of game, share this announcement with them so that we may all rejoice and summon demons during the Steam Summer Game Festival!
And just in case this is your first time to find out about the game, welcome, and check out this excellent trailer to find out what’s in store for you!
While we initially promised a release date of May 2020, we’re sad to announce that we will be pushing back release by a few months, to August 2020. Even though we’re pretty evil, it felt a little bit tone deaf to be releasing a game about ruining people’s lives while the world seemingly falls apart on us because of the covid-19 pandemic.
You won’t have to wait too long though, because we’re only moving the launch to August, by which point hopefully the world will be on the road to recovery (so we can wreck virtual worlds guilt-free). We’ll take that extra time to add more polish and content to the game so that you’ll get a much better game upon release.
In the meantime to whet your appetite, check out this new and improved trailer we made! We hope it gets you as pumped up for Early Access release as we are!
That’s all from us for now, stay safe, stay indoors, and wash your hands!
March has been a struggle, not only for us as developers but for the entire world as well. It's definitely a challenge developing a game with this theme given all the suffering that's been happening all around us. We are from Manila, Philippines and we've been under lockdown since mid-March. We've seen a lot of heartwarming kindness coming out from the community, but there is also some mindbogglingly insidious/inept behavior displayed by some of our public officials, some of which might probably make even a Ruinarch demon blush. Unlike in games, it's never fun to see evil in real life, especially during a crisis like this.
Despite the stress and anxiety brought about by the pandemic, we continue to keep pushing through and we're using all our willpower to keep trudging on. Please see below what we have accomplished so far this month.
New Elements
We added two new elemental damage to the game: Wind and Earth.
Wind
Wind damage transforms water into vapor, and liquid poison into poison cloud.
Earth
Earth damage is basically a neutralizer. It can remove the other elemental status effects like Burning, Poisoned, Zapped and Frozen.
Poison Clouds, Vapors and Frosty Fog
We've expanded how Poison Clouds work now. It has a hidden stack value that determines how large it is. Multiple colliding Poison Clouds can merge into one bigger cloud. Certain elements interact with Poison Cloud in various ways. We'll let you guys experiment to discover these.
In addition to Poison Clouds, we now also have Vapor and Frosty Fog. As mentioned previously, Vapor is produced when water is hit by Wind damage. Frosty Fog can be produced when a Vapor receives Ice damage. Both also have interesting interactions with some elements so have fun experimenting with these!
Mental Break: Loss of Control
We made some unique mental breaks for magical-based classes. We call it Loss of Control. Basically, when a magic user have a mental breakdown, they lose control of their powers, causing some sort of magical disaster in the area. Druids trigger Electric Storms, Shamans trigger Poison Blooms, and Mages trigger Brimstones.
More Spells
Iceteroids
Similar to Brimstones, but the asteroids coming down from the sky are frozen and applies Ice damage instead.
Wind Blast
Deals a moderate amount of Wind damage on a small area.
Terrifying Howl
Causes characters within range to flee in fear.
Fire Ball
A slowly moving ball of fire that applies Fire damage on contact.
Ball Lightning
A slowly moving electric ball that applies Electric damage on contact.
Heat Wave
Increases the temperature of the area (outside structures), and randomly applies Overheating status effect on characters.
Rain
Applies Wet to the entire area (outside structures).
Landmine
The player can place this trap on an empty tile. It explodes and deals huge Fire damage when a character triggers it.
Snare Trap
The player can place this trap on an empty tile. It ensnares the character that triggers it, preventing it from moving for a duration.
Freezing Trap
The player can place this trap on an empty tile. It applies Frozen to the character that triggers it, preventing it from moving for a duration.
More Monsters
New and Revised Objects
Elemental Crystals - When destroyed, they apply elemental damage to a small radius around them.
Ankh of Anubis - The player can activate this artifact to spawn a Quicksand.
Heart of the Wind - The player can activate this artifact to spawn a Tornado.
Necronomicon - The player can activate this artifact to spawn hostile skeletons. They won't become minions of the player but they will still be hostile to the defending villagers.
Berserk Orb - The player can activate this artifact to turn nearby characters Berserk.
Gorgon Eyes - The player can activate this artifact to Paralyze nearby characters.
Winter Rose/Desert Rose - We'll keep what these objects do a surprise for now, as well as how to trigger them.
Herb Plant - Used to produce Healing Potions
Ember - Obtained from burning objects. Can be used to quickly remove Freezing or Frozen statuses.
Antidote - Used to remove Poisoned from characters.
Ice - Obtained from Frozen objects. Used to quickly clean up Poison from objects.
Revised Village Structures
We've reworked how all of the village structures look like. They look much more detailed now:
Family Relationships
This has actually been already in the game for a while but we forgot to take note of it on the previous DevLog. Previously, we just had familial relationship represented as Relative and the game doesn't really identify what type of relationship it is (mother/father/sibling/etc) and it has always been considered a Positive relationship which in reality, could sometimes not be the case. So we've updated it by generating family trees prior to world generation. When we spawn the characters, all their familial relationship based on their family tree will be visible and their Opinion towards their family members will also be generated, based on hidden compatibility values. Here's an example:
Skill Trees
Instead of locking players into one Archetype, we've decided to turn the Archetypes into Skill Trees instead and allow players to unlock abilities from all three branches as they progress through the game. All players now start with the same set of abilities, and they can then spend Experience Points to unlock new abilities from the three skill trees. This will provide a more flexible progression for players, and allow them to develop their own playstyle as they see fit.
This is still a work in progress and will be finished this April.
Win/Lose Condition
Even though we're leaning more heavily towards the sandbox side of the game, we still need to implement some sort of goal that the player will aim for. There are three ways for a playthrough to end:
1. WIN - wipe out all defending villagers 2. LOSE - portal gets destroyed 3. NEUTRAL - abandon world
Depending on what happens, and how many villagers have been killed, the player will then gain Experience Points which he can then spend to unlock more abilities from the Skill Trees. This loop provides the game's long term progression.
With the recent changes to how spells work, the player still has more options to experiment or just fool around with a world. After all, there's no punishment regardless of what happens in a playthrough other than not gaining much Experience Points.
Threat Meter
As mentioned above, a playthrough ends in a Loss if the player's Portal is destroyed in any way. One of the primary means that this will occur is from counterattacks of defending villagers. We trigger this through a Threat Meter system. Basically, most of your damaging spells will increase your Threat Meter, depending on how many villagers witnessed it.
Once your Threat Meter is full, it triggers a counterattack and resets to zero. A counterattack is basically a group of villagers that will target one of your demonic structures. This already exists in the current build but still pretty rudimentary. We think it needs some improvements over the coming weeks.
As we design and expand our skill trees, we envision the Puppetmaster skill tree as the one that would have "weak" and "subtle" powers, but the upside is that they normally do not increase the Threat Meter that much, if at all. Meanwhile, the Ravager skill tree will have some of the most powerful spells, but they should also generate high amounts of Threat.
We've been hinting at it in our previous devlogs (and eagle eyed overlords will have seen our release date on the store page, but we're excited to officially announce that we will be releasing into Early Access in May!
The last couple of months we've been making some major strides in the game, adding a new Invasion System, improving NPC AI, and adding some crazy new spells! For more of a deep dive, check out our latest Youtube devlog:
There's lots more to com in the following months, including improved NPC behavior, user experience, tutorials and a host of other things so that we're ready to launch some mayhem in May!
It would really help us out if you share this news with your friends that you think would like the game. And if you're a streamer or youtuber, please request for a key from Keymailer or email marvin.apacible@maccima.ph. We will be sharing keys with you nearer to the launch date!
It was a very productive month for us. These updates mostly complete our revamped mechanics. There is still quite a lot of things we need to finish to get the game ready for our fast approaching Early Access launch this coming May but we're getting there inch by inch!
Elemental Status
We've recently introduced various Elements into the game with various effects and interactions. These are: Fire, Water, Electric, Ice and Poison
When these Elements are dealt to an object as damage, they also apply unique Statuses such as Burning, Wet, Zapped, Freezing and Poisoned. Certain Statuses interact with different Elements in interesting ways. For example, Electric damage travels through Wet objects while Poisoned objects explode when exposed to Fire Damage,
Experimenting with various ways to trigger chains of Elemental interactions can be a source of great "fun". Over the course of Early Access, we will be introducing objects and characters that would trigger or spread various Elemental Damage and Statuses.
Playstyles
We're working on building a good progression system for the game for replayability and longevity. One major aspect of this is player playstyle (or should we call this Archetypes?). When the player starts a game, he may choose from three different playstyles: Ravager, Lich and Puppetmaster. These different playstyles determine the player's starting Spells, Minions and Abilities.
Ravager
This playstyle has access to a lot of damaging spells and powerful beasts. This is the most visceral and direct playstyle.
Puppetmaster
This playstyle will have you afflicting characters with various flaws and pitting characters and factions against each other. It's intended to be a tough playstyle that requires you to perform subtle manipulations from behind-the-scenes.
Lich
This is a balanced playstyle that has access to some powerful spells as well as some interesting manipulations.
Right now, we're still deciding between two different progression system: one where the progression is mainly on a per-game basis (the player gets stronger as he plays through a single game) or one where the progression builds up over multiple games (the player unlocks more powers over the course of multiple playthroughs). Let us know your thoughts on these!
Bunch of New Spells
Poison Cloud
This noxious cloud may apply poison to objects in its path. Explodes when it gets in contact with Fire, dealing Normal damage and applying Poisoned over a large area.
Meteor
A huge meteor will strike the designated spot, causing major Fire damage.
Water Bomb
Applies Wet to a 2 tile radius around the designated spot. It doesn't deal any damage but adding Wet to tiles and objects has its uses...
Lightning
A lightning bolt will hit the designated spot, causing Electric damage.
Splash Poison
Applies Poisoned to a small area around the designated spot.
Brimstones
Burning meteorites will strike random tiles on the target area, dealing Fire damage. And when Fire damage hits a Poisoned object:
Locust Swarm
These starving insects will consume all edible objects in its path.
Blizzard
Significantly lowers the outside temperature on the target area, which may randomly apply Freezing on affected characters.
Earthquake
Violently shakes the ground, dealing Normal damage to objects and randomly moving them around. Characters will become Disoriented.
Manifest Food
Produce a small amount of Food. Sometimes, you need to feed your prey.
Ravenous, Feeble and Forlorn Spirits
Ghastly spirits that roam around and then drain Need Meters of any character that gets in range. Dissipates after an hour.
Boulder
This will produce a durable and impassable block of stone. This will probably be only a stepping stone in allowing player more extensive ways of manipulating the landscape.
Minion Actions
Minions can now be instructed to harass settlements as well as abduct or kill characters. They can also learn to breed new monsters (they must disable one and then study the monster for a short time). We're not quite happy with how fiddly Minion and Monsters work at the moment but we have time to improve on their functionality next month.
Internal Demonic Structures
We're reworking how the structures function now that the strategic layer has been removed. Similar to the Minions, I'm not quite happy with how they function yet - both in terms of usefulness and UX so I think there's some more improvements in store for most of these. They are starting to look great though!
Spire
The Spire now allows a player to unlock new Spells and Afflictions that are only available from other Playstyles. The options available here are randomized. Learning new ones cost Mana. If we decide to go for the multi-playthrough progression, this would have to be revamped, though.
Kennel
This is where the player can breed his own monsters. Except for the Puppetmaster, each Playstyle has its own set of initial monsters it can already breed. The player can unlock more by learning the monsters that have been randomly spawned in the world. If we go for a multi-playthrough progression, this may be more interesting as new monsters learned can be carried over to future playthroughs.
Goader
This is where the player can force characters to join or leave factions using Mana.
Prison
This is a demonic structure that can contain abducted characters. If you have a Prison, characters abducted by your Minions will be dropped here instead of near the Portal.
Torture Chamber
This is a demonic structure that can contain abducted characters and torture them, causing various negative Status Effects and Traits. If you have a Torture Chamber, characters abducted by your Minions will be dropped here first before Prison.
The Eye
We've disabled most of the notifications that used to popup at the bottom right of the screen when the player sees character activities in the world. We've now transferred that functionality to the Eye. When the player has an Eye on a region, it will add notifications for important events that occur there. The Eye is therefore important for Intel gathering.
More Monsters
We've introduced a few more monsters into the mix. They don't have animations yet. We're considering skipping on the walking animations for now even up to Early Access launch in favor of having more quantity available up front.
What's Left?
As mentioned, we're launching our Early Access this coming May! So we'll be putting a lid on adding new features by next month. The last major thing we feel needs to be prioritized is character behavior. We've lost some of the more fun things the characters used to do after we reworked their behavior so we need to get those things back next month. They don't properly react yet to elements and disasters, so that also needs to be addressed. Lastly, we need to start implementing the various unique abilities of character classes as well as the different non-demonic structures (Mage Quarters, Apothecary, etc). We'll try to get as many as we can next month but it's a dizzying challenge to figure it all out and make it come together well!
After March, we'll focus on improving user experience, player feedback, tutorials, combat balance, bug fixing and polishing.
As we've mentioned earlier, the World Invasion System we had was not working well with our main sandbox/simulation mechanics. It would require that we put significant limitations to the player's powers in order to be satisfying, and these limitations reduce the amount of fun the player can have in interacting/meddling/manipulating the world.
Another issue we had (which we noticed from how many players play the game in our ESGS event) is that the players consider the world map and the world invasion system to be the main part of the game. Interacting and manipulating the characters became a side optional thing they just do to pass the time while they are waiting for the timers. This is opposite of what we intend: the main game is the manipulation, and the world invasion system was supposed to support that by giving some sort of progression as well as providing the players with some of the tools they would need.
Lastly, the human brain is pretty bad at multitasking and our past design require players to multi-task between invading the world map, and interacting with the various internal maps.
So this month we did a significant amount of overhaul to resolve these issues.
New World Map
You still invade the world by spreading your corruption one tile at a time. However, all of these now occur in the internal maps. The Portal as well as other demonic structures (although only the Portal has been converted for this month) will be visible inside the internal maps, and you can interact with them directly from there. You can corrupt adjacent areas slowly, and you can visually see as your corruption spreads out within the internal maps. Instead of showing the player the world map first, the player is first shown the internal map of one region, with the camera centered where his Portal has been placed.
By starting in an internal map instead of the world map (eventually we'll also have this starting region include the tutorials), we think this would reframe the player's focus towards the internal maps.
From here, you can eventually exit the region and see the new world map. The world map is now mostly visual and informational. The game also has fewer but larger regions. But now, all hex tiles are actually high-level representation of a small square section of the internal map. Whatever happens to the internal map will also visually update the world map.
Examples:
This water hex tile surrounded by 2 mountains: Is a representation of this section of the region's internal map:
This settlement hex tile: is a representation of this section of the region's internal map:
You may find it odd that a hex tile in the world map represents a square are in the internal map. Would be much simpler and easier if the world map is made up of square tiles. Honestly, this is only because we cannot really revamp our hex tile assets in the world map anymore due to budgetary and time constraints (alas the bane of every indie developers in the world!). Maybe when the game gets successful we can revise this world map and turn it into square tiles!
The other thing the world map provides is a way for the player to visit each region. Aside from these two things, the player no longer needs to interact much with it, as all of the things we used to have here can now be done in the internal maps. This allows the player to focus on one internal map at a time. There will still be some multitasking required, as the world is composed of multiple regions, but we intend to open it up slowly.
Revamped Player Actions
The World Invasion and World Map changes fix the unnecessary complexity that the game used to have. But one other thing we also want is to just basically ramp up the fun of interacting with the world and its residents. For this, we decided to reduce the limits we placed on the player's abilities. We originally intended to restrain them so that there will be some challenge in wiping out the world. After much consideration, we think it would just be much more pure fun to unleash the player's powers. Yea, it would be quite easy to kill off the residents, but now you can do it in style. We'll leave it up to the player's creativity now to decide how he wants to do it! So our new goal now in the upcoming months is to provide the players more fun tools to execute whatever mischievous things he wants to do to these worlds.
What this means gameplay-wise is that the player can now perform most of his actions at no cost. So if he knows how to cast a Tornado, he can cast as many of it as he wants. He can turn everyone into a vampire or a werewolf. He can start a zombie apocalypse by inflicting just one character, or if he wants to do it much more quickly, afflict more at no cost.
This does mean that the game is now more of a sandbox-simulation than a strategy-simulation. But even in sandbox games, there still needs to be some sort of progression and we also want players to experience new things per playthrough, otherwise it will get stale fast. There's more to say about how we'll deal with this but it's a topic for the next couple of months!
Mana
As mentioned above, most actions have no cost... but not all. We still have Mana as our main player resource. We'll talk about how it will be used later as the work on that is still ongoing. For now, what we'd like to share is how the player gains Mana in the game. In the past, we've experimented on this simply increasing slowly over time (Mana Regen). Now, we've directly connected it to the player's agenda as an evil overlord: spreading evil and misery.
Basically, Chaos Orbs are produced whenever something evil or miserable occur in the world. The player can click on these to obtain Mana. When a resident performs a criminal act, he generates a few Chaos Orbs around him. Same thing when a resident cries, or spits on someone's grave, or screams for help.
The idea now behind Mana is that it is an entirely optional resource. You will have enough means from your starting powers to wipe out the world, but unlocking more interesting options would require Mana. You don't get Mana from simply killing residents, so if you want a lot of it, you've got to be creative in spreading evil and misery!
Mood and Mental Breaks
These are blatantly copied from RimWorldl! Well, they are not exactly the same as our Mood modifiers are different but they behave quite similarly.
Mood is basically the sum of all Statuses that a resident has. So we already have Energy, Fullness and Happiness needs before, and now we further added Comfort and Hope. Characters gain various Statuses depending on how full these Needs meters are. In addition to Needs-related Statuses, there are plenty of other sources of Statuses, such as Illnesses, Injuries, heartbreak, grief, etc.
When a character's Mood is sufficiently low, he has a risk of triggering a mental breakdown, which can take the form of Hide at Home, Dazed, Catatonia, Suicidal Mode or Berserk Mode. Let us know if you want other forms of mental breaks. Reason we introduced Mood and Mental Breaks is these are another source of Chaos Orbs. When a character is in a Mental Break state, it will randomly expel Chaos Orbs from time to time. So one goal of the player is to trigger Mental Breaks to farm Chaos Orbs!
Emotion Based Reactions
One of our issues with how characters react to events around them as well as Intel shared to them is the complexity of it all - as various situations and relationships must be taken into account. A way to simplify this a bit is to deconstruct a character's reaction into a set of emotions. If a character sees his lover having an affair, what emotions would he feel? Anger, Betrayal, Sadness? How about if he sees someone administering aid to a friend? Gratefulness, Approval? And then what we do next is code what each of these emotional components do. Approval simply means an increase of Opinion. Anger may add an Angry status effect and trigger retribution. We still have to assess different situations, but putting the actual reactions inside reusable Emotion components significantly simplifies how we deal with them.
Interrupts
We've reworked some of our Actions and separated involuntary ones like Stumble and Puke as well as special ones like Chat and Break Up as Interrupts. This should resolve some of our strange job prioritizing issues, and reduce instances that a character must manually get close to another to perform actions.
Hollowed Mountains
We've also hollowed out our internal representation of mountain tiles. Some items and monsters will be spawned inside. In the future, it will be possible to dig through thick mountain walls to get inside.
Monster Lairs
Our Monster Lairs are now represented inside the Internal Maps. This is where we will spawn some of the random monsters on World Generation. In the past, Monster Lair landmarks are just separate hex tiles in the World Map and the monsters inside do not have simulated behavior. With the revamp, every landmark we have will be directly visible within the internal maps, and all creatures inside will also be fully simulated (although they do not have Moods and Relationships unlike sapient beings such as Humans and Elves). It still looks pretty empty but it will be much more cavern-like soon!
Settlement Ruler/Faction Leader
In previous builds, a Faction Leader is a separate unique class in the game and they are also the ones that function as ruler of a settlement. We also made these roles essential, meaning that at no point in time must there be a Faction or Settlement with no leader. This caused some issues with some of our systems. For example, when a faction leader werewolf transforms to a wolf form, it also used to trigger leader succession.
Now, we modified it so that there is no longer a unique class for these. Instead, it's just a special role that can be assigned to a resident, we have a behind-the-scenes election that randomly takes place that takes into consideration a resident's traits, relationships and class to determine who becomes a new Settlement Ruler or Faction Leader. It's also now possible for these two to be two different characters even if they are in the same Settlement. It's also now possible for Settlements and Factions to not have a leader for some time as the "election" does not take place instantly the moment a leader is gone. When a character becomes designated as a Settlement Ruler or Faction Leader, it simply gains new abilities and behaviors (for example, designating new blueprints to build, judging prisoners, changing faction ideology).
Create Your Own Serial Killer
Previously, when you afflict someone with Psychopathy, its victim criteria is randomly generated. We've changed this so that when you apply Psychopathy, you can choose your own victim criteria based on Gender, Race, Class and Traits.
You can add up to two different criteria. The UI is still pretty crude but it is just a placeholder and will be fixed later on.
We fully expect 2020 to be a very busy year for us, as we head closer to our target Early Access launch. We have one major issue to resolve - we've talked about this a bit in a discussion thread here - there is currently a conflict between the "play with people's lives" sandbox side of the game and the "invade and wipe out the world" strategic side of the game. Our January will be spent solving this problem and introducing some interesting improvements to the game. We'll discuss that further at the end of January.
But for now, see what we've accomplished on the last month of 2019. For December, we actually only had around three weeks of work as we took a long leave at the end of the month. Below are the things we worked on.
Edited UI
We've reworked some of our UI to reduce the amount of space they take up.
Opinion
We've expanded on our Relationship system. Previously, we only had discrete relationships that determines whether you view a character positively or negatively. So relationship types such as Lover, Friend and Paramour are always positive, while relationship types like Enemy are always negative. This fails to simulate some interesting situations. Example, some people may be in a romantic relationship that has since soured so they both dislike each other.
To fix this, we introduced Opinion (akin to Sims and RimWorld). This is an integer value that determines how much you like someone. It is modified by various relationship types but may change independently of them. So you may end up having negative opinion towards a Lover or a Relative.
Seize
This is a simple ability that allows the player to take any character or object from the map and then drop it somewhere else. The player can only seize one thing at a time. While it sounds simple, it can be used in a lot of creative and naughty ways. The UI/UX and balancing of this ability is still in progress.
Previously, our Kennels and Crypts merely increase Summon and Artifact slots. It was neither dynamic nor interesting. We've started working on making them more interesting. The idea is that the actual monsters and artifacts that you can use should exist somewhere in the world, and then once you are able to corrupt that area, you must then build a Kennel (for the monsters) or a Crypt (for an artifact). Once these have been built, then you will have access to the monsters/artifact there. This would put some more thought into where Kennels and Crypts must be built. Do I build my Kennel in this tile that has five wolves, or in this tile that has a single but powerful golem?
Our plans for January will update these even further but let's talk about that later!
Character Sprite Animations
Our new character sprites now have Walking, Attacking, Interacting and Knockout animations. Farewell gliding static sprites!
Goader Demonic Structure
We have a rudimentary UI for our Goader Structure which is all about Faction Manipulation. Here, the player can induce a character to leave, join or start his own faction.
Various Structure Layouts
We've prepared different looks for new settlement structures. Could still use a bit of work but at least now different structure types are more identifiable.
Aside from Warehouse, Jail and Cemetery, the rest don't have their functionality in the game yet but that will be implemented soon!
After attending the ESGS event last month, we spent the first week of November discussing player feedback and plotting what we have to do in the next couple of months to address issues raised. It has become quite apparent to us that we needed to rework some aspects of the game to improve performance, maintain consistency and streamline our process.
Bulk of our November work revolved around this rework. We're still not fully done with it so it would continue over the next few months. Fortunately, we were still able to introduce some new features. Below is a summary of the major things we've added into the game:
New Character Sprites and Portraits
One of the major player issues before is the difficulty in identifying individual characters in the map as we were still using the same sprite for male and female characters in the game. With these new sprites, characters have different body sprites based on their class, and its color scheme also changes depending on its race. Although, its a bit hard, you can also somewhat identify gender by checking out the character's hair length.
We've also introduced randomized variations in the character portraits, to further differentiate them from each other. It's unfortunate that our portrait icons in game are quite small, because it loses many of the awesome details added by the artist:
Blueprint System
Settlements now start as small villages that eventually grow and expand. The faction leader may place a blueprint for a specific structure and another builder character can take on the job of constructing it. We'll introduce more unique structures in the future that would provide various benefits and means for the characters to fight back against the player and their other opponents.
Migration
As mentioned, settlements now expand and may build new unoccupied dwellings. We've also introduced a daily random event that may spawn new migrants to occupy empty homes. This is a way for factions to grow. It poses another threat to the player - by leaving a tiny village alone for a while, you may find that it has grown into a much stronger settlement days later.
Multiple Settlement and Factions
We've started work on our multi-faction system. For now, we've only set it up so that there are three starting factions and settlements at world spawn. For now they just claim adjacent regions and cleanse corruption but this will open up much more in the future, as we allow factions to build new regional structures, raid and invade opposing factions, and more.
New World Events
Alongside having multiple factions, we've also started tinkering on how we want them to expand and interact. For now we just have two new ones added to the other already existing events:
Claim Region: Allows a character with Royalty trait to claim ownership of an adjacent unclaimed region.
Cleanse Corruption: Allows a character with Purifier trait to cleanse an empty corrupted region.
Soon, we want characters to be able to build new Mines, Farms and Garrisons, as well as raid and invade the player and other opposing factions.
As we've mentioned in a previous post, World's Bane is now Ruinarch! And we have entered into a publishing deal with fellow Filipino game studio Squeaky Wheel. With this partnership, we are able to extend our development time up to early 2020 as well as get much needed assistance in marketing the game.
Much has happened since our last DevLog and the game is in a more complete form now with most of the important features needed to play the game from start to finish already in place. We'll just go through the most major ones here. For a more in-depth information about the game, please check out the first of our video dev log series discussing various features of the game at our youtube page:
We now have Demonic Structures that the player can build on invaded regions. They provide various features to assist the player in invading the world. For example, the player can extract new spells from some of his minions by performing an extraction ritual in the Spire. And the player can research upgrades in the Anvil.
Reworked UI
We've gone ahead and updated our placeholder UIs with near final versions of it. Here are some screenshots of the new UI.
Electronic Sports and Gaming Summit
We recently attended ESGS. It is a Filipino gaming event that has a sizable area for local indie games. While it was exhausting for our developers to talk non-stop for 4 days straight, it was ultimately a very rewarding experience seeing players play and enjoy the latest version of the game for the first time. More importantly, we were able to collect valuable feedback that has now helped us figure out what's working well and what the game's major issues are. We have a lot of work (and re-work) to do ahead of us but we can now more clearly visualize what the finished version of Ruinarch should look like!