Dec 5, 2020
Path to Prosperity - Essence Games
Hi everyone,
Last week has been pretty productive again! While I initially sat down to fix an issue with the placement of rich mines and chests, we ended up including quite a few additional things in today’s patch:First of all, we added new ways to die (lucky you): Where you previously could walk on water, your commander will now fall into the water and drown (unless you get out of it again fast enough). Additionally, you can now die from falling, so no more jumping off cliffs to get home faster (unless you want to get home REALLY quickly)! With these additions, we have also implemented some changes to the way the player moves: You will find that walking up hills will slow you down, while walking down hills will speed you up, while also being a little smoother (less hopping).
Beyond the player movement (and death), we also added a new satchel, which will be dropped by pirates instead of chests. The new satchels are smaller, a little less visible, and can only hold Coin. However, satchels will be picked up automatically by the commander, soldiers, or villagers, when walking past them in close proximity. This should hopefully make it a little easier to pick up the Coin dropped by all the pirates your towers have defended you from.
On the topic of pirates, the last patch also added pirate camps in any positions on Spike Ridge that were not taken by players. This should add some variety to the directions the pirates will attack you from, and make defending more interesting. We also added a dropdown menu during the game setup, which you can use to define how much of a threat you want from the pirate waves. You can define the threat to be anywhere from “none” to “extreme”, and we’d love your feedback on how these work for you.
We also made the executive decision to take Opal Reef out of your options for normal play. Opal Reef was our first map for the game, but frankly, it was too small for the gameplay, and we decided to use it for a more dedicated Tutorial instead. You will now find a Tutorial button in the main menu, and we will soon add a second option for a map in the “real” game.
Finally, we also managed to update the skybox! Instead of the “box” with the message at the top (we appreciate all of the jokes that came out of that), we now have a more appealing sky with some moving clouds - again, we’d love to hear what you think.
Last week, I also brought up the topic of “next steps”. We discussed the topic between ourselves as well as with a few of you, and we came up with 4 primary options:
- We could polish the core gameplay that we currently have further,
- We could strengthen the strategy/RTS pillar, by including scouts, maps, and better tactical options,
- We could improve the survival/FPS pillar by adding quests and points of interest in the jungle, and
- We could add a “coop” option for multiplayer, so 2 players could build the same Village together.
While we are excited about every single one of these (and they are likely to be the ones we will focus on over the next 6 months), we have decided that the most important one will be the second one, strengthening the strategy/RTS pillar. At the moment, a lot of you already enjoy the exploration and city building game, but admittedly, the RTS gameplay and using soldiers is much weaker than we would like it to be. As a result, we will focus on this for the next 2-3 months, and will try to bring out an RTS update with version 0.8. As always, let us know what you think, and we’d love to hear what you’d like to see as the next priority after that.
Until next week!
Share: 
