Alliance of the Sacred Suns News

Hello everyone! It’s time for our quarterly update, but before I dive into what’s new (and there’s a lot), I wanted to do a bit of housekeeping:

• These blogs going forward will be increased to every 4 weeks since we now have a lot more cool stuff to share!
  
• We will be updating our demo soon, be on the lookout for details!
  

First, we have expanded our team! We have added Josh Atkinson as a UX/UI designer full-time. Josh hails from down under and has been invaluable in updating our ‘look and feel’ of the game. You will see his influence in the accompanying screenshots. Welcome Josh!

ICYMI: Because of the new hires and all of the improvements we’ve made this year, we also just want to reiterate that our release window is now 2024.

User Experience improvements

Next, I wanted to talk about our User Experience (UX). As most of you know who have been following the game for a while, the Discoverability and UX has by far been our largest challenge. Alliance has a lot of options available to the player, as well as a lot of data. Our challenge is finding a way to make these options easy to understand and access, as well as present data in a way that makes it easy for the player to find what they need without overwhelming them with a wall of numbers and/or text.

Finally, after years of iteration, we feel that we have found the solution. The solution is actually in 5 parts:

• Right-clickable objects in the game that bring up a context menu to act upon
  
• A comprehensive, sortable, expandable outliner similar to other Grand Strategy Games that replaces a lot of our static data
  
• A unified popup window design that works like Windows: they are draggable, resizable, closeable and there can be multiple ones on screen at the same time
  
• An Action panel native to the main screen that works on System and Planet view that shows every action you can take with a system or planet, and if it’s not available, shows why not
  
• ‘Sticky’ tooltips that can be expanded with more information and data, to reduce the overall size of tooltips, as well as provide ‘tooltip within tooltip’ functionality
  

Let’s break these down in more detail. First, the right-clickable objects. Previously, when you wanted to do a Character Action, you had to open the Character Screen, go to the Actions Tab, and then select the Action category before you selected the Action that you wanted. While you can still do this, we have added the ability to right-click on a portrait anywhere in the game and a ‘quick action’ box will come up that allows you to immediately do certain things with that character, including firing them and performing an Action. You can also do this with Planets, Systems, Houses, Fleets, and your portrait.


Next: the Outliner. Currently, we have data spread out across the game in numerous screens, and it’s not a very unified setup - it’s shown more by mode (e.g. war, economy, domestic, etc) as opposed to holistically. So we wanted to find a way to present most of the info in the game, sortable, clickable, customizable, and by whatever value the player wants to use to compare objects. Enter the Outliner. The Outliner will be a powerful tool to access essentially anything that is actionable - essentially, anything that you can call up currently in the game to act upon will be available through the Outliner. This includes alerts, Court Requests, Comms, and turn blockers (e.g. setting the budget, etc). This means that we can remove several existing elements of the UI as well as remove several Nexii and streamline the amount of screens in the game.

As part of this design, we have moved to a singular modular window design that will carry across almost all of our UI windows. It’s designed to be movable, scalable, resizable, and closable, and multiple windows can be open at once without any performance loss. This has multiple benefits to the player - tons more flexibility for how they want to use the UI, the ability to compare objects (you can have multiple character screens/planet screens/system screens open at once) and the ability to carry data to other views (before, you could only see planet panels on the planet view, now you can see them anywhere).


Now, let’s talk about the Action Panel. This is the centerpiece of our focus on accessibility and player understanding. Imagine a panel that shows you EVERY SINGLE THING you can do with an object (system, planet, character, etc) that has headers that you can open and close, sort, and hide, and that gives you feedback why a specific thing isn’t available. This is the aim of the Action Panel. Now, finally, all actions that you can take with an object in Alliance will be shown in one place - not only the things you can do right now, but what you can potentially do in the future and what you need to do to make that available. In our testing, it has been a game-changer for access and understanding, and we’re excited to add it to the game!




Finally, tooltips have gotten an overhaul with functionality - they will now have the ability to be ‘sticky’ by pressing F once a tooltip is open, at which point you will be able to interact with it, either hovering over a keyword in the tooltip or opening up a info box that expands upon the info in a ‘quick text’ label. This should make tooltips both smaller (since they need to contain less info initially) and more functional.


This in addition to a revamped top Main UI that will be persistent across all screens except for End Turn - this way, you will have critical info available when an Event happens or you’re trying to decide to accept a Demand. To accommodate this, it has been made much slimmer and now stretches across the top of the screen.

System View

So that’s the UI. Now let’s talk about the System View! We have significantly revamped it and made it to where you can pan and zoom (similar to Stellaris). You can now zoom into a planet and as LOD increases see orbitals there, as well as 3D fleets stationed there(to be added very soon). You will also notice arrows pointing out towards LGN connections to other systems, as well as LGN nexus nodes, You will now be able to click on these arrows and move between systems (and nodes). We have also added zoom to cursor functionality, and we will be adding a zoom bar to show where you are in the zoom hierarchy.


We’ve done much more including an all-new Science Nexus design, adding more Actions and Epiphanies, balancing numerous facets of the game, adding the remainder of the Military System, and much more! We can’t wait to release the new demo that will showcase much of this new content, so you can judge for yourself!

Finally, our Discord has been quite quiet over the last several months, but it’s about to get a lot busier. If you’re already part of it, prepare for a significant uptick of activity very shortly, and if you’re not, what are you waiting for? Join the fun here: https://discord.gg/3hcGa4hcmE

See you soon!

Steve Hawkins
Project Lead, Alliance of the Sacred Suns

Hi everyone! Alliance of the Sacred Suns and other games published by Hooded Horse are all featured at the Hooded Horse Publisher Sale. Come check it out!

Hooded Horse Strategy Publisher Sale

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Greetings, presumptive rulers of the Celestial Empire! I know it’s been a while since we’ve updated the game status, but don’t worry - we’ve been very busy, and although there’s a lot of news, don’t stop reading - we come bearing gifts.


First of all, we have spent a lot of time reworking the UI and UX to be… well, more fun to use, cleaner, and more visual. We have two recent examples of this. First is the Rank Map, which is selectable from the Nexus Bar on the main UI. This screen shows graphically the entire hierarchy of the Empire - viceroys, governors, and Primes can now be seen clearly where they fit into the Empire. And it gets better!! No more cumbersome ‘fire’ Actions or begging a House Leader to allow you to fill one of their Holdings - you can make all of your changes on this screen, through the magic of drag and drop! Fire a Viceroy, and drag a Courtier into their place. Promote someone to the Celestial Council from another House, and that House Leader may let you put your choice into their old slot! You’ll be able to see House reactions to all of your moves before you confirm them, and it will be obvious which positions are open and which are not (House Leaders have the final say on their Holdings!).


Next, the Epiphany Tree has gotten a COMPLETE overhaul. We wanted it to be more graphic and more dynamic - the nodes were all the same look, and it wasn’t clear how to move through a larger tree. No more! The entire tree of an Epiphany category is now available to see and plan from the start, and you can move, pan, and zoom in and out freely on the tree! Clean, clear, and more visual: Check!


Moving on, we now have planetary and system Orbitals. These are built with Projects, but before there was no representation of them in-game. No more! Now, you can zoom in on all planetary and system orbitals to your hearts’ content, and see their status, and watch them grow as you increase their level in some cases!


Next, Actions have been updated and revised to fit the new game systemsl. We completely scrapped the old Actions and added over 40 all-new Actions to better fit the theme of the game. We focused on how a ruler would use Actions - they would look to improve their own relationships with characters, undermine their enemies’ relationships, and interact with the other Great Houses for the bulk of their time, so that’s what we focused on! We also greatly updated the UI to show the expected effects of failure and success - what other Characters and Houses will think about this Action!


In addition, conversations between you and other Characters have been greatly expanded, and the result of your conversation, for good or bad, is much clearer.


But what happens when kind words fail, and you must take sterner measures? Glad you asked… Oratory Combat 2.0!! We have completely revamped Oratory Combat to be more visual, visceral, and fun! The big change is that it is now card-driven instead of skill-driven. We made this change to make it easier and more interesting for the player to ‘build up’ their character throughout their life-it’s more visceral to get a new power or effect on a cool card with art instead of just getting ‘Intimidation +3’, which is how it worked before. Essentially, we really want to lean into the RPG element of the game.

You can power up cards (and obtain them) through experience, Events, and epiphanies! Drag and drop your cards onto the battle screen, and outwit your opponents as they use unique demeanors and personalities to rebuff your requests!! Oratory Combat will be how you deal with Court Visits, where characters or Houses issue requests or demands of you. You can accept, decline unilaterally, or convince them not to make this demand/request. If you succeed, you’ve let yourself off the hook for a potentially expensive commitment, if you fail… you may just have made things even worse!


Our main UI got a pass as well; it’s now much crisper, cleaner, leaner, and adds important information like your House treasury right in plain view!


Planets and stars also got a graphical upgrade, including entirely new planet models and lighting maps for inhabited planets, as well as true star light and motion in the planetary view!

What else? We’ve removed provinces from your attention - it ended up being an unnecessary layer of abstraction that didn’t add much to either gameplay or the UX - so we scrapped them. Now you can see your entire Empire’s influence from the Galaxy map, and select a system directly without having to enter a separate Province Mode. Province governors have been retained in the form of Constellation governors - a highly-sought after position, locked behind a mid-game tech.

House Generation and System ownership have gotten some love as well! Now, only one House owns an entire System and all the Holdings within - this makes Military Actions and Wars much easier to conduct, as well as makes ownership less confusing to the player. Each House will have at least one System under their control at start - and we have slightly tweaked the number of planets in a system down to four, to make them even more valuable to build up!

Have you ever wondered why your relationship changed with someone? Or why your Power went down unexpectedly? Or why your House Relationship is suddenly one level lower? Well, we have too! That’s why we’ve updated our UX with dynamic tooltips that show the factors that have changed a value over time. We’ve implemented these tooltips on the most important values in the game, including Power, Spirit, and your relationships with Houses and Characters!

And that’s just the big stuff - we’ve made a host of other smaller improvements already, and we plan on doing a lot more over the course of the summer. Speaking of summer… we mentioned a gift.

We’re pretty confident in the changes we’ve made to improve the player experience and the game's visual interface, but then we would be - it’s our game! Alliance wouldn’t be where it is today without our testers, and we’re happy to announce we plan to run another beta this summer.

The ‘Sagan’ build will comprise of everything mentioned above, plus any further changes we make beforehand, and will be a near complete vision of Alliance of the Sacred Sun’s initial early access offering.

We will announce more details soon, but anyone can sign up as long as you sign the necessary documents! Sagan is a very exciting development milestone for our small team, and we can’t wait to show you the fruits of our labors.

-Steve Hawkins
Project Lead, Alliance of the Sacred Suns

Hello everyone! Hope you’re all having a happy holiday season, and are looking forward to the new year!

I want to talk about a very important part of the game: the Reign Score System, AKA ‘What am I supposed to be doing in this game, anyway?”

When you start Alliance, in the 1.0 release, we aim to have the option to play either a Sandbox mode or a specific Campaign - these will have their own win conditions, special rules, etc. In the Sandbox mode - the only mode that’ll be available in Early Access - you’ll always start in 3050, as the newly-crowned, 18-year old ruler of the Celestial Empire. Your primary goal in Sandbox mode is simply to be humanity’s greatest ruler, and this is reflected in the Reign Score System.

Your Reign is judged through your Reputation (Fear, Popular Support, and Power), your internal personality, and things that you do during that time. The more you do, the better your Reign Score, and the higher rank you can attain. Your Reign Score determines your final rank, from ‘The Forgotten’ to… well, you’ll just have to see! There are well over 20 ranks you can earn, as well as specific honorifics depending on your Reign Achievements.



Your Reign Score has three components - you get some straight from your Power, you earn some by completing Reign Goals, and you can gain - or lose! - Reign Score by acting in accordance or in conflict with your ruler’s Values.

The six Reign Goal categories are: Self-Mastery (goals that improve yourself), Expansion (goals that focus on expanding and claiming/connecting new systems and constellations), Security (goals that focus on developing the internal and external security of the Empire), Administration (goals that focus on planetary and Pop support), Exploitation (goals that focus on economy and production), and Discovery (goals that focus on science and stellar discovery).

Each Tier I goal and most of the Tier II goals act as a tutorial for that area of the game - you will have several subtasks that will introduce you to the basics of the game, and when you complete them, you’ll gain some Reign Score as well. If you complete an entire category, you’ll be entitled to an honorific depending on the Tier IV goal you completed - different goals have different rewards! Tier IV goals are also intended to be ‘capstone’ achievements - they are not easy, and you will most likely not be able to accomplish all of them in a single reign!

There are 4 Tiers in each category; as you complete a Tier Goal, you will unlock the next Tier and can then select a new Goal.

The Value component of your score corresponds to your internal personality Values - Honor, Humanity, and Piety. Throughout your reign, you’ll do things that are considered Humane, Honorable, and Pious - but also things that are considered Inhumane, Dishonorable, or Impious. You will gain and lose Reign Score for these Deeds in proportion to your devotion to the relevant Value. The higher your score in Honor, for instance, the greater the Score benefits of doing things that are Honorable, but the greater the score hit you will take if you do something Dishonorable. This makes playing a character with integrity more challenging, but also more potentially rewarding!

When you end the game, however that happens, you’ll get a final score, multiplied by the difficulty of the game settings, as well as a final Rank Title and a list of any Honorifics that you earned during your Reign. You’ll also be treated to a recap of your reign through a timeline screen, covering the highlights (and lowlights) of your reign, and how it ended, so you can share your story of your brilliant (or horrendous) time as ruler of the Celestial Empire with others.If you opt in, you will also be able to send this score and your rank to a leaderboard that other Alliance players are also populating, to see once and for all who is the greatest ruler of humanity! We’ll also be breaking out your scores for Honorable, Humane, and Pious Deeds into their own separate scoreboards, to keep things fresh.

This is the ‘bow that wraps up’ the gameplay that many of you have been waiting for. With games being a finite length (due to your life expectancy), the Reign Score System should keep the fun going through the mid and end game - unlike other 4X games, you won’t be able to ‘color the map’, but there will always be something happening to keep your attention focused! The flexibility of the Reign Goal system means you don’t have to be ‘stuck’ doing a category you don’t enjoy - it’s better to focus on a few Reign Goal categories and complete them than dabble around the Reign Goal map. We’re really excited about this system - we think it’s going to really transform the game for the better!

Enjoy your breaks and the rest of 2022, and we’ll see you in 2023!

-Steve Hawkins
Lead Developer, Alliance of the Sacred Suns

Hello everyone! Steve here again with another exciting update - we’ve had a busy month, so let’s get right down to what’s improved and changed in Alliance since we last spoke!

[h2]MASSIVE PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS[/h2]

We took a hard look this month after the last demo feedback at the memory and storage systems of Alliance. Some people who were running 8 GB of RAM were unable to play, or the game would partially load before timing out. We want the game to run on no more than 4-6 GB of RAM, with an integrated graphics card, and we want a consistent 60 FPS target on all facets of the game, including the UI.

So we went back to the drawing board, and Brandon, our lead UI programmer, was able to use and integrate Unity’s Addressables system, along with intelligent resource pooling, to dramatically improve load times, game generation times, and most importantly, memory usage! The game should now run on at least a 6 GB machine, and we continue to work towards 4 GB machines as well.

In addition, load and game generation times have been cut by 60-70%. This is the most significant performance update we have ever done.

[h2]UPDATED MILITARY SYSTEM[/h2]





We have continued to work on the military system. It’s a little different from typical 4X games in that you are more or less fighting between elements of the Empire, and a war between Houses is basically a civil war.

So we initially tried to frame wars as Challenges, which were civilized duels between Houses, and only one House could ever challenge another House. They had specific goals and win conditions, usually either territory or Warscore, and in theory seemed like a good idea. However, players found them confusing and restrictive, so we decided to more or less scrap that system and allow Houses to wage war with as many other Houses (including your House) as they like, as long as their Operations Capacity can support it.

What we’ve done is streamline the process of war - all you have to do now is declare war against another House, and that’s that. Each House gains Warscore by destroying or doing things during the war, and that ratio plus each leader’s attributes and skills determines what peace options are available to end the war. Basically, the higher the Warscore ratio, the more ‘punitive’ options are available to a House to end a war, up to and including subjugating a House (if another House is losing badly) or claiming the Throne (if your House is losing badly)!

We have also streamlined the Operations creation process, added a space combat viewer (so you can finally see your fleets in action), added Task Forces, added offensive patrols that also scout systems, added Inquisitor missions that gather military intel on targets, and much more! We will be writing a separate dev blog about the military system in the next few weeks, so be on the lookout!

[h2]UPDATED TECH TREE[/h2]



To fit a redesign of the early game and onboarding experience, we have also radically updated the tech tree. Before, there were 2 main categories - Empire and Military. Empire techs could be used by the whole Empire, but only you could research them, while Military Techs were independent to other Houses and could be researched by all (but only that House would get the benefits).

This setup, while easier, didn’t make much sense in the context of the game. The idea was that the Empire had slowly declined in technology since the height of the Terran Alliance 500 years prior, just before the Second Xyl War decimated it and reduced humanity to the Core Systems. So the idea that all this high technology is still around and easily replaceable didn’t seem to make sense in the context of the game’s background. Also, other Houses contributing to technologies that didn’t benefit them didn’t make sense either.

So what we did is added a third category called Supremacy. This is where we’ve put all the real juicy unlocks, including concepts like EICs, Inquisitors, Exploration expeditions, LGN construction, and more. The catch is that these techs only benefit the Empire directly, so other Houses will be upset that you’re basically expanding the Emperor’s power at their expense. Conversely, the Empire tree has techs that are less game-changing, but which all Houses can use, and thus they will be pleased when you direct your (combined) scientific efforts towards these techs. The idea is that you have to build up sufficient support from the other Houses in order to afford to research Supremacy techs, introducing a recurring interesting decision to the research tree - is my position strong enough to afford this reform? To help new players learn the ropes of the system, your Vizier will also give you his opinion on the matter.

This also has the effect of now gating many Projects and some game systems, including the ability to create System and Province Projects, build new LGN Hubs and Nexii (required to expand to other Constellations), exploration Expeditions, etc. This will make the initial game less overwhelming to the player, since they won’t have a firehose of options to start, and it forces the player to really spend time rebuilding their relationships with other Houses since the Empire’s scientific apparatus will be… shall we say… less than efficient and effective at game start. We’re really excited about these changes!

[h2]UNIFIED UI EXPERIENCE[/h2]



We have finally more or less locked down the final version of the UI for all the game systems (except for game setup, which will be in the next update) so we have started ensuring that all windows work the same - close with a right click, go back to the previous step if there’s an arrow, but right-click should ALWAYS now close the screen, regardless of step. Basically, left click - select/zoom in; right-click - close/zoom out. Also, due to QOL requests, we are adding the middle mouse wheel pan capability, and zoom to cursor on the galaxy map!

[h2]EXPANDED HELP SYSTEM[/h2]



We will now have popup help for all UI windows that require interaction, as well as expanded Encyclopedia entries for all UI windows that have a UI Popup. We will also be testing a guided tour of the interface, and we’ve added an expanded Grand Vizier help system that shows opportunities within the Empire and ways to correct them. We have also added many more Encyclopedia entries for additional game topics that expand on strategy and how to use them. We have also added remaining missing tooltips to the game, so virtually all labels and numbers now have a tooltip!

[h2]MORE EVENTS[/h2]

We have added even more events, and now have over 50 events in the game, many with numerous branches and endings for variety!

That’s all for the October 2022 update - we don’t have anything further to share regarding our release timeline right now, but make sure you watch this space!

-Steve Hawkins
Lead Developer, Alliance of the Sacred Suns