Diplomacy is Not an Option News

Good lords, fair ladies!

Spring has sprung, nature is coming to life and the birds are singing more cheerfully than ever. All this inspires us to further develop the single-player campaign. Also, thanks to the spring, or rather to say the seasonal Steam sale, Diplomacy is Not an Option is at a discount again! Hurry up, because we're leaving Early Access this year. A trailer awaits you soon. In the meantime, buy DiNaO for yourself or your friends! After all, spring is the time to give joy to each other.

Yours, the Door 407 dev team.

Friends! From February 27 to March 6, Diplomacy is Not an Option is 20% off. If you haven't purchased the game yet, now it's your chance.

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[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Greetings. One year ago Diplomacy is Not an Option came to Early Access. We're celebrating this milestone with a new trailer and this dev-blog, where we'll break down just how much the game has changed in the past year. We also want to tell you how the final stage of Diplomacy is Not an Option development is going. Warning, long read ahead.

When our game saw the light on February 9, 2022, it was full of bugs. Some of them were annoying and some of them inspired us to bring new mechanics to the game. Diplomacy is Not an Option has always been and will remain our beloved child. During the past year, we've been supporting the game with patches and hotfixes. Let's take a brief look back to remember what it was like.

In February, two weeks after its release in EA, the first update rolled out. We did some work on the bugs, but the game's difficulty was not exactly welcoming. This is why the "City of Joy" mode was born, bringing DiNaO as close as possible to a spectacular city-building simulator. As for now, we're working on a new difficulty level for even more casual play.

In March and April, we analyzed our community feedback, and concluded that players wanted to focus on the broad strokes of combat, rather than get bogged down in minutia. Excessive micromanagement is annoying. Out economic layer and the interface required significant improvements. We began work to hammer out these problems in May.

With the second major update we switched to using a Universal Render Pipeline, improving the image quality. DiNaO gets a table of records and Endless Mode layouts with new enemies. (At that time, we thought that the Endless Mode was going to be the heart of the game in Early Access stage, but our players wanted something else).

Our biggest takeaway from feedback on the May update was that players wanted victory conditions, which just didn't happen in Endless mode. To fix address this, we launched Challenge Mode in June. With the same update, we also implemented a photo mode, promised way back in the Spring. In addition, we added tools for the more convenient army and economy management. Improving the interface is a constant effort, and one that continues to this day.

In the August update, we expanded the range of troops under the player's control. In response to complaints about the lack of content, we added the Foot knight, Horse knight, Mounted archer, Axe Warrior, and 'Burrdam Chimera' units to the roster. Of course, that's far from the end of it, and we're currently working on long-awaited traps and enhanced defenses.

In August, we completely overhauled the research tree, adding new technologies, and changing the effects of some existing research. We took this opportunity to tweak, tune and rework key parts of the game's economy too.

For October, we rolled out our Halloween-themed update. Along with new Challenges and Endless mode variants, the Undead joined the fight. We also did a lot of work improving the physics. Explosions get epicenters. Projectile trajectories become more predictable, increasing the accuracy of many types of troops. October was an intense month of development for our team, and we hope that no other month will be quite as nerve-fraying as that one.

The December update was dedicated to improving the late game. Resource starvation and repetition are addressed. Infinite sources of iron and stone are added to DiNaO. We also rebalanced the chance of obtaining Soul crystals. With less micromanagement required on the economic side, we bumped up the complexity of enemy waves in Endless mode, increasing the strategic skill ceiling. Finally, the long-promised mountain models were added, and we are extremely proud of them. In fact, we might never stop bragging about it.

While our focus was on survival-style gameplay, January's feedback made it clear that players want a Map/Scenario Editor and more story-driven Campaign missions. For this reason, in 2023 we changed our policy of releasing major updates at regular intervals to make these two most requested improvements happen.
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A little bit about the development of the Story Campaign[/h3]

DiNaO was designed as a survival game. Hunger, disease, war with vastly superior enemy forces, and other hardships of medieval life were supposed to be the main and only obstacles between you and victory. We had planned several factions for you to fight against, each with special abilities and thus provide mission variety. The first draft of the script contained twelve missions, and story branching that only affected cutscenes and dialogues. But we wanted more from the campaign, so we increased the mission number and added a wider range of objectives, necessitating a completely rewritten script. Here are a couple of examples of the challenges we faced.

Let's start with victory conditions. A pretty typical mission objective in the real-time strategy genre is to get your squad from point A to point B. In the case of DiNaO, the question arises: how long will that journey take, especially given the procedural map generation? Won't your squad die from starvation or disease on its way?

Imagine you have to storm someone's castle. There are archers and catapults on the walls, and your troops are trying to break through the enemy's defenses. But all the enemies currently in DiNaO are designed to lay siege to your base, rather than playing any kind of defensive role.

We are currently experimenting with all sorts of victory conditions, and have already found a number of solutions that will allow us to deliver a full and traditional RTS campaign within our gameplay framework.

Also, a few words on the story and artists' work. Given the ballooning scale of the campaign scenario, the number of cutscenes has (to put it mildly) increased dramatically. It's worth mentioning here that every cutscene is bespoke animation. After shooting, we need to bring add sounds to the cutscene and adjust the timing of lines so players have time to easily read them in all supported languages.

Now that we've lifted the veil of secrecy a bit over out processes in creating the Story Campaign, it's high time to answer the big question, "When?", and yes, we know you've been waiting ages for it.

At the time of writing, (February 9, 2023), our final script is finished. Several victory conditions have been coded in, and the vast majority of the sketches and concept art are done. Some cutscenes have been shot, but there's still a lot to do. We have no idea yet what difficulties we are going to face. But you've our solemn promise on one point: Diplomacy is Not an Option will launch out of Early Access in 2023. Once we've hit our stride and got a clear idea of when the end is in sight, we'll announce an exact release date. Between now and launch we'll also be updating the game with patches and hotfixes.

The full release will include the vastly larger and more involved Single-player Campaign with at least two distinct, game-changing plot branches. The launch version will also include the Map Editor, new biomes, new enemies, new Challenges and Endless Mode layouts. We've also got some surprises that we're not ready to announce yet, so stay tuned for more in future dev blogs.

Thank you very much reading all the way to the end – we know it's a lot. We hope this answered at least some of your most burning questions, and clarified our vision of DiNaO's future. One last thing to say. Without you – our players and fans - Diplomacy is Not an Option would not be the game it is today. We are very grateful for your feedback and suggestions, your loyalty, and your patience. Thank you helping us to understand how to make our game better. See you soon!

Yours, the Door 407 team

This week, from January 16th to 23rd, we're having a sale. Come buy Diplomacy is Not an Option with a 20% discount!

"That does it! I'm leaving!" - Princess Shankhar was packing her favorite basalt figurines into a bag. These handmade statuettes were standing on the floor around the family hearth.
Each one represented a month of living together. According to the customs of the Sarranga tribes, the first one was carved by a woman and given to the man on the day she realized she was ready to entrust him with her heart. If he accepted the gift, the next month it was his turn, which symbolized that he was happy to share his life with his beloved. The third one was given by the woman again, which meant that she was still not disappointed in her beloved, and so on. All figurines had their place around the family hearth and their meaning.
Every sixteen months the collection had to be completely renewed. As no matter how big the family hearth is, seventeen not to mention eighteen figurines - are a bit too much. Thanks to their placement, one always trips over them, in addition, they make cooking a risky business. How can you put a deer on a spit when you're surrounded by symbolic figurines, falling of which is a bad sign?
"For hunting?" - the princess' beloved, a young man named Kazakhrutla, was sitting by the window, staring at the melancholy drizzle. And at fishermen carrying heavy baskets of fish on their backs. Kazakhrutla was pondering how to make life easier for them. "I wish..." thought Kazakhrutla, "...to do so they wouldn't have to carry the baskets on their backs. But how? Skis maybe? No, that's only when it's raining, when there's mud and slush all around. I need something else".
"No, I'm going to my place. I'm going home!" - Shankhar had long ago gotten used to the fact that Kazakhrutla was a slowpoke. She felt alright with him being in his own thoughts and not paying attention to her. But eight figurines ago she believed that Kazakhrutla was a thinker and that one day he would invent something after all. That's what he said, accepting the first basalt statuette from her hands: "I am a thinker. Someday, Shankhar, I will invent something very useful."
She hoped it would be some kind of weapon to help Sarranga tribes to fight and even defeat the Undead. But Kazakhrutla thought differently, in a down-to-earth way. In addition, none of his "inventions" ever left the nappies of his mind to take shape, let alone being useful to the tribe.
Shankhar liked that Kazakhrutla was not with her for title and position in the tangled hierarchy of the Sarranga. It was quite an enviable position though - the princess' chosen one was allowed to enter the Palace of the Chiefs in the glorious city of Ninende. Fair to say Kazakhrutlu wasn't interested in her title and privileges. But neither was he interested in hunting and cleaning. There was also no use going to him for advice on how to settle a dispute between two of Shankhar's subjects. Not a single piece of advice had ever turned out to be helpful in the eight months they had been together. In a word, this chosen one was a lazy, slacker, and scalawag. So Shankhar collected the statuettes she liked, which symbolized that her heart was no longer entrusted to her beloved.
"Are you going for a long time?" - Kazakhrutla asked. He was accustomed to the princess being away on business in her native settlement for a day or two. However, his thoughts were with the shape of the sun disk peering through the clouds. The thinker was indeed on the verge of inventing the wheel. Who knows, maybe he would have even invented it someday. We'll never find out. Because Shankhar had walked away from Kazakhrutla that day, throwing the lad into the despair of an extreme degree.
"For forever!" Shankhar took the basalt dragon, the very first statuette she had made.
"How's that?" asked Kazakhrutla.
"Just like that!" - replied Shankhar, taking her sword off the wall and leaving the house. She slammed the door.
"And who's going to cook the fish?" - said Kazakhrutla melancholically.
Shankhar decided to reach her home settlement via the shore road. Because it was a safer choice. One never meets a ghoul by the sea. For some reason, the Undeads usually attack in the forest. And because Princess liked to walk in the rain and look at the sea horizon.
So she was walking, cursing Kazakhrutla, swearing off the time she lost with him and the need to look for a new chosen one. Because according to Sarranga customs, a woman cannot stay alone longer than sixteen months. Where she was supposed to find this new chosen one, as Kazakhrutla seemed to her the most clever member of Sarranga tribes?
Suddenly something in the sand caught her attention. As you know, nature doesn't like corners. And a wide piece of wood, thrown on the shore, had a very unusual form. It was wide and flat. Rectangular at one end and bitten on the other...