Celestial Empire News

Dear community!
The environment is full of life! A variety of animals are hiding around your settlement. Most of them are domesticated and play many key roles in the economy. They can be sources of food, produce valuable resources or help your citizens in laborious tasks.

Ox and horse
These hard-working animals of extraordinary power will help with food and recources production. They work the fields alongside your citizens, allowing them to survive without a problem.

Duck
They are adorable, they waddle around and they for sure are delicious. The survival of your citizens depends on your duck farms, so please take good care of these adorable birds.

Silk moths
With their help, your citizens can create some of the most expensive materials in the world. This resource will be a part of the evolution of your cities.

Panda
One of the most recognisable animals in Chinese culture. They roll around in the bamboo forest munching on shoots and leaves. Their chill attitudes bring peace to the land around your settlements.

Fox
They bring life to the nearby forests. If you see an orange blur speeding through the greenery, you know it’s the sly fox running around, hunting, or playing.

Dog
They are just good boys, true protectors of the household, and friends to your citizens. You can find them barking around in gardens and outside houses.

Not all animals can be useful or pretty, locust will plague your citizens. You can fight with them using specialised buildings and characters, who protect your cities and maintain the production of resources.
If you can think of any other animals we could add, please let us know!

See in our Discord!

Dear community,
When creating maps a lot of emphases is placed on the wildlife surrounding your future city. Terrain and rivers can guide you to places where your settlement will begin, but it is nature that will provide some of the most necessary resources. Plants and trees are crucial sources of building materials as well as a source of heat for your citizens during the cold winter months.

We introduced a huge variety of shapes and colours to create a diverse environment. This allows you as a player to seek locations that not only will have a vast amount of resources but also will look aesthetically pleasing.

Here is a set of foliage you can find on the map.

Bushes and grass.
These cover the vast majority of the map. We are working on the possibility of finding small patches of gorgeous flowers hidden in the tall grass.

Deciduous trees.
There are two tree types in this category: birch and oak. They change their appearance drastically with shifting seasons. This creates a more colourful look to the game and may even remind players to prepare for the upcoming winter.

Conifers.
Dense spruce and pine forests spread over mountainous areas. They are a fantastic source of wood for the citizens. These are evergreen and will always stand out in the winter months.

Colourful trees.
Peach trees and magnolia yulan bring life and colour to the environment. They are some of the most beautiful plants you can find in the wild on the map.

Domesticated plants.
We introduced plants to diversify buildings. We want to show the sophisticated details and gardening available to the upper classes of the citizens.

Bamboo forests.
There used to be a little exploit, which gave your city almost infinite amounts of wood. Even though this has been fixed since bamboo forests are still a viable wood source.

The plant variety presented in this devblog encompasses only a selected group available on one of the maps. We’re constantly working on new elements of the environment and creating new variants of the already existing plants. If you have any suggestions of what regional variants of trees or bushes we should add, don’t forget you can message us on our discord server or comment here.

Until next time,
The Devs

Dear Community!
One of our main objectives while creating the game is to allow players to create complex cities that spread over large areas. We want their settlements to look busy and full of life, with a multitude of different buildings and NPCs running around. This may be difficult when our player base has a large variety of different computers, some of them better, others worse. We need to make sure that they all will be able to play the game with no major problems and at least a satisfactory framerate. To achieve that, we decided to use a mixture of techniques.



Every building that players can place on the map is divided into the main mesh and smaller props, which get hidden when the camera moves away. The main mesh has multiple LODs, which lower the number of triangles on the scene by simplifying the shape of the building. Some of them are generated by the engine, while others are crafted by hand to make sure they still have a satisfying amount of detail. Additionally, when objects are placed on the scene they are caught by a special system that aggregates identical meshes to minimize the Draw Calls. This frees the CPU's resources, which are then used to calculate for example the economy among other things.



We use a similar solution when it comes to NPCs assigned to buildings. When the camera moves away, characters stop moving and then slowly disappear once the distance between them and the camera is large enough.

Drawing roads also turned out to be an optimisation challenge. To achieve a good visual effect each tile of the road has to differ from the ones next to it, which forced us to use Decals. On their own, they are not viable on large maps. We solved this by using Runtime Virtual Texture technology. Thanks to it, we are able to design a sheet on which we placed every single terrain texture. Then when roads are placed, only one source needs to be active, even though there’s a visual distinction between tiles.

Citizens of the city turned out to be a challenge as well. To be able to create crowded streets we had to use AI based on HISM (Hierarchical Instanced Static Mesh). It allows us to connect many static meshes into one, which is later on drawn in many different places. This reduces the number of Draw Calls, as information about the texture has to be sent out only once. We use the vertex animation method to move our citizens, so instead of moving their bones, we use information coded into textures to move triangles on of the static meshes. All NPCs have a shared AI, which chooses the starting and ending points of their journey and then sends them on their way.



These are just a few techniques we use to optimize the game and make it run on as many different computers as possible. These technical aspects of the process may often not look spectacular, but without them, the game would never run on even the highest-end computers. Our programmers spend countless hours on these tasks and they deserve their own time in the spotlight. If you have any questions, don’t be afraid to ask, we’ll try to answer.

See you next time
The Devs

Dear community,
The last week of February was one of the most intense in the development of Celestial Empire. Between finishing the playtests and releasing the demo, we learned so much about our own game and the needs of our players. We listened to your feedback, learned what you need, attempted to fix what was broken, and hopefully made the game much more understandable to the players. Remember that even if we didn’t answer your concerns directly, we tried to address them through changes in the game itself.

What we have learned:

• tutorials are the key - we know the mechanics, you don’t and we definitely need to communicate them more clearly. Certain steps have been already implemented, we are changing the way they work and how they explain the more complicated aspects of the game.
  
• localisations are not perfect - there are typos and mistakes in translations, we are currently working with the localization company to make sure they do not appear again.
  
• balancing is hard - we admit that winter was deadly at the beginning, but at the same time we hope that changes to the balancing done throughout the Steam Next Fest.
  
• we may need a minimap - so many people have mentioned it, so we are considering implementing it in the full version of the game.
  
• shortcuts and keybinds - we added many shortcuts along with information on where to find them, which will be useful in making the game much more approachable to new players.
  
• optimization is necessary - before the game’s release, we will have to make sure that players with less powerful computers are able to play the game with no major problems.
  

With these very valuable lessons, we will continue our work on the game. We will provide regular updates and information about the development progress. You can find them on our Steam Page, social media, and Discord!
Don’t forget that you still can ask questions about the game and submit your own ideas. We are waiting for them in the Discord.
The Devs

Begin your journey as a governor of this forgotten province. These people need you to bring them prosperity and peace. Prepare for winter and the harsh weather it will bring. You will have to balance your citizen’s happiness with moody gods. Not everything you do has to be a part of your great production scheme, place bamboo clumps and fountains to make your city more beautiful. Make the Emperor proud of your aesthetic choices.



A few tips before you play yourself :

• Remember, your canals have to obey gravity, as all objects and beings do,
  
• Citizen’s needs are your guidelines to what and where to build,
  
• Rice and wood will keep your citizens well-fed and warm,
  
• R-r-rotate all buildings with R,
  
• Look out for ducks and pandas, they are adorable.