Slaves of Magic News

Hello everyone! In the previous devlog laid down the goals of my design on the campaign, and now I would like to show you where these goals led me, and what will be the player up against in their fight for freedom!

[h2]The heart of the invasion forces, the armies:[/h2]

The most important thing the AI has to change the game state is their armies. They all start in their headquarters at the start of the month, and as the month progresses, they are all going to conduct different types of missions. Take a closer look at one of them:



There are 5 small orbs and 1 big orb floating above every army. The 5 orbs represent the army level. The more orbs are burning, the higher its level. You can think of an army level as difficulty, as it describes how hard the mission will be if the player tries to counter that army. The big orb job is just to show if the army was successful (purple) or not (red) in its mission, plus it can be shattered if the army is damaged. Under the orbs, you can see the 3 squadron leaders which represents the type of enemies you can encounter if you counter this army. This largely depends on the enemy science level and the army difficulty level.

[h2]The primary conflict zones, the missions:[/h2]

Armies conduct missions on territories depending on their planning at the start of the month. The AI takes into account the current game state, for example, how much supply it has, what its progress on their agenda goal, and updates how dangerous it thinks the player is. Common mission types :

- Tax collection: This mission if successful will increases the enemy supply. In addition, it has a small negative impact on loyalty. Prioritized if low on supply.
- Crackdown: This mission if successful will have a big impact on the loyalty of the territory. Prioritized if agenda is not yet fulfilled.
- Abduction: This mission if successful will increase the enemy science. In addition, it has a small negative impact on loyalty. Prioritized if they feel the player is dangerous.

Other missions which they will only do if they feel threatened:

- Terror mission: This mission cost supply for the invaders. This mission has a big impact on the loyalty of the territory, but the exact size of the impact will depend on how many people the player can save.
- Destroy information network: This mission aims at the player spy network. If the player does not counter it, they lose their spy network. The player can counter these missions which are being conducted by the armies if they detected them, and that leads to the tactical portion of the game.

[h2]Buildings to stake territory:[/h2]



-The player can build spy networks (left) that increased the detection rate of enemy missions to 100% on the territory they are built, plus gives a bonus to the passive detection chance for every other territory in the region.

-The enemy can build bases (right) on a 0 loyalty territory at the end of the month. This cost supply for them locks the territory down (so they can't conduct missions there) but they will gain passive income. Plus the player will have to destroy the base if they want to liberate the territory.

[h2]Science, the wheel of progress:[/h2]

One important aspect which I have not yet talked about is science. The enemy has a small passive science income, and it will prioritize it if it deems the player too dangerous. Science level primarily affects 2 things. For one, it affects how many armies it can field, and at what level. The other one is the actual squadrons which you can meet on tactical combat. For that, we have a handy screen for the player to always see and check the possible enemies:



There are 7 squadrons on the screen. When the enemy reaches a new science level, a new squadron will arrive from the right and pushes all other squadron downs 1 step. The army composition depends on the position on this line. For example, against a level 1 army, you can meet with the leftmost 3 squadrons. In practice, this means as science increases, new harder squadrons appear in the high-level armies, and the low-level armies will "inherit" the pushed-off squadrons. So the player will have ample time to prepare for new squadrons arriving if he fights against the lower-middle armies.

The enemy science screen goal is to make it clear for the player what he is up against, so you can check out the squad's composition, and individual unit statistics as well:



So that's it for today's dev diary. See you in the next one!

Hello everyone, I know I'm a "bit" late with this devlog, but I wanted to write this only when I have something to show for. Briefly about the combat demo before moving on to the campaign, while it has a lot of things it still needs in terms of polish, but we are satisfied with the core combat system in it. I think we finally reached a system we can build upon gameplay-wise so thanks to everyone who gave it a go and helped to reach this point!

So now that we are happy with the core combat system it is time to work on the campaign. In this devlog I want to share what will be the core design principles. Plus showing off the rudimentary 3D engine which we use for the campaign map because why not :) .

[h2]Design goals:[/h2]

After a lot of thinking (and binning countless ideas), I realized that I need to define what experience I want to give to the player and go from there. This is the feeling of building a deck for example in Magic the gathering or character in Guild Wars 1. In addition, I want players to have to adapt to the constantly changing enemies while they gather more and more ways to tweak their team as the game progresses. In addition, I have a secondary goal, which is that I want the player to feel they are fighting against something, and not just getting random missions from the game. I want my campaign design to emphasize these 2 points.

[h2]Starting point:[/h2]

The basic structure of the map is very simple. There are 6 different sized regions, with 16 territories in total. Every territory belongs to a region and will have a loyalty rating (0-5) which represents how much the given territory supports the resistance. Your resistance income will depend on this value. The resistance will be able to build a spy network in a territory, which will improve the income of the region, plus will uncover any mission that the enemy is conducting in this region while it is up (more on this later). In addition, there will be a base-building component, research, smithy, barrack. So far very similar to the XCOM reboot.

[h2]The invaders:[/h2]

One big difference is the way the invaders work. As I said in the beginning, I want the player to feel like they are fighting against somebody. So, what if not the players but the invaders have goals (called agendas) which they need to reach to win the game? These agendas will be things like building a base at a certain territory or have a whole region with 0 loyalty to the resistance, things like that. Semi-long goals, which the AI will be going to pursue, and the players have to realize what is the goal and stop it from happening in a given timeframe. The player loses the campaign if the AI manages to fulfill X amount of agendas (X can depend on the difficulty level for example).

Another idea that reinforces this feeling of playing against someone is the idea that the invaders themselves will have a type of income that depends on how successful they are in conducting their missions. This income can be used to create harder/more missions or upgrade their troops, or maybe fulfill an agenda of theirs. Successful players can slow down their income by sabotaging their missions in the tactical portion of the game.

There is a third point that will be important, namely how dangerous the AI thinks of the resistance. If the player fails a lot, they will not take the resistance seriously, and it might be more greedy, doing more missions with fewer troops defending them. Or if the player is playing well, then it would prioritize upgrading its units more, finding and destroying spy networks in territories, do fewer, but more heavily guarded missions, etc. My hope is that this mechanic while being immersive, will help to smooth out the difficulty curve as well, giving a chance for a come back after a big loss, and giving a bigger challenge if the player starts to snowball.

[h2]The visuals:[/h2]

In addition to working on the design of the campaign map, we wanted to further improve the visual fidelity of the game. So we started to implement more and more shader effects on the video card to create a more dynamic visual experience and to make it feel a little bit more modern. Part of this is the rudimentary 3D engine that I created for the campaign map to create a bit of depth to the map.



In addition to that, we have a day/night cycle with moving trees and lighting effects on cities.





These gif's are not perfect as it was hard to stay within the size limit. If you want to see these effects in better quality, check out our Twitter here where I periodically show them off in video format.

So that's it for today's dev diary. Hopefully, now that we have a clear design philosophy and goal for the campaign map, I will be able to share our progress on it more frequently so stay tuned for more! In addition, if you are interested in older dev logs, you can check out our indiedb page here where all of our devlog is present. But from now on we will post them here as well!

If you haven't tried it out yet, and you want to be more involved in the development of the game, feel free to give the alpha combat demo a go! We are always looking for feedback, and are interested in what you think about it.

Here is the link.