Edge of War News

Update 0.50.121 is now available.
The main things in the update are related to lighting and lights. The focus has been quite a lot on indoor lighting (caves and such), but also the outdoor lighting has gone through some major changes. There is also possibility to activate additional shadow casting lights from game settings, which can be performance heavy, but also gives nice extra detail for those campfires and such. The changes to lighting were quite big, so if you end up finding silly looking lighting conditions, please tell us!

Another bigger change was more related to the release of the updates themselves. We now keep few latest versions (starting from previous 0.50.113) in beta branches, so in case you rather want to keep playing your previous save with the older version, now you can do so. Even though, you will of course miss the latest changes from new update that way. The game will also notify you if you try to load the save game from earlier incompatible version, to not accidentally break the game by loading save games from older versions.

Here is the full change log:

• Support for additional shadow casting lights to improve visual fidelity on high-end devices. This can be enabled from graphics settings and is now enabled by default on ultra quality settings.
  
• Disabled possibility to load save games from earlier versions of the game, which quite often are broken between updates. Now we also keep few older versions of game available in Steam beta-branches, in case player wants to continue their older save instead of playing new version. The version mismatch is now indicated in notification when trying to load the save.
  
  

• Major overhaul on lighting setup with lots of light sources and related effects updated.
  
• Visual post-processing and grading updated.
  
• You are not allowed to anymore trade more items than the merchant has wealth to pay for. Earlier you were able to trade so, but there was no indication that you was giving away items for free or very minor payment.
  
• Indoor lighting and reflections updated.
  
• Lighting and material setups for cave mushroom visuals updated.
  
• Thunderstones can now be used as Vaeki source for electricity multiple times without consuming them.
  
• Small UI updates on pop-up windows to make them be more in line with other in-game UI.
  

• Enemies were visually “jumping” bit from ground when doing their attacks or moving.
  
• In trade window, you sometimes could not move items selected for trade back to the merchant’s inventory due to inventory space calculation bug.
  
• When trying to equip item for which character did not fill requirements by clicking, you were notified for reason. The reason notification already happened for dragging before, but now it also works when equipping through click.
  
• Breaking thunderstones during the combat sometimes caused the game to freeze.
  
• Dodge was not properly shown on character sheet.
  
• In rare case, there could be moment where neither sun or moon was high enough to give proper lighting. That could have caused some situations where there was nearly black locations.
  
• Some interactable objects showed their outlines even when not hovering over them.
  

We are happy to share with you a new update and version 0.50.113. The main feature brought in this update are the storybook encounters that you might come across on your overworld travels. There is also pile of bug fixes and improvements.



[h2]Features:[/h2]

• Added support and content for storybook encounters. Storybook encounters are text-based encounters which add extra flavour in the game and deepen the story-telling.
  

[h2]Changes:[/h2]

• Several updates on dialogue UI visuals
  
• Random encounter starting and rules are triggered, also removing some badly documented content in evasion selection.
  
• Inventory screen improvements for character rendering and some icon configurations.
  
• Level-up screen improvements for character rendering.
  
• Event log now has more data output to give better information about for example gained or lost items.
  
• Random encounter probabilities are reduced. There is still future work on balancing these in future updates as well.
  
• Small clean-up for feat tooltip visuals.
  
• Reduced XP gain both for combat and quests.
  
• Attribute requirements in dialogues and storybooks are now checked against available pool points instead of total attribute value.
  
• Dialogues (and storybooks) with cost on selecting specific option now have tooltip to better see the cost of using them.
  

[h2]Bug fixes:[/h2]

• Juurukko death aura was damaging props around it.
  
• Aura effects did not properly disappear when character with aura died.
  
• Statuses were removed too early, which meant that one round status effects could be removed on next turn of character already.
  
• Fixed magic items with “ruined” property that earlier caused -2100% to attack chance
  
• Some text fixes to in multiple dialogue.
  
• Some cases when we travelled through dialogue or rested through them, the game input got broken until leaving the area.
  
• Sometimes you could receive items in stacks even when item were not stackable in inventory, leading in case where you would have multiple items there, but no indication about the stack itself.
  

[h2]Other / support implementation work:[/h2]

• A massive rewriting of some of the random encounter system to support storybooks and to better support extending for the future needs.
  
• Improved interaction system, allowing for better future content production for dialogues, storybooks and interactable items.
  

Hear ye, hear ye! 🔔 🔔

Edge of War joins the Steam Wargames Fest!

Explore the harsh, Finnish folklore-inspired Northlands and test your tactical might!🌲

Check out our turn-based CRPG during the event! 🔥

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1786070/Edge_of_War/

Happy news! We have made update 0.50.113 available for community testing. The community testing build can be tried by everyone (think of it as beta for the upcoming update) who wants. You can find more information about the community testing in this forum post.

The target for bringing update to official branch (available for all by default) is by the end of the month.

The most important item in the update is a storybook encounters feature and some storybook encounter content, which adds a new layer of interesting depth to your adventures in the Northlands. We have some amount of storybook encounters for you to get into already, and you can expect more to be added in future content updates. Otherwise the changes have been more about polishing existing functionality and preparing for future updates.

[h2]Change log 0.50.113 (Community test version)[/h2]

[h2]Features:[/h2]

• Added support and content for storybook encounters. Storybook encounters are text-based encounters which add extra flavour in the game and deepen the story-telling.
  

[h2]Changes:[/h2]

• Several updates on dialogue UI visuals
  
• Random encounter starting and rules are triggered, also removing some badly documented content in evasion selection.
  
• Inventory screen improvements for character rendering and some icon configurations.
  
• Level-up screen improvements for character rendering.
  
• Event log now has more data output to give better information about for example gained or lost items.
  
• Random encounter probabilities are reduced. There is still future work on balancing these in future updates as well.
  
• Small clean-up for feat tooltip visuals.
  
• Reduced XP gain both for combat and quests.
  
• Attribute requirements in dialogues and storybooks are now checked against available pool points instead of total attribute value.
  
• Dialogues (and storybooks) with cost on selecting specific option now have tooltip to better see the cost of using them.
  

[h2]Bug fixes:[/h2]

• Juurukko death aura was damaging props around it.
  
• Aura effects did not properly disappear when character with aura died.
  
• Statuses were removed too early, which meant that one round status effects could be removed on next turn of character already.
  
• Fixed magic items with “ruined” property that earlier caused -2100% to attack chance
  
• Some text fixes to in multiple dialogue.
  
• Some cases when we travelled through dialogue or rested through them, the game input got broken until leaving the area.
  
• Sometimes you could receive items in stacks even when item were not stackable in inventory, leading in case where you would have multiple items there, but no indication about the stack itself.
  

[h2]Other / support implementation work:[/h2]

• A massive rewriting of some of the random encounter system to support storybooks and to better support extending for the future needs.
  
• Improved interaction system, allowing for better future content production for dialogues, storybooks and interactable items.
  

It is now about a year and four months since Edge of War entered Early Access, and it is time for us to give a bigger update on how things have been going so far and what the future looks like.

This is quite a long post with many things, but at least it should be quite extensive as we really want to keep things transparent and our community informed.




As has been told before, going to Early Access was forced by external conditions. We had lost our publisher and were running out of money which meant that everyone in the team had to look for jobs elsewhere. As we did not want the game to be buried without anybody ever playing it, five of us decided to keep on continuing development in our spare time and to prepare for that we spent our last months working full-time in getting the game to Early Access condition. It was not in the level that we would have wanted to be when entering Early Access, but the situation was clear in the sense that if we really want to keep on developing the game, we need to build a community around it to support us and walk the path together with us.

Before the unfortunate situation, we had a team of around 15 persons working on the game full-time, so the amount of hours we could put into development dropped quite dramatically.




The time we have been developing the game in Early Access has been quite a learning path so far. It was extremely hard to evaluate how fast we can progress with things and how many hours we could put into the game. First half a year two us (me and our Lead Level Designer Antti) spend quite a lot time on pushing the game forward. The biggest priority was to push forward quest content that we were really lacking. Luckily Antti proved to be also extremely good in working on the narrative part of quest content and we managed to have quite a push there. Of course we were lacking lots of elements for quest development still, so we had to limit ourselves on working on the content that we really could already support. I was mostly working on coding and game design related things as well as trying to organize our work in the way that we can manage it better while working in our spare time. With that work, we managed to get an important update of getting some more story content in and improving the existing one, which really added a lot to the game (which before that was primarily just exploration and combat, which could be pretty fun, but a bit aimless).

After that period, Antti got occupied by happy things in his personal life and have not yet taken that much time in development since that.

After that, I mostly worked on the things myself. The initial update was quite a big one and having worked on bigger things it was extremely hard to adjust on scoping things to smaller updates and therefore shorter periods between updates. That is something we are still learning. To improve that, lots of time has also been spent on technical things to improve our own tooling for being more effective. Unfortunately that is something that is not immediately seen in updates themselves, but should help us when going forward. There was quite a bit of tweaking on game mechanics as well (and there is still some to do).

Also, there were other learnings as well. We had been (and still are) missing for example lots of VFX, which makes things sometimes really unpolished. So, I’ve been spending quite a bit of my time to also work on the VFX side of things. It’s fun stuff, but of course very time consuming still to get things “right”.

At the start of Early Access I spent lots of weekends and evenings developing the game, so in the summer I was quite tired with it, so we had a two month break. After that, I did get active again and we got a few updates in as well. Our Lead Artist Lyde also jumped in to finish some facial hair so that we finally got those in game. In addition our CEO Sami worked on a pile of animations for NPCs, so that we can get them out of just standing idle in the place. Unfortunately I have not yet had time to work on the tech side of getting those in use, so they are still waiting to be used.

Thinking of the progress so far and how far we have come now, I feel like things have been much slower than I was hoping for. Of course it is totally understandable, and something to take into account in future when planning on new features and what we should prioritize. We need to learn to be even smarter in picking our battles during development. Sometimes it feels sort of insane to work on developing a game of this size in our spare time, even though we got a good head start for it during the time we worked on it full-time. But being a bit insane can be advantageous in working in the gaming business in any case.

The sales of the game have been pretty low. That is somewhat expected for an Early Access title. That is something I’m quite okay with though, it has been just enough for us to be able to pay costs of some of the tooling like version control and so on, so that we don’t need to put our own money into those monthly as we have managed to minimize such costs. That is important, of course and lets hope we can keep even that small regular income coming. We have not been pushing marketing for the game much either. It's mostly me telling us to still keep it on hold before spending our time on it as I feel that the game is not yet in the shape that I’d want it to be to really show how good it can be.

What I’ve been really happy about is that even though the game is still long way to being nearly as good as I’d want it to be in Early Access, it has been quite well received. Currently the game stands in 81% positive ratings, which is nice in this phase. It makes me believe that when we get the polish of the current content to the desired level, we can start aiming for much higher numbers still. It is a great indication of the potential. Also, we have had some really positive interaction with our community. All of that is extremely important in keeping the fire of passion burning. When you are in a situation where there is a mountain of work to be done in your spare time and you really cannot expect any compensation for it (at least in near future, and maybe never), all of those positive words and encouragement are extremely valuable. I really want to thank all of you who have given it. If you would not have done that, it is very possible that we would not be here still developing the game.




As mentioned before, it is quite a long path ahead. There is tons of work before the game is finished, so it is important to focus on nearby goals. The development pace will likely not improve much of what it has been (unless we can find some treasure goblin to loot and be able to hire some of us full-time again). We are still working on the game, update by update. Time will tell when we are ready (if ever). Maybe it's two years, maybe ten, maybe we will get it released from retirement home. There is still a chance that at some point we notice that the passion has burned out and we will finish the things properly to that point. In any case, we will keep you all updated and there will be no sudden disappearance or anything such.

Instead of focusing on the final release somewhere in the distant future, it is important to focus on something more tangible.

The next important goal for the game is to get it to the level where we would have wanted it to be when initially entering Early Access.
Some of the major things that we will be focusing for that are:

• Some improvements on game mechanics for ability usage and combat. For example shields should become more useful and we want more variety on how combat feels, for which we have quite good ideas on how to get that done.
  
• All the enemy encounters should be revisited after mechanics changes. There is lots of polish required for most of the enemies. There are some enemy skills missing animation, vfx and such.
  
• Character skills and skill progress should be revisited. Some of the skills and skill trees really don’t work as nicely as wanted at the moment, so there is room for overhaul there.
  
• We would need a pile of usability improvements. Some things with highlight indicators cluttering the screen at some points, better showing interactables and so on.
  
• Party management also needs a major update. It has been lacking quite a bit and will need some love.
  
• Revisiting for some of the dialogue is needed as well as some additional quest content. We have some additional mechanics to tell the story coming to help us with that.
  
• Some UI usability improvements would still be in need. We should be able to better teach some of the game mechanics, have some place to find all the hotkeys and such. Life of quality things. And of course some location map, even on a simple level, to make it easier to find your way inside locations.
  
• And of course a pile of bug fixes and miscellaneous improvements (would be really nice to get those NPC animations into use and so on).
  

This all will of course come in a series of small updates, so we will not lock ourselves in our wizard’s tower and appear in a year or so and just toss all at once.

So, that is the next big goal ahead.

That should take us to the place where we can tell that even though we still are missing some major systems and lots of content, you can happily jump into the game and get a good impression of what you will be getting. And that would be a good place for us to start putting some extra effort in marketing the game for a wider audience as well. And that does not mean that we are not happy to get all the visibility before that as well as all new players are more than welcome already.

I think that would be sort of the next big check point on where we will be heading with the game in the future.

Of course there are likely some smaller content additions and polish outside the main goal as well, but those are nice bonus to appear every now and then.

The goal is there, the pace will reveal itself while we see how the path opens in front of us.


Thanks to all of you who have been walking this path together with us so far, and all of those who will join us in future. You all make the path much more fun to walk.

Cheers,
HP - Lead Developer