Devlog 5: Enter the Gods

As the end of the year rolls in, development of Critias Empire continues to progress apace. The global bonus system foundations have been implemented, along with about half the planned bonus types. While I didn't (yet) start on to the UI improvements mentioned last blog, the game did receive some new art, which I'm very excited about.

[h2]Wondrous[/h2]

The global bonus system gives the player bonuses (or penalties) right across their empire, rather than being limited to specific land uses (buildings). Amazingly, I've worked on the game for years without ever actually needing such a system, at least until now. However, it's now key to make wonders... well, wondrous!

[center][/center]

To give you a flavour of what this means by way of example, the Temple of Artemis wonder provides a bonus to certain special resources: All "Fish" now get an extra 15 food added to their reserves, meaning they last longer before expiring and produce more over their whole lifetime.

There are still a few more bonus types to add, after which I need to balance and test which wonders give what bonuses. But I'm excited as I think not only will this make wonders a really powerful, interesting part of the game. And the global bonus system can be used for other things as well.

Specifically, there is a feature called "Festivals" on the roadmap, which is ideally suited to use the global bonus system. As well, many strategy games have quest systems and random events systems, which if I ever decide to put into Critias Empire, could tie into and use the global bonus system also.

[h2]March of the Gods[/h2]

Much of the art in Critias Empire is public domain, simply because when I started making the game, I didn't have the money to hire an artist, nor the skills to make the art myself. This however, has proved incredibly limiting, as I often can't quite get the art the game needs, especially if I want to keep the style at least somewhat consistent.

The arrival of AI generated art has left me somewhat torn, as it's clearly going to make a lot of artists, many of whom are my friends and colleagues, either unemployed or relegated to the far less creative work of touching up and fixing AI generated images.



However, ultimately I need art for my game, and the 18th-19th century oil on canvas styles I've been using so far in my game are all from long-dead artists. The results from my experiments with AI generation are scarily good so far. I've been able to generate portrait images for all the Gods in Critias Empire in a fraction of the time and cost that would have been needed otherwise.

Nevertheless, it's a controversial topic, so I want to be as open as possible, and respect anyone who does not want to support the game for this reason.



That said, there is still quite a lot of work to do on each image to bring it to the quality I'm aiming for. I've been using Midjourney so far and it does love to make shirtless greek Gods have far too many muscles. And when it comes to fingers, just about every God so far has had either a horrendous accident with a food blender, or spent a bit too long hanging out at the local nuclear power plant, with the 6 fingers and 7 toes mutations that come with it.

These problems though, are all fixable with a bit of time and my rudimentary photoshop skills. I'll also find out soon how well the AI algorithm handles tsunamis and forest fires.

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]

While wonders still need yet more time, I'm confident they are on course to be an intriguing and integral part of the game.

UI polish is the next area of focus after that, with the first part being the experiments I've already started with AI generated art. This will fill in the holes, and make the game more visually appealing, before I move onto UX improvements and all the gloriously fiddly aspects of perfecting the game's UI.

The prophecy/oracle feature, as well as sea-routes to connect road networks on different islands are also both still (still...) near the top of the todo list.

All of which is aimed at making the game as fun and shiny as possible for the planned upcoming demo. I decided to drop out of the upcoming February edition of Steam NextFest simply because there is too much marketing and promotion work to do between now and then to make the most of it. This way I can concentrate on just making the demo and the game in general, the best it can be.