Devlog 10: Double Trouble

In preparation for the demo, the game has once again been re-balanced, this time focusing on the gods Poseidon and Hephaestus respectively. With this has come new God related features, plus a lot of bug fixing and user experience improvements.

[h2]Gods Get Tough[/h2]

After meeting lots of publishers at Develop conference in Brighton in July, I realised, perhaps unsurprisingly, that they all want to get their hands on a demo of the game. So they can see if it's fun, or at the very lease see that it has the seeds for something great in it.

To that end, I decided to rebalance the game yet again. This time however, the focus was on making a really great demo to convey the essence of the game to potential publishers. That meant making what was already in the game more coherent and less a bunch of parts that would "eventually come together". Then making that shine.

In particular, the connection between the gods and the disasters was weak.

I decided to take the two existing disasters in the game - volcanoes and earthquakes - and pair them up with two gods, each of whom would spawn just that one disaster. Hephaestus is the god of volcanoes (amongst other things), so naturally he was paired with volcanoes. Meanwhile the earthquakes in Critias Empire are all about changing the land and sea, so made most sense to give to Poseidon.

[h2]How Angry?[/h2]

All the previous work on disasters from months ago made it easy to set up and balance Hephaestus and Poseidon with their respective disasters. However there was no way for the player to ever see or get a sense of what was going on.

To solve this, the new "God UI" shows various indicators that the player's soothsayers and mystics have divined about the gods. The information is purposely ambiguous and mysterious, and the hope is that players will have fun figuring out the god's intent and behaviour from this.



The God UI also includes an "Appease" feature, which allows prayers to be spent to lessen a god's anger or increase their patience. I'm not sure yet if this is a good idea and whether it will remain in the game, but for now it's a nice way for the player to directly interact with the gods.

As well, the gods now have a positive or negative affinity with certain land-uses (buildings). I am also undecided as to whether this is something the game should be be so explicit about, or whether to instead have more subtle clues (spooky noises and vfx perhaps could be cool, but could also be missed by players? Rather than unambiguous big fat up/down arrows as currently in the UI).

[h2]Favour with the Gods[/h2]

To support all of this, the gods each get their own prayer points resource. This concept has actually been lurking in the game data for years, but was never used until now.



How this works with rescuing and repositioning in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is still being worked out. The current plan is to have the rescue cost in prayer points of each god be a combination of the god's affinity with a particular land-use, plus which god spawned the disaster now threatening that land-use.

If there's a volcano, then praying to Hephaestus is going to make most sense (and therefore make rescue cost in Hephaestus-points cheaper). After all, the gods are nothing if not egotistical, and anything that will make the citizens of Atlantis (and the player) pray to them more is surely a good thing.

Likewise, Hephaestus is probably going to want a hefty price for rescuing the temple of another god (say Poseidon). Whereas Poseidon will want any temple dedicated to his name to be preserved, and so make the rescue cost cheaper.

The only thing still to figure out is the UI for letting players choose whose favour they want to spend. Once that's done, I will be working on implementing this next.

[h2]Protection[/h2]

Another element of interacting with the gods that needs a revisit are shrines. These protect the land around them from disaster, but are frankly overpowered. The current thinking on this leans towards the idea that each god has their own shrines, and that these only protect against disasters spawned by said god.



How useful this actually is though will need testing. The hope is it will combine well with the plans for the prediction feature (aka prophecy UI). This feature has suffered greatly from constant changes to how disasters are implemented. Hopefully there will be time to finally re-implement predictions soon.

[h2]Floating[/h2]

In addition to pitching the game to publishers at Develop conference, I will also be pitching the game at devcom/gamescom in Cologne next week! In preparation, I had a few close friends play the game, and wow! There were a lot of issues. Lots of small user experience issues, rough edges and misconceptions. Plus a hatful of balancing problems. Though not many programming bugs or crashes, which is a good sign.

The results mean it doesn't make sense to have a demo for Steam Strategy Fest. It's a shame, but no point in releasing the game with so many problems. Not to mention the complete lack of tutorial.

However, of the very long list of things wrong with the game, I've already made some progress fixing them. More bad things are red, there's more feedback on why players can't do things, and there's even little floaty text boxes to show materials spent when building.



[h2]Roading[/h2]

The road placement UI also finally received somewhat of an update. It now shows the cost of placing a road section and will be expanded to include the benefits of placing road in a specific place. The plan is also to let multiple road sections be built without having to re-open the build UI every time.

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

Top of the priority list are: The rescue cost revamp, shrines revamp, prediction feature re-implementation, finishing the road placement UI, and a whole lot of small UI things.

The aim is to get all that done at least by the next update, plus re-balance the exploration feature and refine the existing balance.

Which is a lot! Especially since I will be away travelling from mid September until the end of the year, and unlikely to get much work on the game done in that time.

That said, I am quite proud of the progress made on the game in the last two weeks, so I'm optimistic I can get at least some of that done. I came very close to burning out at the end of July. I took a break from work, cleared some existing commitments that were stressing me out and things have been much better since. (This is also why this update is a bit later than normal).

As usual, if you have any of your own feedback or thoughts on the game's progress, you can always contact me or leave a comment!