Darfall News

The third annual event celebrating the Czech and Slovak games starts this week (Nov 14th - Nov 21st). Just like last year, the unique Czech & Slovak Games Week event will take place on the occasion of the national holiday of November 17th.

We're proud to present to you that Darfall will be part of the Czech & Slovak Games Week.

Hello everyone and welcome back :)

It's me Lukas and today I will talk about how the map is generated in Darfall.

Since maps in Darfall are procedurally generated, we needed a versatile system that would allow us to modify any part of the map generation, like which trees are placed into the forests, what areas will our forests cover, or what units and structures are generated into which parts of the map.

This system is fully "scriptable", this means that Martin, our artist, can modify any part of the map generation without me needing to touch the code.

[h2]Grassland Map[/h2]

Let's start with few steps of how the Grassland map is generated. First, an empty body of water is placed onto the map



Next, the terrain tiles are generated, with mountains and bodies of water. Both use perlin noise to make them look natural.



Then resources like trees and iron veins are placed into the map. Trees are also generated using perlin noise, which gives the tree clusters more natural look.



Finally, enemy camps are placed into valid locations, like orc camps or undead zones



[h2]Camps[/h2]

Any enemy "point of interest" location is called a camp. These are also procedurally generated. We have a simple system that allows us to quickly populate these camps with props and loot in the Unity editor without touching the code.

Some simple examples of orc camp can be seen here:



All these tools allow us to create quite an impressive locations, like undead zones which create an atmosphere of dangerous corrupted lands



Above were just quick examples of the processes we currently have in its initial stages. In the future, we plan to generate entire villages, forts or encampments for different races, that will be present across different map biomes.

I hope you liked this quick sneak peak of how Darfall is generating its map :)

See you in the next dev blog post!

All the best,
Martin and Lukas from Play Square Games

Hello everyone and welcome back :)

Today, we want to show you the work we have done on the Main Menu in the past weeks. It was not the only improvement to the game, far from it, but it's something visually interesting we can show you.

As we are moving closer to the testing phase and giving the game to other people, the menu is the first thing player sees when they start it up.

Our old menu was not changed for more than a year, it was full of empty screens and placeholders, since it was not a high priority during the development.

Bellow you can see how was the main menu screen looking before



and now the reworked menu page



Following is the old page where player could choose which survival map to play



and the new version with additional info and improve art



next we have the load game menu, which was a complete mess :)



now its a clean and dedicated screen with all your save files



and lastly, we have a loading screen, which was really just an empty screen with simple status text



and we transformed it into a more informative page, giving you a loading progress bar, as well as cycling game tips, which can give you more hints and info about the game as you wait for your new world to generate



Martin, our artist, did an amazing job on designing the UI and we are really satisfied on how it turned out. There are still improvements we want to make to the menu in the future, as having a 3D animated scene from the game.

We hope you liked this new visual update!

See you in the next dev blog post, where we will talk about how the AI works in the game.

All the best,
Martin and Lukas from Play Square Games

Hello all!

We are two indie developers, Lukas (me) and Martin, working on a Darfall game, where you build, defend, loot, explore and survive waves of undead invasions during the night.

This is the first dev blog, we hope one of many, where we introduce the game and ourselves to you.

I started this project several years back as a solo programmer. The original game was a player controlling this viking village, balancing its economy, all made using just 2D graphics.
The project later transformed into a 3D game, where you fought over a control of various islands inhabited by enemy factions :D
Later on, I removed the islands and just made one giant map where you built a city and defended against invasions. This was more or less the idea of the game we currently have. We then introduced some unique mechanics, like leveling and equipping a hero, crafting of items in your city, or a day & night cycle.



A year ago, my artist friend Martin joined me in this endeavor. Martin did a great work on marketing, steam page, game trailer and the UI art. We also do a game design together, so you can imagine how two different mindsets have to work together and try to connect ideas into a single one (while still trying to stay friends :D)

You can watch the announcement trailer Martin made here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The project is done in a Unity engine, as this is the engine I've been working with for almost 10 years, both in hobby projects and professionally.



Above you can see the entire map generated from the Unity editor view.

And this is where all the work is done from my side on the project


And this is Martin's desk, you can see the creative notepad he uses for his sketches and ideas :D


We hope you liked this brief introduction about us and the project :) Next dev blog post will be about the Main Menu rework we focused in the past week.

See you in the next blog post!

Martin and Lukas from Play Square Games