Hi everyone,
Tomas here (the Developer of Bulwark), I thought it time to offer everybody who's following the game a welcome and quick peek on what I'm up to at the moment. Take note, I'm mostly developing Bulwark alone but getting awesome help from my publisher Wired Productions, Benedict Nichols is onboard to compose and later on I'll get help on porting, QA and help running things.
For now Its just me plugging away at the game and occasionally some updates from the good people at Wired. I am always around so please comment, post questions, stuff you like, stuff you don't like, it's all good info to me.
So getting back from Gamescom I was reeling from the announce trailer reception and since then I've been getting back into the swing of things. The game is playable for shows and such, and some people and press got a demo but it's still early. Still you can already create all the fortresses and towns you saw in the trailer, nothing was faked, all of it just created by plugging away at the current build.
[h2]Captains and Commanders[/h2]
One thing you've not seen is some of the story bits and NPCs and those will be in the game to spice up your bulwark and make it come alive with little stories and events. And the idea is that sometimes you'll end up with an NPC (aptly called commanders at this stage) to assign to a tower or a major building, to unlock specific upgrades. One variant of those are captains, these are commanders you assign to a harbor and the associated trade-routes (every harbor is connected to one other harbor to make a trade-route), and they will bring their own ship to sail that trade-route, and if it's a fighting vessel keep it safe. If you've played the Falconeer you might recognize some, though 30 years of war has turned most fleets into collections of make-do and jury rigged vessels of various plumage.
[h2]Talking head rendering and design[/h2]
I've been working on upgrading the NPC system from The Falconeer to visualize the animated portraits for the NPCs. I use lots of tricks to create content quickly by making elaborate systems first and the NPC generator is one of the more complex systems, for Bulwark I've developed new tools to manually tweak and curate the NPCS instead of full blown procedural, which doesn't always generate the best faces ;). There's also a lot more detail and geometry, even though they retain some of the simple stylings. Remember these will usually be shown reasonably small.
Here are some Freehouse captains.
(the portrait up above of your advisor is actually a more up 2 date renderstyle)
I'm not sure how often I can post these updates, or if they are appreciated;) I usually share everything on twitter
@falconeerdev if you want really hot updates, that will be fastest.
Let me know if you want to see more updates from the development and for any questions or comments.
Cheers,
Tomas
