Bulwark Evolution: Falconeer Chronicles News

We are thrilled to announce that Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles is featuring at The Mix Next 2022.
Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles is a new city-building game set in the oceanic world of The Great Ursee, by BAFTA-nominated developer Tomas Sala.
He will also be delivering a short developer talk on Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles ⚒️
Streaming live at http://twitch.tv/mediaindieexchange on October 27th @ 10A PT // 1P ET // 6P BST!


Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles is about Tomas’s love for creating and kitbashing fortresses and settlements and it aims to bring that joy back to gamers. In the game, players will create their own fortified settlements within the haunting landscapes of The Great Ursee, the world of The Falconeer.

The core gameplay is squarely focused on wildly building across the rocky cliffs and crags of the world. Light resource management, combat and story elements bring your creation to life, whilst giving a voice to its inhabitants and allowing you to expand with exotic new build options.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The Media Indie Exchange (MIX) is all about the games – created by indies and indie game enthusiasts to provide a casual yet professional setting for developers to showcase their projects to top journalists and key folks in the industry.

Hit the link to find out more: The Mix 2022

Make sure to wishlist Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/290100/Bulwark_Falconeer_Chronicles/

We are very excited to reveal we have been nominated for the Peoples Choice award at the Game Connection Europe 2022 indie development awards. This is a public vote, so all of you Bulwarkians can get voting ⚒️

VOTE HERE!

Game Connection is an international event where 1,500+ developers, publishers, distributors and service providers come together to find new clients and we are honoured to be nominated.

Voting ends on Thursday the 14th, so be quick.

VOTE HERE!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/290100/Bulwark_Falconeer_Chronicles/

So in the previous update I shared about about how NPCs and portraits, I've been working to get the captains part of this functional in the game. That means when you build a harbor you will get a prompt to pick a captain to sail that future route (once you create a sister harbor they'll get connected and the captain's ship will go back and forth).

Here's a bit of the UI for that,

I am aiming for a very minimal UX for Bulwark, so information needs to be condensed, in this case you can switch between your inventory of captains and see what kind of effect they'll have on the route. In this case a trade route for steel and workers. But you can also drop in a combat captain and turn it into a patrol route with a capable warship.

[h2][/h2]
Every captain will come with their own ship, unique to their task and character. There will be ships of different factions and of different classes. Little story events will unlock new captains and move your faction relation in a specific direction and thus later on unlock more capable captains and ships of a friendly faction and fewer of a hostile faction.


Here's a look at the Freehouse (civilian) ships including a freehouse clipper, the base warship when you are neutrally aligned. Players who've played The Falconeer will recognize some of these and notice the extra detail and dynamic trim (that will be a player choice, so there's a bit customisation to the ships and looks of things).

There will be ships and captains to "gather" from the freehouse, imperial, mancer and possibly pirate and freebooter factions as well, each with their own unique ships (or creatures)..

[h2]Factions Overview[/h2]
just a quick intro for those new to the Falconeer Lore

• Freehouse, your average trading and peaceful neutral faction. Civilians,traders and mercenaries basically.
  
• Imperial Remnant, what remains of the great noble houses of the Ursee and their united empire.
  
• Mancer Remnant, the rare remaining bastions of learing and sciece. An order that once controlled all technologies from their massive vaults and thus 'the path' of Ursee civilisations. Now greatly reduced
  
• Pirates, well.... pirates
  
• Freebooter Remnant, a subterranean people with impressive biological tech. Now a scattered tribe forced to wander the Ursee after their homes were destroyed
  

That's it for this week, If you have questions or feedback don't be afraid to pop in some comments
Cheerio
Tomas

Entwirf, entwickle und verteidige dein Bollwerk, verwalte Ressourcen und triff Entscheidungen, um einzigartige befestigte Siedlungen zu erschaffen.

» Komplette News auf pressakey.com lesen» Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles auf pressakey.com

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