Dev Blog 7 - Units
Hey everyone!
Last week I showed and talked about the maps where combat takes place. The combat requires some units that do the… combat. So, let’s talk about those a bit.
When discussing what we wanted to do with the units, our writers Jonas and Verena were a big help, as they gave us the idea to use historical figures. Instead of using the popular ones - like Galahad, Lancelot, Percival and similar - we could use the more obscure ones, like Sir Breunor or Safir. This would still anchor us to the Arthurian legend, but give us more leeway with the characters, their backgrounds, and storylines. If we can give the second-grade knights a cool story, maybe they get the recognition they deserve!
The current roster consists of 9 heroes, 3 per class (with uniquely made-up names such as tank, support, and ranger - I know, we’re so inventive), spread evenly between the 3 regions of the world. Every hero will have their own set of encounters for meeting them in the wild, and the player will most likely start with a full party, one hero of each class. We’re discussing if and how we’d allow starting party customization, so players can pick their party composition, and try the “imba 3 ranger starter combo”. Maybe we should make that an achievement? Anyway, one idea floating around is to add any hero you meet in the world as a potential starting hero, turning it into a small meta progression system that just opens up customization for starting future runs. This is something we still haven’t decided on, and I’m interested in hearing your opinion on this. Shoot them my way in the comments, the steam forums, Discord or Twitter!
Each hero has their own traits that affect how they approach world encounters, opening up additional options and ways to resolve encounters and reach different outcomes. We have a small number of traits (ballpark of 8, stuff like “strong”, “perceptive”, “herbalist” etc.), and each hero unit gets 2 of those, which gives them a small bit of personality during encounters. For the combat part, every hero unit will have a starting skill (besides the default movement and attack abilities) that highlights their role in combat. The skill isn’t exclusive to that unit, though. Any other unit of the same class can learn that ability through upgrades, susceptible to randomness.
This is the part where I introduce another member of the team: our character concept artist / texture artist / RoomC psychologist / horse wrangler - Kaz. Nobody knows her real name. She came to work with the team after leaving prison, and we’re too afraid of letting her go.
She actually just worked there, which was a relief to some and a letdown to others...
She has drawn most of the concept art for the heroes (we have some extra hero concepts stashed if we get the time to model them), drawn every UI icon for status effects, skill icons, spell icons, character portraits, textured every 3D character model, painted the terrain for the world maps, and is generally the main point of contact for texture related stuff and psychological torture. I’ve been told Ivan does some texture stuff as well, but nothing worth mentioning. ;)
The animations for the human models are done by Toni (talked about him, like… two weeks ago), and we’re in the process of doing a better rig for the units to make even better animations. There is baseline of 11 unit animations, and there will probably be additional ones required for specific abilities. I’ll talk about abilities in general next week, and their implementation the one after. For now, I’ll leave you with this beautiful animation of a dead unit.
As always, thanks for reading. Join the Discord, follow me on Twitter, and comment on what you’d like me to write about if there’s a specific topic you’re interested in. I’ll be back next week, cheers!
MarkoP
Last week I showed and talked about the maps where combat takes place. The combat requires some units that do the… combat. So, let’s talk about those a bit.
When discussing what we wanted to do with the units, our writers Jonas and Verena were a big help, as they gave us the idea to use historical figures. Instead of using the popular ones - like Galahad, Lancelot, Percival and similar - we could use the more obscure ones, like Sir Breunor or Safir. This would still anchor us to the Arthurian legend, but give us more leeway with the characters, their backgrounds, and storylines. If we can give the second-grade knights a cool story, maybe they get the recognition they deserve!
The current roster consists of 9 heroes, 3 per class (with uniquely made-up names such as tank, support, and ranger - I know, we’re so inventive), spread evenly between the 3 regions of the world. Every hero will have their own set of encounters for meeting them in the wild, and the player will most likely start with a full party, one hero of each class. We’re discussing if and how we’d allow starting party customization, so players can pick their party composition, and try the “imba 3 ranger starter combo”. Maybe we should make that an achievement? Anyway, one idea floating around is to add any hero you meet in the world as a potential starting hero, turning it into a small meta progression system that just opens up customization for starting future runs. This is something we still haven’t decided on, and I’m interested in hearing your opinion on this. Shoot them my way in the comments, the steam forums, Discord or Twitter!
Each hero has their own traits that affect how they approach world encounters, opening up additional options and ways to resolve encounters and reach different outcomes. We have a small number of traits (ballpark of 8, stuff like “strong”, “perceptive”, “herbalist” etc.), and each hero unit gets 2 of those, which gives them a small bit of personality during encounters. For the combat part, every hero unit will have a starting skill (besides the default movement and attack abilities) that highlights their role in combat. The skill isn’t exclusive to that unit, though. Any other unit of the same class can learn that ability through upgrades, susceptible to randomness.
This is the part where I introduce another member of the team: our character concept artist / texture artist / RoomC psychologist / horse wrangler - Kaz. Nobody knows her real name. She came to work with the team after leaving prison, and we’re too afraid of letting her go.
She actually just worked there, which was a relief to some and a letdown to others...
She has drawn most of the concept art for the heroes (we have some extra hero concepts stashed if we get the time to model them), drawn every UI icon for status effects, skill icons, spell icons, character portraits, textured every 3D character model, painted the terrain for the world maps, and is generally the main point of contact for texture related stuff and psychological torture. I’ve been told Ivan does some texture stuff as well, but nothing worth mentioning. ;)
The animations for the human models are done by Toni (talked about him, like… two weeks ago), and we’re in the process of doing a better rig for the units to make even better animations. There is baseline of 11 unit animations, and there will probably be additional ones required for specific abilities. I’ll talk about abilities in general next week, and their implementation the one after. For now, I’ll leave you with this beautiful animation of a dead unit.
As always, thanks for reading. Join the Discord, follow me on Twitter, and comment on what you’d like me to write about if there’s a specific topic you’re interested in. I’ll be back next week, cheers!
MarkoP