Ruinarch News

Hello Overlords,

We've been hinting at it in our previous devlogs (and eagle eyed overlords will have seen our release date on the store page, but we're excited to officially announce that we will be releasing into Early Access in May!

The last couple of months we've been making some major strides in the game, adding a new Invasion System, improving NPC AI, and adding some crazy new spells! For more of a deep dive, check out our latest Youtube devlog:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

There's lots more to com in the following months, including improved NPC behavior, user experience, tutorials and a host of other things so that we're ready to launch some mayhem in May!

It would really help us out if you share this news with your friends that you think would like the game. And if you're a streamer or youtuber, please request for a key from Keymailer or email [email protected]. We will be sharing keys with you nearer to the launch date!

It was a very productive month for us. These updates mostly complete our revamped mechanics. There is still quite a lot of things we need to finish to get the game ready for our fast approaching Early Access launch this coming May but we're getting there inch by inch!


We've recently introduced various Elements into the game with various effects and interactions. These are: Fire, Water, Electric, Ice and Poison

When these Elements are dealt to an object as damage, they also apply unique Statuses such as Burning, Wet, Zapped, Freezing and Poisoned. Certain Statuses interact with different Elements in interesting ways. For example, Electric damage travels through Wet objects while Poisoned objects explode when exposed to Fire Damage,

Experimenting with various ways to trigger chains of Elemental interactions can be a source of great "fun". Over the course of Early Access, we will be introducing objects and characters that would trigger or spread various Elemental Damage and Statuses.


We're working on building a good progression system for the game for replayability and longevity. One major aspect of this is player playstyle (or should we call this Archetypes?). When the player starts a game, he may choose from three different playstyles: Ravager, Lich and Puppetmaster. These different playstyles determine the player's starting Spells, Minions and Abilities.

[h2]Ravager[/h2]
This playstyle has access to a lot of damaging spells and powerful beasts. This is the most visceral and direct playstyle.


[h2]Puppetmaster[/h2]
This playstyle will have you afflicting characters with various flaws and pitting characters and factions against each other. It's intended to be a tough playstyle that requires you to perform subtle manipulations from behind-the-scenes.


[h2]Lich[/h2]
This is a balanced playstyle that has access to some powerful spells as well as some interesting manipulations.


Right now, we're still deciding between two different progression system: one where the progression is mainly on a per-game basis (the player gets stronger as he plays through a single game) or one where the progression builds up over multiple games (the player unlocks more powers over the course of multiple playthroughs). Let us know your thoughts on these!



[h2]Poison Cloud[/h2]
This noxious cloud may apply poison to objects in its path. Explodes when it gets in contact with Fire, dealing Normal damage and applying Poisoned over a large area.


[h2]Meteor[/h2]
A huge meteor will strike the designated spot, causing major Fire damage.


[h2]Water Bomb[/h2]
Applies Wet to a 2 tile radius around the designated spot. It doesn't deal any damage but adding Wet to tiles and objects has its uses...


[h2]Lightning[/h2]
A lightning bolt will hit the designated spot, causing Electric damage.


[h2]Splash Poison[/h2]
Applies Poisoned to a small area around the designated spot.


[h2]Brimstones[/h2]
Burning meteorites will strike random tiles on the target area, dealing Fire damage. And when Fire damage hits a Poisoned object:


[h2]Locust Swarm[/h2]
These starving insects will consume all edible objects in its path.


[h2]Blizzard[/h2]
Significantly lowers the outside temperature on the target area, which may randomly apply Freezing on affected characters.


[h2]Earthquake[/h2]
Violently shakes the ground, dealing Normal damage to objects and randomly moving them around. Characters will become Disoriented.


[h2]Manifest Food[/h2]
Produce a small amount of Food. Sometimes, you need to feed your prey.


[h2]Ravenous, Feeble and Forlorn Spirits[/h2]
Ghastly spirits that roam around and then drain Need Meters of any character that gets in range. Dissipates after an hour.


[h2]Boulder[/h2]
This will produce a durable and impassable block of stone. This will probably be only a stepping stone in allowing player more extensive ways of manipulating the landscape.



Minions can now be instructed to harass settlements as well as abduct or kill characters. They can also learn to breed new monsters (they must disable one and then study the monster for a short time). We're not quite happy with how fiddly Minion and Monsters work at the moment but we have time to improve on their functionality next month.


We're reworking how the structures function now that the strategic layer has been removed. Similar to the Minions, I'm not quite happy with how they function yet - both in terms of usefulness and UX so I think there's some more improvements in store for most of these. They are starting to look great though!

[h2]Spire[/h2]
The Spire now allows a player to unlock new Spells and Afflictions that are only available from other Playstyles. The options available here are randomized. Learning new ones cost Mana. If we decide to go for the multi-playthrough progression, this would have to be revamped, though.


[h2]Kennel[/h2]
This is where the player can breed his own monsters. Except for the Puppetmaster, each Playstyle has its own set of initial monsters it can already breed. The player can unlock more by learning the monsters that have been randomly spawned in the world. If we go for a multi-playthrough progression, this may be more interesting as new monsters learned can be carried over to future playthroughs.


[h2]Goader[/h2]
This is where the player can force characters to join or leave factions using Mana.


[h2]Prison[/h2]
This is a demonic structure that can contain abducted characters. If you have a Prison, characters abducted by your Minions will be dropped here instead of near the Portal.


[h2]Torture Chamber[/h2]
This is a demonic structure that can contain abducted characters and torture them, causing various negative Status Effects and Traits. If you have a Torture Chamber, characters abducted by your Minions will be dropped here first before Prison.


[h2]The Eye[/h2]
We've disabled most of the notifications that used to popup at the bottom right of the screen when the player sees character activities in the world. We've now transferred that functionality to the Eye. When the player has an Eye on a region, it will add notifications for important events that occur there. The Eye is therefore important for Intel gathering.



We've introduced a few more monsters into the mix. They don't have animations yet. We're considering skipping on the walking animations for now even up to Early Access launch in favor of having more quantity available up front.



As mentioned, we're launching our Early Access this coming May! So we'll be putting a lid on adding new features by next month. The last major thing we feel needs to be prioritized is character behavior. We've lost some of the more fun things the characters used to do after we reworked their behavior so we need to get those things back next month. They don't properly react yet to elements and disasters, so that also needs to be addressed. Lastly, we need to start implementing the various unique abilities of character classes as well as the different non-demonic structures (Mage Quarters, Apothecary, etc). We'll try to get as many as we can next month but it's a dizzying challenge to figure it all out and make it come together well!

After March, we'll focus on improving user experience, player feedback, tutorials, combat balance, bug fixing and polishing.

As we've mentioned earlier, the World Invasion System we had was not working well with our main sandbox/simulation mechanics. It would require that we put significant limitations to the player's powers in order to be satisfying, and these limitations reduce the amount of fun the player can have in interacting/meddling/manipulating the world.

Another issue we had (which we noticed from how many players play the game in our ESGS event) is that the players consider the world map and the world invasion system to be the main part of the game. Interacting and manipulating the characters became a side optional thing they just do to pass the time while they are waiting for the timers. This is opposite of what we intend: the main game is the manipulation, and the world invasion system was supposed to support that by giving some sort of progression as well as providing the players with some of the tools they would need.

Lastly, the human brain is pretty bad at multitasking and our past design require players to multi-task between invading the world map, and interacting with the various internal maps.

So this month we did a significant amount of overhaul to resolve these issues.


You still invade the world by spreading your corruption one tile at a time. However, all of these now occur in the internal maps. The Portal as well as other demonic structures (although only the Portal has been converted for this month) will be visible inside the internal maps, and you can interact with them directly from there. You can corrupt adjacent areas slowly, and you can visually see as your corruption spreads out within the internal maps. Instead of showing the player the world map first, the player is first shown the internal map of one region, with the camera centered where his Portal has been placed.


By starting in an internal map instead of the world map (eventually we'll also have this starting region include the tutorials), we think this would reframe the player's focus towards the internal maps.

From here, you can eventually exit the region and see the new world map. The world map is now mostly visual and informational. The game also has fewer but larger regions. But now, all hex tiles are actually high-level representation of a small square section of the internal map. Whatever happens to the internal map will also visually update the world map.

Examples:

This water hex tile surrounded by 2 mountains:

Is a representation of this section of the region's internal map:


This settlement hex tile:

is a representation of this section of the region's internal map:


You may find it odd that a hex tile in the world map represents a square are in the internal map. Would be much simpler and easier if the world map is made up of square tiles. Honestly, this is only because we cannot really revamp our hex tile assets in the world map anymore due to budgetary and time constraints (alas the bane of every indie developers in the world!). Maybe when the game gets successful we can revise this world map and turn it into square tiles!

The other thing the world map provides is a way for the player to visit each region. Aside from these two things, the player no longer needs to interact much with it, as all of the things we used to have here can now be done in the internal maps. This allows the player to focus on one internal map at a time. There will still be some multitasking required, as the world is composed of multiple regions, but we intend to open it up slowly.


The World Invasion and World Map changes fix the unnecessary complexity that the game used to have. But one other thing we also want is to just basically ramp up the fun of interacting with the world and its residents. For this, we decided to reduce the limits we placed on the player's abilities. We originally intended to restrain them so that there will be some challenge in wiping out the world. After much consideration, we think it would just be much more pure fun to unleash the player's powers. Yea, it would be quite easy to kill off the residents, but now you can do it in style. We'll leave it up to the player's creativity now to decide how he wants to do it! So our new goal now in the upcoming months is to provide the players more fun tools to execute whatever mischievous things he wants to do to these worlds.


What this means gameplay-wise is that the player can now perform most of his actions at no cost. So if he knows how to cast a Tornado, he can cast as many of it as he wants. He can turn everyone into a vampire or a werewolf. He can start a zombie apocalypse by inflicting just one character, or if he wants to do it much more quickly, afflict more at no cost.


This does mean that the game is now more of a sandbox-simulation than a strategy-simulation. But even in sandbox games, there still needs to be some sort of progression and we also want players to experience new things per playthrough, otherwise it will get stale fast. There's more to say about how we'll deal with this but it's a topic for the next couple of months!


As mentioned above, most actions have no cost... but not all. We still have Mana as our main player resource. We'll talk about how it will be used later as the work on that is still ongoing. For now, what we'd like to share is how the player gains Mana in the game. In the past, we've experimented on this simply increasing slowly over time (Mana Regen). Now, we've directly connected it to the player's agenda as an evil overlord: spreading evil and misery.

Basically, Chaos Orbs are produced whenever something evil or miserable occur in the world. The player can click on these to obtain Mana. When a resident performs a criminal act, he generates a few Chaos Orbs around him. Same thing when a resident cries, or spits on someone's grave, or screams for help.


The idea now behind Mana is that it is an entirely optional resource. You will have enough means from your starting powers to wipe out the world, but unlocking more interesting options would require Mana. You don't get Mana from simply killing residents, so if you want a lot of it, you've got to be creative in spreading evil and misery!


These are blatantly copied from RimWorldl! Well, they are not exactly the same as our Mood modifiers are different but they behave quite similarly.


Mood is basically the sum of all Statuses that a resident has. So we already have Energy, Fullness and Happiness needs before, and now we further added Comfort and Hope. Characters gain various Statuses depending on how full these Needs meters are. In addition to Needs-related Statuses, there are plenty of other sources of Statuses, such as Illnesses, Injuries, heartbreak, grief, etc.

When a character's Mood is sufficiently low, he has a risk of triggering a mental breakdown, which can take the form of Hide at Home, Dazed, Catatonia, Suicidal Mode or Berserk Mode. Let us know if you want other forms of mental breaks.

Reason we introduced Mood and Mental Breaks is these are another source of Chaos Orbs. When a character is in a Mental Break state, it will randomly expel Chaos Orbs from time to time. So one goal of the player is to trigger Mental Breaks to farm Chaos Orbs!


One of our issues with how characters react to events around them as well as Intel shared to them is the complexity of it all - as various situations and relationships must be taken into account. A way to simplify this a bit is to deconstruct a character's reaction into a set of emotions. If a character sees his lover having an affair, what emotions would he feel? Anger, Betrayal, Sadness? How about if he sees someone administering aid to a friend? Gratefulness, Approval? And then what we do next is code what each of these emotional components do. Approval simply means an increase of Opinion. Anger may add an Angry status effect and trigger retribution. We still have to assess different situations, but putting the actual reactions inside reusable Emotion components significantly simplifies how we deal with them.



We've reworked some of our Actions and separated involuntary ones like Stumble and Puke as well as special ones like Chat and Break Up as Interrupts. This should resolve some of our strange job prioritizing issues, and reduce instances that a character must manually get close to another to perform actions.


We've also hollowed out our internal representation of mountain tiles. Some items and monsters will be spawned inside. In the future, it will be possible to dig through thick mountain walls to get inside.



Our Monster Lairs are now represented inside the Internal Maps. This is where we will spawn some of the random monsters on World Generation. In the past, Monster Lair landmarks are just separate hex tiles in the World Map and the monsters inside do not have simulated behavior. With the revamp, every landmark we have will be directly visible within the internal maps, and all creatures inside will also be fully simulated (although they do not have Moods and Relationships unlike sapient beings such as Humans and Elves).

It still looks pretty empty but it will be much more cavern-like soon!


In previous builds, a Faction Leader is a separate unique class in the game and they are also the ones that function as ruler of a settlement. We also made these roles essential, meaning that at no point in time must there be a Faction or Settlement with no leader. This caused some issues with some of our systems. For example, when a faction leader werewolf transforms to a wolf form, it also used to trigger leader succession.

Now, we modified it so that there is no longer a unique class for these. Instead, it's just a special role that can be assigned to a resident, we have a behind-the-scenes election that randomly takes place that takes into consideration a resident's traits, relationships and class to determine who becomes a new Settlement Ruler or Faction Leader. It's also now possible for these two to be two different characters even if they are in the same Settlement. It's also now possible for Settlements and Factions to not have a leader for some time as the "election" does not take place instantly the moment a leader is gone. When a character becomes designated as a Settlement Ruler or Faction Leader, it simply gains new abilities and behaviors (for example, designating new blueprints to build, judging prisoners, changing faction ideology).




Previously, when you afflict someone with Psychopathy, its victim criteria is randomly generated. We've changed this so that when you apply Psychopathy, you can choose your own victim criteria based on Gender, Race, Class and Traits.

You can add up to two different criteria. The UI is still pretty crude but it is just a placeholder and will be fixed later on.

Happy New Year everyone!

We fully expect 2020 to be a very busy year for us, as we head closer to our target Early Access launch. We have one major issue to resolve - we've talked about this a bit in a discussion thread here - there is currently a conflict between the "play with people's lives" sandbox side of the game and the "invade and wipe out the world" strategic side of the game. Our January will be spent solving this problem and introducing some interesting improvements to the game. We'll discuss that further at the end of January.

But for now, see what we've accomplished on the last month of 2019. For December, we actually only had around three weeks of work as we took a long leave at the end of the month. Below are the things we worked on.


We've reworked some of our UI to reduce the amount of space they take up.



We've expanded on our Relationship system. Previously, we only had discrete relationships that determines whether you view a character positively or negatively. So relationship types such as Lover, Friend and Paramour are always positive, while relationship types like Enemy are always negative. This fails to simulate some interesting situations. Example, some people may be in a romantic relationship that has since soured so they both dislike each other.

To fix this, we introduced Opinion (akin to Sims and RimWorld). This is an integer value that determines how much you like someone. It is modified by various relationship types but may change independently of them. So you may end up having negative opinion towards a Lover or a Relative.


This is a simple ability that allows the player to take any character or object from the map and then drop it somewhere else. The player can only seize one thing at a time. While it sounds simple, it can be used in a lot of creative and naughty ways. The UI/UX and balancing of this ability is still in progress.


Our latest DevLog discusses the improvements we've made regarding the Tornado Spell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ-gRusSDKc


Previously, our Kennels and Crypts merely increase Summon and Artifact slots. It was neither dynamic nor interesting. We've started working on making them more interesting. The idea is that the actual monsters and artifacts that you can use should exist somewhere in the world, and then once you are able to corrupt that area, you must then build a Kennel (for the monsters) or a Crypt (for an artifact). Once these have been built, then you will have access to the monsters/artifact there. This would put some more thought into where Kennels and Crypts must be built. Do I build my Kennel in this tile that has five wolves, or in this tile that has a single but powerful golem?


Our plans for January will update these even further but let's talk about that later!


Our new character sprites now have Walking, Attacking, Interacting and Knockout animations. Farewell gliding static sprites!


We have a rudimentary UI for our Goader Structure which is all about Faction Manipulation. Here, the player can induce a character to leave, join or start his own faction.



We've prepared different looks for new settlement structures. Could still use a bit of work but at least now different structure types are more identifiable.



Aside from Warehouse, Jail and Cemetery, the rest don't have their functionality in the game yet but that will be implemented soon!

First of all, we have two new DevLogs for the month.

This one is about our Share Intel feature:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj8JsoVYOeQ

And this one is all about Characters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMByJ7ehaZE

After attending the ESGS event last month, we spent the first week of November discussing player feedback and plotting what we have to do in the next couple of months to address issues raised. It has become quite apparent to us that we needed to rework some aspects of the game to improve performance, maintain consistency and streamline our process.

Bulk of our November work revolved around this rework. We're still not fully done with it so it would continue over the next few months. Fortunately, we were still able to introduce some new features. Below is a summary of the major things we've added into the game:


One of the major player issues before is the difficulty in identifying individual characters in the map as we were still using the same sprite for male and female characters in the game. With these new sprites, characters have different body sprites based on their class, and its color scheme also changes depending on its race. Although, its a bit hard, you can also somewhat identify gender by checking out the character's hair length.

We've also introduced randomized variations in the character portraits, to further differentiate them from each other. It's unfortunate that our portrait icons in game are quite small, because it loses many of the awesome details added by the artist:



Settlements now start as small villages that eventually grow and expand. The faction leader may place a blueprint for a specific structure and another builder character can take on the job of constructing it. We'll introduce more unique structures in the future that would provide various benefits and means for the characters to fight back against the player and their other opponents.


As mentioned, settlements now expand and may build new unoccupied dwellings. We've also introduced a daily random event that may spawn new migrants to occupy empty homes. This is a way for factions to grow. It poses another threat to the player - by leaving a tiny village alone for a while, you may find that it has grown into a much stronger settlement days later.


We've started work on our multi-faction system. For now, we've only set it up so that there are three starting factions and settlements at world spawn. For now they just claim adjacent regions and cleanse corruption but this will open up much more in the future, as we allow factions to build new regional structures, raid and invade opposing factions, and more.


Alongside having multiple factions, we've also started tinkering on how we want them to expand and interact. For now we just have two new ones added to the other already existing events:

• Claim Region: Allows a character with Royalty trait to claim ownership of an adjacent unclaimed region.
  
• Cleanse Corruption: Allows a character with Purifier trait to cleanse an empty corrupted region.
  

Soon, we want characters to be able to build new Mines, Farms and Garrisons, as well as raid and invade the player and other opposing factions.