Another week has passed without major news.. It seems there are no news at all.. How about some more artwork then? The new artwork comes from a freelance artist. Meet the builder:
Builder
This guy is a core of the Next Game world, he builds it all. Given enough stone, timber and time, he can build a full-blown Castle all by himself! Isn’t that impressive 😉
Last week was low on progress.
What has been done:
Now hopefully I will have move on to more interesting areas 🙂
Here’s another idea mentioned by TheDarkLord in the previous ideas topic: Camp-Wagons (CW for short). CWs could enrich the game by allowing the player to choose where his town will start. It could be an interesting addition to the game.
    
     
Wood ware icon got a deeper shade, new repair icon (might be used for Build menu instead?), and a Quarry icon (might add a stone to the left corner). Icons are scaled x2 from the actual size for preview purposes.
I’m planning the bow to remain that simple. Next tier bowman will have a much better one (probably a long-bow?). Quiver obviously needs more work and some arrows inside.
The goal of it:
Key points for a camp:
Usually it is the Camp that the player starts the mission with (unless there’s a more developed town). Player can build any number of Camps. Both Camp and Store take the same space (4×4 tiles). Camp is transformed into a Store via upgrade. While upgrade in the progress, Camp keep functioning as usual. Once the upgrade is complete – additional storage space is unlocked. Upgrade button is located within Camp user-interface and available only if the required amount of building materials are inside.
From what I recall, AoE had a similar Store upgrade that would trigger advancement into a next age (Bronze, Metal, etc). There the upgrade was quite epic in cost and time.
As usual, feedback is welcome!
Do you know examples of similar functionality in other games, how do they work and what pros/cons do they have?
These weeks summer came to city, the weather is hot and distractions are plenty. Still there is some progress report (pics inside).
Unit animations receiving an overhaul. According to new rendering engine, everything should change from fixed-step to floating-step.
Let’s start a new category of posts, called “Ideas”. Here I will post ideas about the game. Here’s the first one – a new house called “Stash”.
Goal. This is a non-player structure placed on the map which can hold an amount of wares in it. Much like storehouses with coal and iron placed on the map in the older days. The difference is that the “Stash” house will serve only this role and presumably will fit in with the mission story better.
Looks are not defined, but it has to be something man-made, like an outpost or a parked wagon, maybe a tent.
Problems: How to let the player to access the wares? Building a road just to evacuate the wares is silly. Maybe have a special “raider” unit that can “steal” things from such stashes and enemy stores, a wagon/cart?
Feedback is very welcome!
Food plays major role in the game. Let’s try to understand why and what we can do about it:
There are not many news since 07/05, there were long weekend holidays dedicated to WWII victory which I spent in Belarus, seeing locals. Besides, the weather is so nice, that concentrating on programming is really hard now 🙂
Anyway, what’s been done – I’m revising unit animations and rigging. Animations will have more info in them and will be more tightly coupled with the balance, so that for example archers animation description will hold aiming moment and aiming delay. That will allow to fine-tune the balance without need to change the animation. For the moment it’s more of a thinking that coding phase.
