The road to Version 2

The first major announcement is that we have posted a Let's Play video, showing off how we play a first few turns, going from lowly baron to king of a dark empire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tLD1XV9LeU

Recording videos turns out to be a whole load of work and stress, and the video, basic as it is, stands at more than an hour in length. However, despite various minor setbacks (ambulances going by, minor bugs, unexpected events, accidentally deleting the half-edited video...), we now have a youtube link for you all to enjoy (or at least learn from).

Version 2

Version 2 is our new objective. We've a set of minor and major additions we wish for this one, a set of milestones which will set Version 2 apart from Version 1.

The first is a save/load system. This has taken far longer than anticipated, and we've tried multiple libraries without success. The library used in the previous game seems to not fully work, and crashes without providing any error message (the crash isn't even deterministic, implying some horrific race condition in Unity's underlying system).

The second is a full balance pass. Change up abilities a bit, see what gets used in a normal gameplay session and what gets ignored. Maybe slow down your enthralled's speed of taking over a society, while perhaps reducing the speed at which they are discovered, to compensate.

The third is expansion of existing systems. Deep Ones need to be expanded a bit, as we would like their limitation (only really act on coastal cities) to be matched with a broad range of highly useful powers, not just a military force (for example assassinations, bringing down defences, or forcibly enshadowing a noble over time).

The fourth is addition of at least one new "type of evil". This would probably be the climate change power. The world currently tracks the temperature and humidity of every hex, and cities will fall and grow based on these. For now, however, the player has no way to interact with this system. We'd like to have the player be able to set up a form of magical obelisk in the far north or far south and slowly wipe out the entire world map by turning it into a world-wide blizzard or desert. This will introduce a new victory condition (which we really should have implemented earlier (sorry Supercat345)), that is to say the extinction of all human life. In the future, we may wish to introduce the concept of some evil army from the north, descending and bringing the winter with them (White Walker Simulator 2020).

Once these are in, we should be able to call it a Version 2.

Of course game development won't end with V2, we've already got a range of ideas for Version 3, but you'll have to wait to read about our plans for those.

For now, thanks for the ongoing support.