Update #7: Graphical component improvements

"The last sun rays are lazily making their way through the rare gaps in the foliage... The darkness slowly falls on the silent forest. It becomes dangerous to wander around, as in such remote places, even a good swordsman can fall a victim of the wild beasts and unknown creatures... Suddenly, the reign of the night is disturbed by distant flames, a campfire!...

- Please take a sit stranger! Might be not a good idea to wander around that late, you never know who's eyes are watching you from the dark. We ain't got much, but we will share what we have! You are going to the north? Rumors say it is harsh in there. The unexpected death of the ruler a couple of years ago has dragged the kingdom into the everlasting conflict, the fight for the throne. Those who yesterday were pledging loyalty to the King are backstabbing each other to accomplish their own goals, weakening already precarious power of the legit ruler, the very young sibling of the passed away ruler. Who knows how much it is left for him to live in a such unstable situation..."

We (Yes, WE! a bit later on that :P)  hope you enjoyed a bit of the lore we have decided to publish, to try the new format of interacting with community. From now on, in most posts there will be published a very short excerpt taken from the storyline which is being built for the game, which will not spoil the whole idea, but will allow you to see through the main hero's eyes the world which we are trying to build for the game.

Now, I (this time it is me) have to apologize for the lack of the updates recently, but there were some circumstances which caused a couple of drawbacks and delays in the regular schedule, nevertheless, game development did never stop during the time when there were no updates posted.

The most exciting news I have to share is the arrival of the new team member, @Djei22. He joined the project in the beginning of June and will be working on the graphical part of the game (finally a creative person!). Most likely I will continue modelling the assets and do the programming, while Andrey will be focusing either on texturing produced models, or detailing the 2D renders in Photoshop. Andrey's arrival has brought some 'chaos' in what I though is a 'fairly organized' process, therefore there was an initial phase when we had adapt the procedures so he could start doing his magic.

From the very beginning of the collaboration we have started working on improving the game engine (and respective assets) to support the Full HD resolution (previously the only resolution supported by the engine was HD, which is definitely not enough for modern games). In this respect, several features were introduced into the core of the application:

• When the game is starting for the first time, maximum screen resolution is detected and if below Full HD, the game will automatically adjust the parameters and scale the components so everything is displayed correctly
• Settings menu has been added, where the user can choose one of the supported resolutions and switch between full-screen and window mode (settings are saved, so the next time the game is starting, it will start with user set configurations)
• Whenever the resolution of the screen does not respect the 16:9 aspect ratio, the black bars will be added on either of the sides (centering the game screen in the middle of the screen)

While new features were added into the game engine, the background, grass and underground have been reworked. First of all new details were added to the grass, there is a road which is more most pronounced inside the castle and slowly disappears in the forest. Additionally, the color palette was fixed, so both background and grass match and the borderline, striking much less the eyes. Finally, a lot of work have been put into making an initial background asset Full HD compatible. The initial set of images was produced for 800x600 resolution, therefore a lot of details have been added to make the image look fine in higher resolutions  (since there are image size restrictions for blog entries, the asset was scaled down).

Besides highlighted graphical improvements multiple small features were implemented and a couple of bugs were fixed: 

• Among the most notorious features, a capability of queuing the unit recruitment has been added. Now a player can add or remove units from the queue by either clicking respective '-'/'+'buttons or by pressing 'up'/'down' keys. Once the recruitment time elapses, the unit will appear at the spawn point. 

• Added support for idle animations. Whenever multiple idle animations are supported those are triggered randomly from time to time.
• Campaign screen now supports navigation with keyboard
• Graphical glitch which would show a shield in some of the spearman's animations has been fixed
• Building site detection has been improved in order to prevent setting a building site when the enemy is too close
• Tower defensive bonus has been adjusted to improve the survival chances of the deployed units (finally some time for the game balancing)
• We also started playing with particle effects, but for now there is not much to say about (I will go a bit more into details it in the following posts)

At its current state, the game is quite stable, not yet fully balanced and lacking some content, but running quite fine (tested on Linux and Windows, Mac tests will follow shortly). However, the internal play-testing has shown however that there is a lot place for improvement both content and graphical-wise. From the game design perspective, something which we started to work on and conceptualize are the special levels and hidden locations, a more sophisticated economical system and exploration part of the game. On the other hand, graphical improvements are on their way, in the nearest future the goal is to improve the quality of the forest's vegetation and building assets.

For now that is all, if you like the new post format (I mean some lore+concept art in addition to updates) make sure you let us know, either by commenting, sharing or subscribing to our page! Stay tuned for the upcoming updates! We promise this game will not disappoint!