Medieval realtime strategy in first-person view. · By
So I only played for a little bit, but I noticed some things. At night time the trees in the distance turn white on the trunks. In full screen my mouse is not aligned with clicking stuff in game(off by a inch for me). The jumping is also very high should decrease that a lot. The stairs in the starting hall you can't go up without jumping(make it so you can just walk up). That are the main things I see wrong so far. Keep up the good work
1.The ability to zoom the map. 2.To enhance the feel of truly interactive world, everything that has ever to be consumed has to be consumed at the site it should be consumed. That is, for example, (a)Production facilities would better need raw materials hauled in from guildhall or storage like how you sell goods to the marketplace. (b)Food and other commodities had better be stocked into each dwelling by one villager from each dwelling at night after work, so that villagers could consume food etc at home or a tavern in the morning or during lunch break. In that aspect you could also make the cooking motion of idle villagers useful. I don't like how villagers magically eat food anywhere and how they only work all day long like robots. 4. Work should not progress when the workers are not actually on site.
Game looks very promising. There are so many existing and upcoming medieval battle games already, many of them brilliantely developed by big companies, so I think it would be clever/great when this game is different and does not focus on battle too much but on building, crafting, economy, managing the town and related difficult moral decisions. I think there is a large fan base and market for it, as proven by non-combat games like Banished and Forest Village (and even The Sims). With difficult moralic decision I mean for instance: How will the city ruler spend his money: for a public school, an orphanage, for granting education fees for poor kids in his town or supporting poor families etc. Regular audiences for needy people who came with such requests belonged to the life of city rulers at that time. How will he balance taxes and duties against well-being of the villagers/citizens, etc.
Yes, I am ; )
There have been big changes in the back end of the game, lots of performance optimisations, AI scripting and more. Unfortunately not completely stable yet. That's why it has been a little bit quiet over here.
But I decided, to release a new stable demo version in the next week, including bug fixes and some added gameplay functions. Thanks for your patience and stay tuned.
First of all, this game is everything i ever wanted. Medival city builder meets Mount and blade and i believe it could be the next big hit.
So i played some couple of hours and i wanted to make a video(If it is ok for you) but i encountered a major bug :
-My keep could not be finished(all my workers idiled at their homes running circles) and when it was (after 10 minutes) i selected to build a barracks for the pikemen. Problem was i placed roads around the keep and i was unable to build the barracks and it hasn´t disappeared. I still could drop certain buildings but the barracks blueprint stayed red even in the "free roam" mod. Had to end the game meeh... all the progress lost.(Couldn´t also demolish the since the place building blocked it). Also i was able to "recruit" pikemen without the building. It removed the weapons and the gold but no soldier was added. Also the building dropped back to 0% done even if it was standing there.
-Some Buildings (huntsmen) have a certain clipping problem after reaching i believe it was tier 3. There is a house (physically) but you could still move through that Wall. Not sure if it fixed itself.
-Another bug i encountered was while crafting a wooden shield and a mace. When i armed myself with it it duplicated itself. I ended up having 3 shields and 2 clubs i couldn´t sell or destroy since the button in the inventory justs drops the wepon or armor on your feet.
I try it tommorow again still a bit nagged about the bug was some hours i sunked into it. Keep up the good work!
Hey Brummbear,
first of all: big thanks for your detailed post and the bug reports. This really helps me improving the game. I spotted the building bug of the quarters and (hopefully) completely fixed it. Also the bug which occurred when equiping weapons has been removed. I think, the bugs of being able to build pikeman and the wrong assignment of the building progress percentage have been triggered by the initial quarters bug and do not exist if everything works fine. At least I tried my best to reproduce them and Bad a look into the code once more, (fortunately) whithout success.
Concerning the idle workers which failed to get to the keep building site: A wrong placement of streets may have been the problem. Simply just drag some new streets on the old streets or try another route. Should solve 95% of all pathfinding problems. I'll fix that later.
I'll upload a hot fix tomorrow.
Cheers.
Small update from playing today :
-I crashed more or less. The game stopped working when i build a tower on an existing wall. Waited some minutes but it didn´t recover from it. :( (Was on the 2v2 map, tried to cover the bridge with it build a square around it)
Was so damn close to build T2 had enough pottery, tables and all damn wanted to see what it has to offer.
-Also the message building place is already occupied always appeared on my screen as i build a warehouse pretty close to existing buildings (To be fair it didn´t snap on the road and was only 1 second green so ok to place still was able to do it). Removing the building tabs fixed the issue but it appeared again while i was building more.
-Also the clipping issue i reported disappears (The T3 Woodcutter for example) building is in place and rock solid, just some peasants sometimes walk through the ground.
Will try it out tomorrow again and hopefully get my feet in the T2 area.
Edit 12.05 :
-Finally reached T2 i only focused on eco this time. Only thing i noitced was that the stone quarry has some water in it (is it supposed to be there?)
- I was able to terraform some land when i build a church near the water a bit of the river turned into land. (Divine powers!)
- The Craftsmen houses look a bit empty with just the cooking pot in it. I know it is a quality feature by this time but i would love to see the pottery and some furniture in there later down the line (Since they are requiered)
Some suggestions :
- regarding the research tree. Is it possible to make tabs for it? Like Economy, Social and Warfare? I just noticed after playing this game for hours that there are more researches. Ex the wheel upgrade is nice. Only found out that there are more tabs when i build the monostary.
- I would like to have the option that the game asks me to place the building in the building menu. Like a confirm button to place it. Build a farm on a spot accidently when i was moving on the building map.
-Speaking about missplacing things, removing buildings or sites should give some of the ressources back. ( Depends on the % it is finished nearly finished buildings shouldn´t give the same ammount a freshly building side should give.)
- Even if i am fine with no saving feature for now, it would be since building everything from scrap is a bit of a pain. Anyways can´t wait for new stuff.
Big thanks for your bug and improvement report again!
I'll definitely consider adding a panel which asks if a building should be placed or not and I'll care about the bug with the message panel.
The clipping issue is meant to be a function not a bug ; ) It prevents getting pushed into the universe when a new building and new colliders are instantiated near the player. The colliders will become active when the player moves away from the new building afterwards.
Yeah the terraforming can be quite heavy near rivers and mountains. But at least your workers won't walk into water. (Let's consider it to be the Netherlands function ;)
I'll improve the 3D Models inside the buildings for sure! In fact, I planned some dependencies on the supply with copper ware, furniture, wool, etc. just as you mentioned.
The water issue with the quarry is not solved yet. I have to think a little bit how to fix this, as the water level is global for the whole game and the quarry may go beyond it at some times.
The idea to make tabs for the research menu is good. I'll implement it in a version in the future. Returning some of the building material when destroying houses is a good feature, too!
For the saving function: I'm a little bit sorry, but this feature will first be implemented in the final version, or an early access version (I'm still not sure, if I want to support the idea of EA and if it is helpful for the development of the game, if the community wants to have one, etc)
You can imagine the saving function as a way to rebuild the entire game and then store it to some variables. As this is some work, I'll want to make sure, that the game runs stable before and the most bugs are fixed.
You are ,as always, welcome.
It is a feature not a bug then fine by me ;)
Nothing against the Netherland function then. In fact a nice idea! Just some random idea which got in my head, why not have some "netherland"fishers near the water then? As a new food ressource ;o)
Sounds good. I can´t wait to spend more time into the game. Personally i would support the "early access" idea and i would gladly pay for the game again.( More or less invited you to 3 beers in a tavern here, Cheers!)
As always keep up the good work! And i am looking forward to the next version.
Yeah, I had the idea of some "netherland fishers" in mind, too. ; ) Let's see, maybe I'll have the time in on of the next updates.
While we're at it: the next update will be released in a couple of days - probably end of next week.
Thanks for the beer ; ) - maybe I can return the favor by naming the innkeeper of the tavern Brummbaer ; )
This may have already been suggested but I think a UI overhaul and simplification is the key here. It's a fantastic concept, one I've been waiting for but currently the UI is Crusader Kings levels of baffling. Being able to smoothly and easily switch between the overhead view, the worker management and first person views would make the game feel a lot smoother. Also being able to rotate buildings would really help with road placement.
Hey thanks for the great feedback. I'll definitely care about the building rotation! Could you give me some more details about, what you'd expect of a good UI? This would be a great help, as I'm really trying to make it as intuitive as possible but, at some point, I could need some more creative advice.
Great! I have some experience in UI design so I'm happy to help. For a start, check out the Endless series (Endless Space, Endless Legend) for examples of very clean, clear and intuitive strategy UIs. At the end of the day, it's about working out what UI works for your game but there are some basic principles that are worth keeping to.
Try prioritising player actions based on how often they will need to do them. For example, with your game, players will be switching from 1st person to overhead regularly. They'll be assigning workers regularly. Think about any other things players will do very often. Then make a point of making those things easily visible and accessible on the UI. Make them the largest buttons, easily visible. You've got a good start by having number shortcuts for certain things. However if a player needs to make 3 clicks to access something they need every 2 minutes, that's 2 clicks too many.
Then think about the menus and what information is the most important. It's tempting to give players all the info they might need immediately but that often just leads to a confusing wall of numbers and text. Try making important numbers bigger. If necessary, hide more detailed, micromanagement stuff behind tooltips or context menus. For example, seeing how many workers you have assigned to a building and how many you have spare is really important, so that should be easily seen at a glance.
Sorry if that's a bit much and you're probably already thinking about a lot of this stuff. There are entire books written on UI design and player psychology so it's a very broad subject and it's up to you how much time you want to spend looking into it; I'm sure you've got a lot of work to do! A good start is stripping everything back and thinking; What do I actually need to see right now? What do I need to do? Testing and tweaking is the best way to figure this out. Good luck!
Hey, big thanks for this great and detailed reply!!! I'll definitely check out the Endless series and will follow your advice and recheck all players UI actions concerning how often they'll be triggered and how important they are. Working with different sized texts and using tooltips more often seems a very good start. Thanks a lot.
Hallo!
Ohne große Einsicht in diesen Titel sei hier dennoch ein Vorschlag von mir eingebracht,
Erstmal: Alles klingt sehr vielversprechend, gerade die Mischung aus Aufbau und Kampf. Oft fokussieren sich solcherlei Spiele zur sehr auf das eine oder das andere, aber gerade die Mischung macht es für mich aus. Ebenfalls finde ich es sehr angenehm, dass das Spiel hier über eine drm-freie Website "vertrieben" wird, gepaart mit dem interessanten Setting ist alleine dies schon fast ein Kaufgrund.
Jedenfalls nun zum Vorschlag (genau genommen sind es 3) und sie alle drehen sich um den politischen Aspekt des Spiels
1. Ich wäre stark dafür das zum Beispiel in Form von Audienzen oder einfach Events Entscheidungen getroffen werden können, die entweder schlicht moralischer Natur (Lukrativer wirtschaftlicher Deal gegen Ausbeutung eines Teils der Bevölkerung etc.) sind oder einfach das Leben eines Monarchen beschreiben (Gerichtsprozesse, Streitigkeiten, Gnadengesuchen etc.). Bei Interesse kann ich mir sicherlich auch ein paar solcher Dinge ausdenken^^
2. Je nach Macht und Größe des Landes des Spielers könnte dies "hochgestuft" werden. Von der kleinen Baronie über die Grafschaft, das Herzogtum, Königreich und schließlich das Kaiserreich. Mit jeder Stufe könnte es dann möglich sein, dass der Spieler verschiedene politische Aktionen tätigen kann - zum Beispiel in Form von verfügbaren Slots, die mit Reformen oder Gesetzen belegt werden. So ist dem dem Baron möglich zu entscheiden, ob er gerne eher die Viehhaltung auf den Feldern unterstützt (Boni auf Viehwirtschaft) oder Land stattdessen als Ackerflächen verwenden möchte (Bonus auf Felderwirtschaft). Der Herzog muss wählen, ob seine Bauern als Leibeigene schuften oder als freie Männer leben sollen (je nachdem gibt es beispielsweise Boni auf Zufriedenheit und Produktivität) Der König später vermag dann bspw. darüber zu beschließen, ob die Kinder seines Landes in den Genuss von Bildung kommen sollen (Teures Gebäude (Schule) wird benötigt, gewährt nachher aber dauerhaften Bonus auf alle "geistigen" Arbeiten) oder auch nicht. Der Kaiser kann sich schließlich sogar dazu entscheiden, eine teure Berufsarmee (Kasernen und Drillplätze werden benötigt) aufzustellen, die dafür umso effektiver die Sache des Reiches vertritt.
2. Regierungsarten. Es sollte möglich sein, Regierungsformen für das eigene Königreich zu bestimmen. Entsprechend verschiedene Formen der Monarchie (absolut, konstitutionell, feudal etc.) oder auch früher Republiken (Räte oder oligarchische Versammlungen). Diese Regierungsformen würden wohl keinen großen Beitrag zum Spielgeschehen leisten, könnten aber einerseits verschiedene Boni/Mali gewähren und sonst auch Auswirkungen auf die Verfügbarkeit/das Aussehen bestimmter Güter, Gebäude , Truppentypen haben, als auch Auswirkungen auf diplomatische Beziehungen zu den anderen Königreichen. Dies würde wohl auch den rollenspielerischen Aspekt fördern, wenn beispielsweise Soldaten eines absolutistischen Herrschers standardisierte Uniformen tragen und die Truppen eines feudalen Monarchen mit den verschiedensten Wappen aufwarten.
Ich weiß, die ganzen Vorschläge sind nun wirklich nichts, was gerade ansteht oder auch nur alsbald anstehen wird, aber ich wollte die Gelegenheit nutzen, um meine Meinung darüber auszudrücken, dass dies alles sicherlich den Spielspaß oder zumindest die Komplexität enorm bereichen könnten. Nun ja, zumindest für Spieler, die in dergleichen Interesse haben, was in diesen Genre aber wohl die Meisten sein werden. Natürlich steht nun aber erstmal die Entwicklung des Grundkonzeptes an und dabei wünsche ich viel Erfolg! Sollte irgendwann etwas von meinen Vorschlägen in das Spiel Eingang finden, dann nur umso besser.
Viel Erfolg weiterhin.
Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
Valerian
PS: Jegliche Rechtschreibfehler dienen der Belustigung!
