Proper Devlog #4

Smallest update after the small one. 

In case anybody wondered what happened a week ago, there was an update. Almost nothing gameplay related, so I thought that just another patch note wasn’t required or interesting. However, now I will talk about these changes and speculate more freely about some decisions that led to final choices.

A bit of gameplay/

Firstly, villages are now spawned anywhere(with a tendency to be further from other villages) on the map instead of the last placed tile. And the first corrupted tile is also not fixed. Now instead of inconveniently placed villages we have inconveniently randomly spawned villages/ Progress, yup.

Economy and all coin-related stuff has been rebalanced(or at least we tried to do this).

A bit of sound/

Now to the fun stuff, or should I say fun sounding? We finally added sounds in the game, something that was suggested even in the earliest reviews. More about that you can read in the previous devlog “Volume to 100”.

A bit of style/

Remaining changes are all related to presentation of information. 

Instead of an unexpectedly appearing village sprite, as an indication, there is an omnipresent timer showing number of turns until the next spawn. Furthermore, because of the fact that player’s turn is no longer directly connected to village's position, foreshadowed deletion of colorful indicators was done. On the other hand, this method was utilized elsewhere.

Both abilities received new visual accompaniment, and both of them had two similar major iterations during their development. Overall this paragraph can be summarized by something like “It’s better to do more work earlier instead of doing more work later”.

      Original idea for freeze was to make a big blue donut expand from the point under the snowflake and stop corruption animation of a given tile roughly the time it’s under the donut. Sadly I don’t have any screenshots of this(I probably should start taking them during actual development), so you can see recreation of this effect. Implementation of this idea turned out to be too flashy and overall unpleasant.

That’s why it was replaced with a second variant represented by a lower picture. Technically there is still an imaginary circle, but now it affects only corrupted tiles, therefore it’s more localized and looks like a big wave of cold blue hexes. 

      Lightning ability is mechanically tied to a cursor. That’s why boring standard sprite was replaced with a fancy partly transparent hand. And activation of this ability electrifies the hand. At first, we had a gif with an electric circle around a hand, but it was on a black background instead of transparent. Instead of remaking this asset we decided to incorporate some manipulations with blend modes. The result was ok, but actual colors of the hand were dependent on the sprites under the cursor to such an extent that after pointing at something dark like a mountain it seemed like something has changed while in reality nothing did. For the sake of understandability(and our sanity after dealing with blend modes) new gif was created to replace it.

(no pictures once again, only sprite and its replacement with normal background).