What's happened in development the last month:
Resources
Reliquaries are no longer just random statues that pop up from the ground. I had a tracking mini game in mind, but with a bit of perspective that just felt like a cop-out,and a bad idea. So you will now find fields of graves that will provide the blood reliquary (and resource, and you'll find essence pools that provide the essence resource. This way you'll be able to scout for resources and claim them more easily creating a better game-play path through a map.
essence pool, with bodger and bellyall unit
field of graves
Dungeons
As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been trying to put all the meta-game stuff (managing your persistent army/collection) in mini-dungeons. This means you'll find the following (amongst others) items in the mini dungeons. These will come in the shape of rituals to perform or elder shadows to meet.
- chaining a new shadow from its crypt (adding units to your army collection)
- upgrading units, (ritual)
- destroying units (you have a unit cap both in active units, and units in your collection) these are the mechanic elder shadows, searching for a way out of the underworld, and you can offer them one of your units as test subject. (there's a bit of an over-arching quest feel to this, to reap the real reward)
- finding steel reliquaries
- finding bone reliquaries (only blood/health and essence/stamina resources can be found on the main map now)
- receiving special abilities from custom encounters (based on the unit you send into the dungeon)
- random enemy encounters
- a few story driven encounters
- traps
I've posted some visuals from the dungeons in a previous news post you can find here: Indiedb.com
The mini-dungeons are the largest remaining bit of actual coding and modelling/animating to be done.
No more mapscreen
I've also been working on removing the map-screen.You now have portals in the game-world that will transport you to a new map, creating a bit of a rogue-like feel to a campaign. This is now working and finished, but required a lot of re-factoring.
Map Loading
Re-factoring the load system, this was required for the seamless teleportation between maps. Now the entire game system is loaded on startup and never unloaded. In practice this means the initial load time will be a bit longer, but the loading time between maps is a few seconds tops. This as i'm keeping all the assets and pools in memory and then rebuilding a new map on the fly, but not destroying units and other pools.. This has cost me the most time so far, as it also meant creating a good level description system, such as what flavor/theme is a map, does it have a cutscene/intro, what enemies and what level enemies does it contain, what dungeons are accessible etc etc.
Portrait mode
I've been trying to get a good portrait mode working. So you can play it easily from your iPhone, and are not required to flip your phone on the go. This required some experimentation with the swipe sensitivity and Field of view for instance.
More Maps and level variation
I've been working on creating more variation in the level environment, so more mountains, plains and distinct set pieces.
Boof games
I've got a label!, as I'm self publishing I felt I needed a label, for this and future projects. Introducing Boof Games
Making it to the IndieDB AOTY top 50
And finally Oberon's Court has been nominated in the Indie DB AOTY awards under the catagory best upcoming RTS. If you'd like to help out please vote, its very appreciated if you do... Just follow the link and click on the vote button, no registration required Indiedb.com (select upcoming and then real time strategy) or directly on the gamepage:
So that's an update. Hope you liked it, and make sure to post and ask questions.
Uhuuuu!!! i wait for this to be realesad