Hi everyone! It’s been quite a while since our last post, for which I have to apologise. Things have been a little bit crazy, and on the technical front we bit off a little more than we could chew, leading to a massive delay in a content update.
Since we've been keeping you bored for ages, let me kick things off with some pictures first.
New UI
It's never been a secret that WuS uses AI generated art (and we still do in place of static 2D images). Saying that, we have now had enough money to hire an artist to redesign the GUI for us, where I'm sure you'll agree he did a tremendous job!
The entire UI has been overhauled - both in main menu, and in battle. We've added tooltips that explain all sorts of things that were missing, and everything should be a bit more clear.
Here's a comparison shot with old UI (although you can also see new post processing and weather effects there!)
New building: Mage Guild
Mage guild is a new type of building, which traditionally has three tiers. The guild periodically generates a resource (mana) which can be spent on casting spells. Naturally you have to research those first (in a similar way to how we research blacksmith upgrades).
The update will come with three different spells:
- Pylon - a magic stone which zaps enemies around it
- Swamp - slows enemies traversing through
- Rock wall - imprisons a unit inside it
Each of these naturally has a duration and a mana cost. You'll find yourself casting often. The cool thing is there's no limit to how many spells you can cast in one area. You're only limited by cooldown and the amount of mana you currently have in store.
Here's a little image of the Pylons just hanging around!
Spells are currently not upgradable in any way as far as endless upgrades are concerned, with the exception of Pylons (they benefit from the tower upgrade). This will be looked at and balanced out in the future when more spells are available.
We hope to expand the idea of the Mage Guild by introducing "Schools of Magic". These would be spell sets (such as life, death, fire etc.) that you can take, which would very much change how you play. We're undecided on how to proceed with this, but we'd like to avoid further card purchases in the shop. Instead some kind of reward based progression would be nice - we're still thinking!
Other changes
We introduced some fixes, but the update notes will only contain the biggest changes. The biggest QoL update is that you can now quit the battle manually and receive the gold for time spent in game. Right now, if you quit the game manually (without the enemies destroying your Town Hall) you'll not be rewarded. This lead to a lot of frustration from players that didn't know about this, and faced a massive and challenging grind, which in turn translated into some negative reviews on Steam as well! It's getting fixed now!
We upgraded the Unity Engine version as well to allow for some further optimisation improvements. New sounds for Goblins and Swordsmen were added, and more are to follow. We've optimised things here and there, but there's still more work to do on that front.
Lots of little issues were eliminated (like Anwen sliding like crazy when she's on speed boost), some pathfinding issues and such things... Buildings can also have unique sounds now, which adds some immersion, but only the Mage Guild currently has one.
The Future
Aside from ironing out the current issues, Schools of Magic (which will be a big update by itself when it all comes together) and long awaited mod support we do not have many plans to expand the content further until 1.0 hits. We hope there's plenty to do as is but we're still very much open to feedback and ideas. You can expect Fates of Magic update to hit soon...ish. I'm not going to give a precise date because it needs a little bit more work and testing, but we do plan to release it this month. Fates of Magic is out now!
Other things
Now, I do risk being a little bit crass here, but hey ho, that's the gamedev life. Those of you who have gotten to know us a little bit closer will know that we're a small team of hobbyists working on these games in our spare time, trying to "hit it off" so that we can make bigger titles in the future. We've been working on another game, called Warlords Battle Simulator, which will be released as a full title (not EA) sometime this year. The demo will be available to play by the time Steam Next Fest hits this summer. In fact, it will be available as soon as Valve approves the current built we sent off this week!
I do understand that some of you may find it a little bit concerning we're working on more than one game simultaneously but please remember we do our best to be efficient. When coding work on Warlords was stuck because it needed full UI implementation, I moved onto WBS while Gothim chipped away at the GUI. When design work on WUS was finished, Kiwi was writing the design doc for WBS and so on... We simply try to be as efficient as possible, so there is minimal impact on quality and time spent between updates. Although I do admit this was a long one!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2594290/Warlords_Battle_Simulator/
When we had a spare moment, we also worked on something a little bit more fun and casual. The demo for Balling Up is available now. We made it simply for fun, to take a break from the top down view of strategy games. Please try it out, and let us know what you think (although there's a high chance you will rage quit!).
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2593440/Balling_Up/
That's all we have for you for today. I hope you're looking forward to the next update, and see you on the battlefield!
Kommissar