As our autumn quickly deepens and the leaves brown, it's time for a summary of what the Empires of the Undergrowth team have been working on recently. As is always the case, the newsletters work in tandem with the roughly bi-monthly vlogs.
Given the point in the development cycle of the DLC we're currently working on, this will be a shorter newsletter than usual addressing a few key things. As much as I'd like to spill the details on everything, I'm not allowed to just yet!
Exploding ants from Balithecat2024
We've thoroughly covered the current roadmap in the previous newsletter and vlog, but I'll bring that up briefly now just in case anyone hasn't seen it yet - click here to see the graphic that goes through where we're going with the game in the immediate future (without spoiling things).
The only thing "new" to say about the roadmap at this particular time is that we're making great progress on the currently in-development DLC and are confident that we'll get it ready for everyone in a solid timeframe, so thankfully it doesn't look like we'll need to adjust the estimated timings on the roadmap for now.
The thing from the previous vlog that generated the most discussion was the very brief look at upcoming changes to the game's UI. It's important to note that we're not done with these changes yet, and to some extent they're still being refined. We've decided to give you another picture that shows recent changes we've made, again with the understanding that things are still somewhat in flux with the redesign.
Yes, there is a lot of jelly
The design of the pheromone markers and / or the numerals in the pheromone panel are still subject to change, but we're homing in on correct scaling and suchlike now. The creature spawner panel on the left is due for its creature icons to be updated, so those are blurred out for now to minimise confusion.
The time to truly gather feedback on the UI changes will be when we get it into everyone's hands for an optional beta, but until then we just wanted to show you some of the progress we've been making. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments, but we would ask you to keep in mind that feedback will be much more useful after you've used the updated version and it's at that point that I will begin collating feedback in earnest.
The UI updates are partially in aid of better controller support, and one of our devs has been working almost exclusively on this for several months now. Empires of the Undergrowth is quite playable on controller as things stand right now, but a truly excellent controller experience has needed some careful thought and a fair amount of trial-and-error to get things to feel right. Our main thoughts here are for those of us who like to play the game on handhold systems, such as the Steam Deck and equivalents, but the changes are relevant to anyone who prefers to play on any controller outside of a mouse and keyboard. I mentioned previously that the updated UI will feature a new radial menu to make selecting things quicker, and since there was some concern it's worth pointing out that it won't be forced upon you if you're playing with mouse and keyboard.
I've had a lot of fun over the past few weeks making a couple of YouTube shorts that highlight a specific design problem related to Empires of the Undergrowth. The game has an unusual setting, and in making a satisfactorily realistic feeling ant game we came up against lots of issues, small and large, that needed some creative thinking - this series aims to go through those to explain our thought process.
More of these are to come, but please check out these two! The first deals with a scaling issue we came up against related to the green lynx spider:
The second one talks about the decision to base the game around pheromone trails, rather than the more traditional dragging of boxes to command units:
Please let me know if you're enjoying these videos, and if you have any ideas for game design challenges that you'd like me to concentrate on in future shorts, do feel free to post them in the comments! If I think something would make an interesting minute or so of content, I'll get around to it.
At the end of the newsletters we like to have some community-made content, so if you'd like one of your screenshots to be considered for Screenshot Central the easiest way is to join our Discord and post in the appropriate screenshot channel. To get interesting shots with the camera uncoupled from the floor, hold down shift as you enter screenshot mode. A titan bomb in Bomb Mode from 孙梓翰 (and thanks to 优美狱虫 for getting it to us!)
Ruuuuun!! From Dino Dude on our Discord
A gatekeeping leafcutter from Balithecat2024 on the Discord