Warlords,
Thank you all for your patience. I wanted to provide a brief update regarding Warlord: Awaji's development. I plan on releasing some news like this once every 2 months, so everyone knows I am still alive and kicking. I would love to provide a dev log in a more entertaining and digestible format, like a video, but I am a game developer first and foremost, not a content creator, so please understand this is the best I can do! Anyways, let's get to the news.
The last demo update went very well. I feel like the combat ecosystem of the game is in a decent place, and it is fun to play, but you have not seen everything yet in terms of weapons. I have noted some suggestions regarding the melee combat, things like adding a basic parry/perfect block system. This could be interesting should time allow, but overall I feel like the combat is already a quantum leap above Warlord: Britannia, and will play out nicely in the open-world campaign.
After the demo update released I pivoted to implementing the actual Warlord elements of the game. Namely, the camp, army, and open world mechanics like settlements and convoys. So far things are coming along very nicely and I have no doubts WLA will live up to and exceed it's predecessor. Having created a Warlord game once before, setting out to build features from scratch in WLA has been satisfying and efficient. Now that I know all of the pitfalls and gotchas that came with implementing these systems in WLB, I can write maintainable code from the get-go, which keeps my technical debt low (although not zero, but we are only human).
Even after only a short time implementing Warlord elements into the new game, some big differences have arisen from WLB. I would say the biggest paradigm shift is with the save system. In the previous game, you could only save your progress when at camp and not under attack. This was reasonable and by no means prevented people from enjoying the game, but I felt like it was adding friction. For example, if I want to assault a nearby village, I need to make sure I actually have 10 or 15 minutes to do it. If I have to go to a doctor's appointment in 20 minutes, this would result in me calling it quits. The lack of a true pause when opening the escape menu contributed to this issue. Now I am glad to say both saving and pause features have been made universally accessible during gameplay.
Another big change in Warlord: Awaji has been a simplification of harvesting, building, and storage. I found that while satisfying to watch your troops build structures and harvest resources in WLB, more often than not it became a source of frustration when things didn't go right with their AI, or when the player was unsure if they were experiencing bugged behavior. The interaction between these three elements: the building of structures, harvesting of resources, and storage space created a long list of edge cases and odd behavior. Storage space did not feel like a value-added feature, more like a chore you had to keep up with. AI building and harvesting was cool but became cumbersome and slow, and often frustrating. So for WLA, I have decided to forgo AI building (instead, the player's builds are automatically completed with a timer), harvesting, and storage space entirely. That being said, there should still be tools to allow for clearing of trees and foliage, and decorative storage builds. Plus the extra free time given to your troops around camp will be used for other immersive purposes, so no worries there.
What the removal of harvesting does is cut out the bottomless supply of resources from nature, and instead makes their procurement part of the overall progression ecosystem, which is something I really want to lock in for this game. Another reason why I decided to go this route is due to the samurai setting itself. Samurai field camps were not nearly as complex and well defended as Roman marching forts, so extracting massive quantities of wood from nearby forests simply doesn't compute. So I think these changes will be both historically authentic, and beneficial to the player's experience.
In other news, I have experimented with the base terrain for Awaji island, including the surrounding seas and landmasses of mainland Japan and Shikoku. I am still unsettled on the overall size of the map (determined by the scale factor to real life), but so far a roughly 1/3 or 1/4 scale is seeming appropriate. For comparison, Britannia (actually the real life island of Jersey), was in 1/2 scale and ended up being roughly 10km long. Awaji could be rendered between 1/3 and 1/4 scale and end up roughly 15km long, which may be too large for Warlord gameplay (some would argue WLB was already too big). So I will be tweaking and testing the map to ensure a vast open-world that feels adequately filled with content, is easily traversable, and retains recognizable valleys, mountains, and beaches from real life.
Let me know what you think about this. I look forward to reading your comments here and on Discord. Until the next news update I will be hard at work on the remainder of the campaign mechanics, then hopefully start to fleshing out the open world itself. Still no official release date yet, but it definitely will not be this year, so we still have a little ways to go. I hope it will be worth the wait! Thank you all for the support.
Until next time,
Darkmatter
(Greetings from somewhere on the Northern tip of a barren Awaji)