It’s July and that means it is time for another edition of Dinolords Monthly where we dig into what has been going on over the last month.
While May had a couple major topics, those being networking and controls, June has been a month of many different things that might each appear smaller, but quickly adds up to some major steps.
When the Vikings come wading all over your freshly mowed lawn, there is only one thing to do: build a wall! While walls have been in the game for a good while now, they just got some updated models and are now working in networked play. Having walls work in multiplayer now makes it a lot less confusing when everyone can see them, what a surprise! There’s also been some progress on the technical aspects of the wall system and how it works, but before we dive into that just some quick temporary terminology used to explain the walls. Walls consist of individual wall “chunks”. Think of these as a 1x1 “part” of a wall. Multiple of those can form a wall “segment”, e.g. a longer section of connected wall chunks. Firstly, walls are now more intuitive to build; you place a wall segment and it is constructed as 1 construction site instead of individual chunks. Meanwhile, the system is still keeping track of individual chunks of that wall, so that damage to a segment is still per chunk where neighboring chunks are also damaged and deteriorate as they get damaged. Secondly, how walls work with attacking units also got some love. Units will now attack individual chunks of a segment more dynamically, working towards making an opening that is wide enough for several units to pour through. Depending on the attacking unit's size, they can also damage one or more connected chunks (imagine the difference between one guy with a sword versus a big dinosaur swiping with its tail or similar). The damage and health values are very much still in flux; walls need to be an impactful defense system that keeps your base safe - you spend a lot of resources on building them - but on the other end of the scale it is also very much not meant to be a “be all end all” defense that you just set and forget. Striking this balance will be done through testing, testing and more testing, until the feeling is just right.
Here’s a little sneak peek at some of the new in-progress stone wall models:
Combat has also seen some changes lately as we have focused more on it during our playtest sessions. Overall, the game is a hybrid merge between two genres, seeking to mold elements from each into one coherent mass, with combat and controls that feel intense and dynamic from Action-RPG, and base building, unit combat and level design from RTS games. From the get go, we have wanted to avoid what we have affectionately dubbed “mosh pitting” where friendly and enemy units just form two big blobs and hit each other until whichever blob with the largest numbers reigns victorious. Having that tends to feel a lot less like you play an integral part in combat, and it also is not really visually interesting. On the other hand, while the Lord is a powerful character with powerful abilities and weapons, we do not want units to feel meaningless if you can just solo all the encounters in the game.
What we are currently looking at, is making combat a lot more dynamic, both gameplay-wise and visually, by leaning into two primary additions to the gameplay. One of which is telegraphing. Telegraphing is a visual indicator that a unit is about to do something, giving the player a brief grace period to react and dodge, block or otherwise play around the incoming attacks. A concrete example right now is archers. We want to avoid the flat directional arrows that are used elsewhere and have the effect of proper arcing arrows that fly across the sky, so to allow for this we had to figure out a different way for archers to telegraph their attacks. The solution we are looking into right now is having them draw their bows tight and then they “lock” their aim, predicting where their target will be as the arrow is fired, and showing an indicator on the ground where the arrow will impact. This allows you to avoid arrows by moving unpredictably. This is already leading to some super engaging gameplay where you can dodge in and around incoming arrows fired from archers and sword blows from soldiers. The second addition is smarter units. Since units now telegraph their attacks, it makes sense for them to also react to incoming attacks from other units. As we showed in the last monthly, we added a “scatter” command where you can command units away from immediate danger, but this can also exist in a much more lightweight form where units can dodge, block or parry strikes from other units or attempt to move around incoming attacks. Finding the right balance here where units feel smarter but not flawless is important, and much of this second aspect is still early in design space and subject to change drastically, depending on playtest findings.
The Vikings, however cool they are, did not swim across the North Sea, so we had to make some vessels that would be deemed worthy to carry both infantry and dinosaurs. Our 3D department has been busy at work researching, designing, modeling and texturing some awesome ships. We will just include a super cool screengrab here, and if you are more curious about ship-related 3D models, there is a cool 3-part thread with “the making of” over on our Discord, https://discord.gg/bTWMfWkjuw
Inevitably, when doing any sort of development, you come across bugs. Some of which can be quite unexpected. Here are a few of the better ones we have seen while playtesting. More can be found over on our Twitter, https://x.com/dinolordsgame Sometimes, even a lord needs to unwind and relax, but maybe swimming in full plate armor is not the best idea. Forgetting that enemy town halls also spawn workers and then leaving for lunch with the game running: When blender decides to warp into the 7th dimension and summon an eldritch horror instead of opening the file you asked for:
That was what was on the programme for this month’s edition of Dinolords Monthly.
As always, there is a lot going on every day and things change weekly as we chase the fun from iteration to iteration.
Thank you for reading along and following us and the development of Dinolords.
Catch you in the next one.
-panxter
Huh, one of the villagers found this in a big nest in the forest. Wonder what we can use that for?