We hope you all are having a happy easter! Thanks to all that joined us and showed us your creativity during the game jam! We hope as many of you as possible had a chance to both contribute a game as well as play some of the games that were submitted. If you still haven't played any of the contributions, feel free to do so here.
So back to Lorne, let's get into it! World changes: As a follow-up to the previous update, we've made several improvements across the world to get it to a state we're happy to playtest. Multiple collision issues with environment assets have been fixed, and the audio experience has been expanded with biome music, combat themes, shrine ambience, and sound fixes.
Gameplay adjustments: We've introduced a home position at game start and tweaking shrine reset zones. New encounters have also been added to the world, for example implementing imps to roam certain areas of the world to increase the challenge, as well as a few new battle camps.
Invasions and their AI targeting challenges: As a consequenceofour work on invasions and AI behavior, enemies now prioritize targets more reliably, react properly to damage through perception, and several enemy behavior trees have been updated to work with the improved targeting logic, such as Exploding Ents not properly targeting buildings. While also trying to take a number of edge cases into consideration, such as AI controller validation when enemies die and bugs affecting certain enemy types.
Teleportation: When a new wave begins, you’ll now be returned to your home base to ensure you’re ready for the attack. The UI will warn you before the teleport happens, invasions only start after you’ve arrived, teleporting will not occur if you’re already close to your base. These changes help ensure invasions begin in a fair and predictable making sure the player can still explore the world without worrying for their base.
Together, these improvements move invasions closer to the reliable and exciting experience we want them to be as we continue preparing the game for broader testing. Optimization: We’ve continued optimizing the game to improve overall performance. Updates include global culling, lighting improvements, smoother fog, and optimizations to day and weather cycles, as well as improved SM spline lightmap performance. These changes have reduced FPS variance and increased average FPS by 15–20 in certain areas, while also allowing higher default graphics settings for a smoother overall experience. Miscellaneous: As we've prepared the game for internal testing some various smaller miscellaneous updates has been done as well.
Various code cleanup
Removed debug lines
Dev platform removed to prep for testing
Cleared inventory, stats and various equipment from the player for testing
Changed various resource costs for buildings
Updated description texts for buildings
Internal game testing has now started: As some of you have surely seen on Discord, By the end of February, we started internal testing with version V0.1.0 and will continue onward with a small team. This helps us test the game while building a short intro for the alpha testers, balancing resources, stats, progression, and working on some of the final additions to the crafting system. So going onward below we'll look at the changes made to Lorne since then
Version 0.1.2: Here the focus was mainly on stability, balance, and general improvements across the game. A number of bugs affecting saving/loading, enemy spawning, combat mechanics, and environment interactions have been fixed. Several systems have also been cleaned up or refactored to improve overall stability and maintainability.
Gameplay balance changes: Resource availability got tweaked and enemy density in certain areas reduced, invasion pacing adjusted, and some enemy behaviors updated.
Quality of life improvements: We made a bunch of UI updates, improved shrine behavior, better spawning logic, and small adjustments to progression and player abilities.
For example of a UI update we made the zone presentation a bit better
Example for some addition and fixes that came in version 0.1.2
Trees now drop 3x amount of wood
The amount of starting souldust at Vendors has been tweaked
Decreased cost for various buildings
Stamina balances for some abilities
Various sound effect fixes
Fixes that issues with action animations when the character is ported
Adding more resources to the world
Fixed bugs where shrines were not unloaded from the world correctly
World tiers now changes after wave 6
Adding signposts and zone presentations
Version 0.1.3: We've continued looking into balance, and overall polish across several systems. In this version we fixed some bugs affecting enemy spawning, resource handling, and loading behavior to preventing duplicate enemies and resolving inconsistencies in resources.
Gameplay Improvements: By making mining and chopping significantly faster and tweaking building and traps costs we were able to improve early progression and help the players start out their adventures faster. Various sound effects have been corrected, and environment polish has continued with small adjustments to areas such as the swamp and the shrines.
UI cohesion: By harmonizing fonts across dialogue and interface elements and refining notifications we've been able to give of a cleaner look to the interface.
Vendors: and crafting: These was adjusted with new resources available from merchants, updated costs for certain items, and by adding a new vendor in Northshire.
The Swamp now is not as foggy to encourage exploration.
Example for some addition and fixes that came in version 0.1.3
Improved gathering speed on trees and nodes
Harmonized a bunch of UI and dialogue fonts
Improved the inventory at vendors to encourage trade more
Adjusted collision areas for some buildings to improve placement and better match the space they occupy
Lowering the fog density in the Swamp area
Version 0.2.0: So let's unpack this one! It's quite a major step forward for the game, bringing improvements across systems, progression, stability, and world content. A large number of bugs have been resolved, including further issues related to enemy spawning, shrine behavior, building placement, and world interactions. Core systems such as saving, loading, and invasion logic have also been refined, resulting in faster load times and a more stable gameplay experience overall.
Invasions and progression: Here there's been some significant changes in 0.2.0!
Invasion slider: Players can now adjust invasion frequency through a slider so the player can have control over the waves and even disable them completely.
Invasions: The waves have been rebalanced to be a bit more challenging early on, and their systems have been improved to behave more reliably across saves and wave transitions.
Crafting: We've expanded with two new crafting stations, new ingredients, icons, and updated recipes, as well as added new ones.
Cooking Station: Food and consumables have been reworked and can now be crafted in here. Raw ingredients like wheat, milk, eggs, raw fish, and raw meat have been added and can now be processed into recipes such as bread, cheese, cookies, grilled meat, and flour, adding more depth to cooking.
Alchemy Table: Potion brewing has been moved to the new Alchemy Table, where players can now also craft gems used for trinkets, rings and necklaces.
Your new home: In 0.2.0 we introduced a new starting location for the player and their Powercore to help kickstart the game while giving a thematic start point as well. This little village with it's vendors has all the things an aspiring ranger might need.
While still giving you plenty of space to grow and build.
A New Level system: Finally, in 0.2.0 we've reworked how the level system works. Instead of giving enemies a span of levels they can spawn within, we’ve changed it so the level value of a enemy now gives the player insight into how strong the enemy is. For example, basic enemies will be seen as level one due to their stat values, but when you go up against a stronger foe you'll quickly see their levels rise.
Example for some addition and fixes that came in version 0.2.0
You will now start with a pre-placed Powercore to help you get the ball rolling on your base
Crafting has been split up between different crafting stations and more resources has been added
A big performance improvement was made
Cooking stations can now be placed inside the prefab houses
All one handed axes has seen some improvements to make them perform better in combat
Adding an invasion frequency slider to the player's inventory so the player can either shorten the time between waves or pause them completely.
Further fixes to fonts and UI to make them more cohesive.
As we've moved over to internal testing and preparing the alpha we're confident enough to have released a planned early release date on steam! Early access will be released on Steam by August 25th, with Kickstarter backers with alpha access being able to playtest Lorne from June to the days before early release.
Community feedback: Feel free to swing by with your ideas and feedback on Discord as we move forward and if you yet have to wishlist Lorne on Steam feel free to do so!
As always, we wish you all the best and we’ll see you in the next one!