Hey everyone,
It’s been a while since I last had a turn writing a blog for Lost Legions. I’ve been too busy in the pixel mines over the last couple of months. About two weeks ago, we had an all-hands-on-deck meeting with our team, which normally works remotely, and it was so energising that I couldn’t wait to write about it here.
The reason we met wasn’t necessarily a good one. With a launch date planned for July, there was a growing unease within the team that something in the game was missing. We have a lot of nice systems, but somehow they don’t click together perfectly yet. The latest friends-and-family test also yielded unsatisfying feedback. So the idea was to use all the brainpower available during a two-day workshop to identify the pain points and devise solutions.
And boy, did we find pain points on day one! When you want to make a game better, it’s best not to pull any punches. Did it hurt? Yes. Did some of us have to kill our babies? Definitely. Did it lead to amazing solutions on the second day and end up being an overall super motivating event? Absolutely!
If you look at it from a distance, the issues could be boiled down to two things:
1. The game needs a lot more polish, feedback, and signposting. It also needs to teach players better about the many things they can do.
Examples:
- You can throw spears to break shields, and it feels super fun. But only very few players ever figured out they could do it.
- There is a great combo system in our combat, but you can’t cleanly transition out of all states, which breaks your flow after a shield bash, for example. (I fixed that one myself in the meantime.)
2. The game doesn’t do a great job of making you feel like a Roman.
Sure, there is an amazing sequence at the beginning of the game where you actually live through the worst parts of the Battle of Teutoburg, but after that — because this is how we all experienced survival games — you get thrown into the wilderness with a loincloth and end up being another naked survival-game dude in the forest for far too long.
Yes, there are many features in the game that are really geared towards making you feel Roman (stealing enemy technology and improving upon it, for example), but they all come much too late in the game. Given that the Roman flavour is what we feel is the game’s main selling point, this was a big problem.
Problem number one just needs more time. So, with a heavy heart, we decided to pour more financial resources into the game and delay the release to early next year. Though that means you’ll have to wait longer for it, it also means the game will launch at a much higher quality.
Problem number two is where the creative juices really started flowing. There are a lot of changes — both big and small — happening to the flow of the game, all with one objective: making you feel more like a Roman legionary.
The biggest changes boil down to this:
1. You need to be able to look the part from the start.
Gone are the sticks-and-stones tier, the copper tier, and the bronze tier. Now you work with iron from the very beginning and will be able to craft Roman-looking gear — albeit of lower quality at first. This sounds like a small change, but it requires a major rework of our tech tree.
2. We called the second change the “Band of Brothers feeling.”
Basically, you need to find other Romans right away instead of after a couple of hours — and you need to find more of them. In addition to the Romans that are already part of the story, you’ll now also be able to rescue generic brothers-in-arms who populate your camps, gather resources, and join you in battle, while our story NPCs remain more safely in the back ranks.
3. How many of these generic soldiers you can take along and command now depends on your rank!
Gone are the days where you start at the top of the ladder. You now begin much further down the hierarchy and follow the orders of a Centurio, who promotes you along the way. Rise through the ranks far enough, and you’ll eventually become a Centurio yourself. New ranks come with plenty of cosmetics, of course, but also with the ability to lead more men into battle and command them around camp.
4. Last but definitely not least is a huge change to the building system.
The Roman legion had a very strict way of constructing war camps, and no matter what tools we gave players, most still ended up building the very un-Roman blockhouse-style settlements you see in almost every survival crafting game.
To address this, we removed the free-building mode. You now have fixed slots within the different camps available to you, where you can build different kinds of tents, structures, and fortifications. Thanks to this more rigid system, we get to flex our historical research more, and your camp always looks far more Roman.
All the things you build also come with a large amount of customization slots that you can fill with flags, trophies, decorative fortifications, and more to truly make your camp your own. Early tests of this system are very promising, and I can’t wait to show you a video of it in action.
Apart from that, we’ll keep pushing our combat system, which I believe is pretty unique within the survival genre, and of course: polish, polish, polish.
We all came out of this meeting hyper motivated, and development speed over the past week has been crazy. So while we started with heavy hearts and the need to push back the release, we ended up with a much clearer and stronger vision of the game we want to make for you.
Speaking of which, I hear the pixel mines calling again.
See you next time!
Felix
