Tattered Banners Demo · published
Greetings, mercenaries,
We are pushing some ambitious changes to the simulation this week as we steady our footing for the upcoming Demo launch on July 9th.
To make the world feel more reactive, many characters in the world are now fully persistent. They possess unique names, backgrounds, specializations, faces, noble house allegiances, and more.
Short-Term Impact: This helps the world feels more grounded, and opens the door for an idea we had for streamer integration (more info below).
Long-Term Impact: The persistent characters infrastructure gives a lot of room for emergent stories. If you help Bob the merchant gain wealth, he'll steadily grow his financial empire. If you raze Alice's noble estate, she'll become a refugee, get kidnapped by bandits, join them, and eventually rise through their ranks to become a new bandit leader.
A secondary effect to persistent characters is highlighting the world's setting and the war between the noble houses - the realm consists of 10 cities, each led by a lord/lady with different personalities. Those nobles fight for power and set to war against one another. So far there were only subtle hints about the setup, but in the coming weeks we'll be deepening the clarity and impact of the house war.
New dialogues were added to differentiate the Rural Folk and City Gang origins, as well as a few World Events. World Events trigger based on the locations you are near, the physical state of those locations, and the backgrounds of members in your company. More of these will be coming soon.
If you travel through a city currently looking for lumber to expand, a Thief in your roster might pop up with a questionable suggestion
All AI generated portraits have been completely removed from the game and replaced with live 3D-rendered character portraits.
Beyond the ethical reasons for the change, it also serves as a big step forward for the much-requested character customization feature. With portraits now rendered dynamically from characters' 3D models, enabling customization is one step away of enabling to assign different body parts/textures/visual accessories to units.
We're big fans of XCOM playthroughs where viewers name and customize the soldiers, and so we wanted to bring that exact same thing to Tattered Banners - but with two upgrades:
Instant Drop-In: Viewers can populate the game immediately via stream integration, removing the need for pre-configured save files.
Global Integration: Viewer characters won't just join your squad, but will be injected into the simulated world as lords, bandits, merchants, blacksmiths, innkeepers, and more.
We’re a 3 person team heavily swamped with deadlines, but we think this system is too cool to not try out. So we're adding an initial version of it before the Demo comes out. If you are a streamer and want to help run an initial test of this feature before the public demo drops, reach out to us on Discord
Until next week
- The CookieByte Team