Tattered Banners Demo · published
Greetings, mercenaries,
The time is nearly upon us - Tattered Banners' demo launches July 9th, in 3 days. We're hard at work squeezing in last minute changes for the build, such as...
We want TB to have that sense of "emergent storytelling". In a way, the common thread between the expanded circle of games in our genre (Battle Brothers, Wartales, XCOM, Mount & Blade, Final Fantasy Tactics, ... Maybe Kenshi?) is only that feeling of a story being woven as your group of mercenaries travel through the world and build up their skills.
We're tackling the emergent storytelling problem from many angles (persistent characters, world events, noble houses with agendas, more on these in the coming months), but one aspect that is perhaps the most elegant is letting streamers and viewers create stories by inserting their characters. If you've watched ChristopherOdd's XCOM videos you'll know what we're referring to, and how entertaining it can be to watch characters inserted by the viewers.
To that end we've set up a system similar to the one in XCOM where the player's units can be drawn from a pool of units that was set up in advance. But we wanted to make it better in 2 ways - make it easy for viewers to drop their characters in through a simple chat command, and make it so characters appear not just in the player's group but throughout the simulated world as mercenaries, bandits, innkeepers, merchants, etc.
The basic idea was implemented earlier this week, and now we've become more greedy (as behooves maximizing strategy game fans) - we're looking to implement ways viewers can aid or harm streamers by influencing battles, such as wandering knights or wolf packs joining the fray, or for viewers to take part in world event choices. Time is short, but we hope to implement the initial system in 3 days for the demo launch.
One idea is adding events with 2-4 choices that viewers decide on. But if that is to happen, the events would need to be very impactful
There were complaints during the playtest about performance, especially on the world map while moving at 2x speed. Happy to say performance on the world map has been much improved. It's still not where we'd like it to be, and there's still plenty to be done about it, so there will be more rounds of improvement. But for now, with this fix the world map should stutter less than before.
Imagine this running efficiently
All AI screenshots have been removed from the store. Since all AI in the game has been removed as well, we are very nearly done with this chapter.
While recapturing new screenshots we aimed to include the many developments since the steam page launched - new reactions, new armors and portraits, raid merchant mission improvements, town construction, new UI, specializations, world events, magic statues, and more.
See you in 3 days
- The CookieByte Team