Indie Dead Monarchy: Open-World | Turn-Based | Mercenary Management | RPG - Fully Released May 19th 2023

[ERYFKRAD]

Can I play as a barbarian?

You can wear nothing but a loincloth and wield a giant axe. Do you approve?

Pants would be nice though.

 

[Bantichai]

Can I play as a barbarian?

You can wear nothing but a loincloth and wield a giant axe. Do you approve?

Pants would be nice though.

If my game didn't have pants I wouldn't be able to sleep at all.

 

[Bantichai]

Another update on the armor progress. Armor is still WIP, materials haven't been properly configured yet and the lighting is flat. Nevertheless, I wanted to show how progress is coming. So far in this build, there are 7 equipment parts. Head, body, legs, feet, shoulders, hands and under-layer. Whether or not I will keep it, is not confirmed as I'm sure other issues will arise. Nevertheless, things are looking quite promising.

 

[Bantichai]

Couple more screenshots of the armor in game this time. Metal is looking less matte. You might also have noticed a difference in the grid, I'm testing out tiles for terrains as opposed to my old method of laying a grid overlay on top of a predefined terrain. The reason for this is I am more or less experimenting with map/tile generation. By using tiles, it'll be easier for me to implement terrain and elevation as well. I'm hoping to put that in but we'll see, nothing confirmed as of yet.

 

[Bantichai]

Updated the specular materials, look less matte now. Quite happy with this.

 

[Bantichai]

So wanted to get your opinion on loot icons. Full background, border or none? (I'm aware of the inverted boots hiccup, these boots are for people with inverted feet)

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Border.

 

[Ranarama]

Either have no border, or double the thickness. I prefer the gradient background though the boots get lost in the grey, so you might want some tint to it. I assume you're picking purple for the contrast?

 

[Bantichai]

Either have no border, or double the thickness. I prefer the gradient background though the boots get lost in the grey, so you might want some tint to it. I assume you're picking purple for the contrast?

Thanks for the feedback, I'm picking purple as an example for loot quality, IE purple = legendary. I know I can easily convey the rarity of an item in the tooltip name as well but I was thinking about also giving the player visual feedback immediately

The icon background can also just be transparent and fit within the UI grid box. IE it would be a pair of boots in a wooden frame on top of parchment.

 

[Bantichai]

Border.

Indeed, I do like the border.

 

[JarlFrank]

Do we get female characters

 

[Bantichai]

Do we get female characters

Doing female characters essentially means I double the amount of armors I need to create, especially if I want to implement a relatively detailed customization system. IE, chest + shoulders + hands instead of just an "upper body" slot. So I'm deciding whether or not is it worth the trade off. While I am still early in development, I don't want to promise anything just yet.

That being said, the alternative option is to give female characters set armors that only they can use which would help reduce the workload. It's a one man show and although I do occasionally outsource some work, it's something I have to constantly balance. If I give female character set armors then I am essentially locking out the rest of the armors and the player will question why he/she can't wear X armor on X female character.

I'd like to say I'm still thinking of the most viable solution and if not, it is something I'd like to put in further down the track

 

[Bantichai]

Well looks like I found a solution, after morphing/shrinking the armor to somewhat fit the female base. JarlFrank this is for you - no boob armor though, I think it's better this way and saves me time having to create a separate female set. It still needs work, because it is still based on the male body but that does it make it more "realistic".

 

[JarlFrank]

Nice, awesome!

Your game keeps looking better and better, btw. Keep on doing what you're doing.

 

[Bantichai]

Nice, awesome!

Your game keeps looking better and better, btw. Keep on doing what you're doing.

Thanks! The vote of confidence really goes a long way

 

[SmartCheetah]

I hope for semi-realistic armor sets like BB had 8) Never been a fan of fantasy'esque armor sets like in eg. Neverwinter Nights 2. Man, those sucked big time.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

I hope for semi-realistic armor sets like BB had 8) Never been a fan of fantasy'esque armor sets like in eg. Neverwinter Nights 2. Man, those sucked big time.

Huh. Don't remember nwn 2 having excessively fantastic armour.

 

[Bantichai]

I hope for semi-realistic armor sets like BB had 8) Never been a fan of fantasy'esque armor sets like in eg. Neverwinter Nights 2. Man, those sucked big time.

Armor in Dead Monarchy is definitely more grounded. I'm taking a lot of inspiration from historical armors, not striving for historical accuracy but it won't be high fantasy either. If anything it will be similar to BB, taking the semi-realistic route. I am also doing full plate armor but in terms of progression, you won't be seeing that for a while. I'm stopping at 16th century medieval armor, so you'll be seeing Gothic, Maximilian and Fluted plate. Early tiers will be leather armor, primarily lamellar or scale, moving towards chainmail + surcoats, partial plate, full plate and then I really want to get in a full enclosed set of armor complete with the codpiece. :D

The modeler I'm currently working with also prefers more realistic sets so we have a lot of back and forth. You'll be hearing more details in the coming week, I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

 

[Bantichai]

Progress on the combat demo is also coming along at a steady pace, the coder that I am working with is currently reviewing the new system that I've designed and partially implemented. As I said before, rather than just speeding up combat I made it so that the AI takes all its turns simultaneously with 1 second intervals. I'll probably then have an actual fast mode which just cuts out the walk animation entirely, that is actually already in I just need to link it to the interface.

Forgot to mention, with the old system and a +30 battle it took 2 minutes for the whole round to finish. With the new system I've cut it down to 30 seconds. With fast mode (teleportation IE no walking animation) it cuts it down another couple of seconds.

Hopefully I'll be able to get in a new dev blog video one day

 

[Severian Silk]

Maybe the women in your game cut off their boobs like the Amazons? Then they can use whatever armor.

 

[Bantichai]

Maybe the women in your game cut off their boobs like the Amazons? Then they can use whatever armor.

That is an interesting idea.

 

[JarlFrank]

Early tiers will be leather armor

Go for padded armor/gambesons instead of leather, it's more realistic. Leather armor wasn't really used much in history, but padded armor was used extensively, because it's way more effective.

Just a suggestion

 

[Bantichai]

Early tiers will be leather armor

Go for padded armor/gambesons instead of leather, it's more realistic. Leather armor wasn't really used much in history, but padded armor was used extensively, because it's way more effective.

Just a suggestion

I thought I mentioned padded armor, I guess I didn't. I'll probably do a gambeson chest piece then a padded jacket for underlayer armors. The next set actually has some padded armor, I'll should be able to give a preview of it later in the week.

 

[Bantichai]

For those with +10 perception, you might have noticed that the majority of my screenshots have no shadows. Unity's take on shadows isn't that great honestly, it is more or less a brute force algorithm that at the minimum, doubles the amount of tris/faces you need to draw. Today I wept tears of joy as I got my shadow proxy method to work in Unity. Before shadows were pretty taxing but I've gained quite a bit of performance by essentially projecting a low poly model in place of the actual model. Given that the camera is drawn out as well you can't really see the difference.

I'm a little bit more confident now with shadows in Unity and will use them a bit more liberally, I did a lot of model optimization as well and so far I'm pretty happy with the performance of running 50 skinned meshes (models) + shadows. These are still stress tests and nothing is 100% concrete but if I was a player, I'd be salivating at the mouth for being able to field 25 units in a battle. If I do decide to go with this many units, these field/line battles definitely won't come by easily.

The picture below shows 40 units, will post some more pictures later.

 

[Falksi]

As someone who's no clue about game developing, I often wonder why so much time is spent on aesthetics?

Don't get me wrong, I like a game to look nice, but the first things loads of folk do when they get a game is minimilize the graphics output so they can actually play it, and interesting gameplay can have me hooked way quicker than how something looks (Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday the perfect example)