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[LRex]

I've been working on a game for quite some years now, but have recently picked up the pace and this seemed like a great place to share my progress as I get closer to beta and release.

Current progress is that the game is on Steam Greenlight, which is very exciting.

I have a blog, where the progress has been chronicled so far. Open alpha is over, but there will be an early access before the 1.0 release. There is also a forum with some documentation and development information.







Highlights of the features planned for 1.0:
* Turn-based 4X fantasy strategy game.
* Randomly generated worlds, with randomly generated races, cultures, dungeons, cities, pantheons and organizations.
* Different games modes. You can play as a warlord bent on conquest and empire building or a wizard with enigmatic goals.
* Fight battles in a turn-based tactical battle engine or let the game resolve them.
* A research system where new 'technologies' or areas of arcane research can be unlocked as the game progresses.
* When playing as a wizard, you research spells and rituals of increasing power. Seek out ancient artifacts, forbidden tomes and forge pacts with extra-planar creatures.
* Defend against planar invasions, or take the fight to the alternate planes in search of arcane power, riches or military allies.
* As a wizard, you can manage your tower, constructing upgrades available as you unlock them through research. Create a wondrous tower with a splendid bazaar, stables and enchanted gardens, make it a bastion of armories and mystic forges, or dig deep into the bowels of the earth and connect with the underworld realms.
* Manage your cities, constructing buildings and shepherding their development along various paths, such as martial, learning, spiritual or even crime and decadence.
* Random events to spice up gameplay and help weave interesting stories.
* Hidden cults plot and scheme. Uncover their hidden agendas, fight their intrigues or even try to manipulate them into becoming your pawns.
* Hire mercenary sellswords, summon magical allies or raise regiments from your towns and castles. Enhance regiments with attachments and upgrades.
* Design custom unit types by choosing from unlocked templates and selecting various modifiers, enchantments, weapons and armor.
* Recruit mighty heroes and send them to explore dungeons, ancient ruins and forgotten temples - or place them in charge of your armies and cities and forge a mighty empire.
* Ancient evils slumber. Beware waking them or taking too long to complete your goals. Defend your holdings against all consuming gigantic oozes, the mad ghoul king, eldritch horrors, or other ancient evils of great power.
* Customizable settings: size of the world, cultural and racial variety, planar invasions frequency, rival wizards/warlords, how dangerous the world is, rarity of magic, and many other things.
* Built to be very moddable. There is a custom map/world editor, and the content generator can be modded via text files.

Features planned for future updates:
* Play as a demigod trying to ascend to godhood, an ancient evil imprisoned/slumbering/dead/planeshifted/etc. trying to regain power and indirectly manipulating the world, or an shadowy organization (lycanthropic warrior monks bent on infecting the world with lycanthropy, mad cultists trying to bring about the apocalypse, secret crusaders against evil fighting to contain undead and demonic foes, dragon worshippers helping out dragons do dragon-y things, etc.)
* Separate maps for other planes
* Multi-player

[LRex]

New Build: V0.9.31
Mostly a bug fixing build, but a few improvements as well.

* Researching Worship adds a religious-type follower.
* Researching Mana Nodes will now alert you to any nodes discovered in already explored territory.
* Followers can be sent to explore freely if you don't care if they explore in a particular province.
* Artist and Musician followers added. When the Ancient Evils start corrupting followers soon, artists will be handy for their ability to create unhinged and disturbing works of art, with the proper inspiration.
* Bugfix: Memory leak related to music.
* Bugfix: Crash related to hero generation.
* Bugfix: Call for Heroes exploit to generate unlimited followers.
* Bugfix: Crash related to the Santor's Vengeance event fixed.
* Bugfix: Followers are no longer assigned classes reserved for dungeon bosses.
* Bugfix: Quest to find a mana node no longer gives a reward every single turn after it is completed.
* Bugfix: Custom regiment types can now be deleted.
* Bugfix: Naming custom regiment types did not work in some cases.
* Bugfix: Shrine construction did not complete.
* Bugfix: Wizard tower upgraded to give more slots now have proper labels.

[LRex]

New Build: V0.9.32

* Ancient Evils now interact with the world, marking and influencing characters, sending strange dreams, spawning monsters, creating climate/terrain change, spreading blight or other terrain modifiers (primal, enchanted, etc.), unleashing rains of blood, corrupting heroes or local wildlife, and much more. Many events are still bit rough, and there is way too many to have extensively tested them all, so expect some bugs in this area.
* Regiments now replenish losses at a rate of 5 per turn.
* Followers now gain levels as they gain experience, potentially learning new skills.
* Followers can learn new skills and acquire new traits through events and assignments. Ie sending someone as an emissary to a neutral city
will eventually make them better at diplomacy – or make them depressed or paranoid from the stress of being a terrible diplomat for year.
* Followers now have a patron deity.
* Constructed shrines will be dedicated to the patron deity of the religious leader during construction (if any).
* Bugfix: Crash related to pathfinding fixed.
* Bugfix: Several world generation crashes fixed.
* Bugfix: Crash related to minor neutral ai processing fixed.
* Bugfix: Quest to find a mana node no longer gives a reward every single turn after it is completed (if an army moved).
* Bugfix: Research duration estimate corner case fixed.

Also updated to a new and much nicer forum software for the "official" forums.

[LRex]

New Build: V0.9.33

A small patch with a bug fix to the new Ancient Evil content, and improvements to various mechanics:

* Army General task now requires either the Command trait or Martial type. (previously only the quite rare commanders were assignable).
* Free Exploration assignments will now eventually come to an end as the expedition tires and/or runs out of supplies. Grants experience and
creates a couple of turns of fatigue for the character. Traits and class affect the expected length of the expedition.
* Cities: There is now a variable construction time per building type. Cultural traits and leader traits affect construction time. Assigning
workers increases construction progress.
* Bug Fix: Some Ancient Evil actions were not properly assigning traits.

Documentation has been added in the forums, now covering the core game concepts. I will update with current status, known major issues, a development road map and build history as one of the next things.

[LRex]

New Build: V0.9.34

* Marauding armies not controlled by a faction will now roam around looking for trouble or seek out civilizations to attack, depending on type. Previously they just stood around and fiercely defended their hex. Depending on their type they might not conquer cities they defeat. No more rampaging beasts taking control of cities.
* Nomad raiders now return to the camp and recruit new raiders to replace losses.
* More random character names.
* Units of races with natural armor no longer gain the full effect of equipped armor. E.g. Dragonmen in full plate are no longer effectively invulnerable.
* Cultures will have a greater variety and number of unit types generated.
* City buildings now display exactly which units are unlocked by building them, rather than just the general type. If no units are unlocked, the type will be displayed, since it will combine with other buildings. E.g. a Smithy unlocks Medium Armor and a Training Ground Professional-type units – to unlock a Professional Medium Armor unit, both need to be built.
* Templar class added for followers.
* Followers now need to be in or near an Army to be able to join it or become general.
* Some random events which were occuring too often have been made less likely to occur.
* Cities now accumulate wealth.
* City progression mechanics improved to flow a bit more smoothly and give fewer followers towards the mid-game. The display of city attribute progress should also be more intuitive.
* At game start, fortresses now tend to be controlled by nearby minor cities, if no rival warlord controls them, instead of being strangely unaligned fortresses.
* Orcs and Human Barbarians have a greater chance of having nomad camps.
* Similar messages are collected in the notification bar to reduce spam during periods of high world activity.

Also added more documentation and development info to the forums.

[LRex]

New Build: V0.9.37

Espionage, enchanted items, bug fixes, and stuff.

Been working on porting the game to Unity.

Here are some screenshots:

[LRex]

Made a build with a real installer. Getting closer to having everything ported to Unity. It's boring to do the same stuff 'again'.

https://wizardsandwarlords.net/files/WizardsAndWarlordsSetup.exe

[Cipheres]

I really like the whole concept of the game, it kind of reminds me of dwarf fortress.  Some screenshots of something besides the menu would be nice though.

[LRex]

Thanks for the encouragement, Cipheres, and yes I do need to add more screenshots. Since the Unity port is still in progress, it looks rather rough around the edges, but here is one I just took. But thanks for reminding me once, as others have done, that I need to improve the screenshots-to-words ratio. A lot of the assets are still placeholders, if anyone wonders about the mix of styles.

[LRex]

New build up. Did some work on Tyranny mechanics, but primary focus is still porting to Unity. The UI is almost fully functional compared to the pre-Unity build.

Had a funny test run - names are randomly generated and the possibilities are quite honestly vast. Game of Thrones season 6 is upon us, and the game gives me a Sheila Tarly and a Gilly as initial followers. I guess my game is a fan

I put a screenshot in the OP.

Link to build: https://wizardsandwarlords.net/files/WizardsAndWarlordsSetup.exe

(please do note, the current build is still buggy)

[LRex]

A new build is up - edging closer to having feature parity with my pre-Unity build. Had a test run where I got a halfling hero named "Bronson Lightningstick" - couldn't help but imagine a half-size Charles Bronson with hairy feet and a magic stick, shooting down baddies with bolts of lightning. Also had a test run where the randomly generated race of Dorklings had a city named Dorkelia!

There is no logic matching the race/culture name with city names, but this gave me the impetus to actually put this in. Not that elves should always live in Elfheim, halflings in Halflington and dwarves in Dwargburg, but I think for the randomly generated races and cultures it can really help create a narrative and more memorable world. I also like to take some time working on the generators when I need a few hours away from the drudgery of user interface work.

[LRex]

For holiday seasons and special days, I like to add something related. For Mother's Day I've added a Gaia/Mother-Earth type of deity to the random mythos generator. So in most cases, and especially so if there are druidic/shamanistic cultures, there will be a deity generated from this template.

Other ideas I had, but didn't have time to implement before the end of today was: events related to dragons and their eggs, events/world generation features related to cultures with the Matriarchy traits and generating parent characters for really important notable.

For latter (family trees), the UI for navigating/finding characters needs to better to not make this a usability nightmare, but I really want this in at some point. There is code tracking character relationships, including blood relations, but apart from alliance among followers, rivalry and the rare romance, there are not many events utilizing this system yet. As the game progresses it would be great to see the children of famous heroes grow up, track noble and royal houses, etc. Everything that can help support the narrative of the game world, and make it more memorable. It also needs to be something which can be mostly ignored for those who are not so interested in this aspect of the world.

[LRex]

Yay, finally got feature parity with my pre-Unity build. I am really stoked to be back at adding stuff now. Save game functionality is going to be somewhat boring, but it's also going to be great for bug reproduction and saving funny world generator results.

[LRex]

Another update of mostly bug fixing, usability and balance changes. A bit of mechanics as well, but the other stuff was really needed. Next up is dungeon boss battles! That's going to be fun to implement. Also working on save game functionality. I stopped maintaining the old save game system a long time ago, since it was buggy and keeping up with new functionality was annoying. So now I have to bite the bullet and make a new save game sub-system. It's really boring to be honest. There are no shortcuts, in my opinion.

Technical gobbledygook: I strongly dislike automated serialization frameworks, as they are invariably intrusive and interfere with how I want my model code structured. Chasing down bugs in reflection or injection based frameworks is also a great pain. So I actually prefer old-fashioned manual serialization, of course with good helper classes and an elegant interface, so that the amount of boilerplate is minimized, and manual reference rewiring is virtually eliminated.

[LRex]

The latest feature I have been working on is rivers, and roads are following in short order, so I thought I'd do a write-up on the design decisions involved. Please note the map graphics are still placeholders and not the final assets - especially the province borders, rivers and (non-existent) coastlines. For example, the final river graphics will make the stream direction more obvious.

I am really happy to finally have rivers in the game. Almost every fantasy world has a couple of rivers of geopolitical and historical significance, e.g. the Brandywine and Isen of Middle Earth, River Reik in the Old World of Warhammer, and the Trident of Westeros. In our world, the ancient civilizations and empires arose on the banks of  the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, Indus, the Rhine, the Seine, the Danube, the Volga, etc.

Rivers have a dual nature, forming a natural barrier useful to a defending army or as the site of a castle, but also providing a travel route for invaders and merchants. These aspects make good mechanics in a strategy game and help create an interesting world for the player to explore.

In Wizards and Warlords, the world is generated randomly. The first step of this process is creating a height map - a topographical map of the world. This divides the world into oceans, lowlands and hilly/mountainous highlands. Climate bands and the roll of the dice then distributes biomes throughout the world, resulting in forests, swamps, plains, jungles, deserts, tundra, etc. After this comes special natural resources and the more fantastical element. Finally the races, cultures, organizations and religions/pantheons are created.

The newly added generation of rivers is done after the topography is created, but before biomes and terrain are assigned. Rivers flow from mountains and hills, following the slope of the land, probably snaking through a continent before reaching the sea. The very first design decision I had to make was whether rivers should be placed ON tiles or BETWEEN tiles.

All tile-based strategy games have to make this choice, and there are advantages and disadvantages to both. Having rivers on tiles makes it easier to have cities and castles centered on them, and it is conducive to movement. The disadvantage is that it makes crossing the river a strange thing. Does it happen when entering a tile? When leaving it? Should the penalty be postponed and applied depending on how movement continues out of the tile, etc. And how if the tile has roads, it can really strange as the roads often up "overlaid" on the river in an odd way. Here is a mock-up of how this river implementation could look:

I ended up using the other approach, where rivers are located between tiles. This makes it very straightforward and intuitive to determine when the river is being crossed. The downside is that it becomes less obvious when a city located in an adjacent tile is actually located on the river. This will be solved by making the border of tiles a valid location for sites. This also makes great sense for coastal cities, border forts, castles guarding a mountain pass, etc. Here is a screenshot of a river in this style:

When generating rivers, something that occasionally will happen is that the river ends up flowing into a valley or basin, so it cannot continue towards the sea. It looked rather silly to just have a river abruptly end, and having rivers flow upwards is even more strange, even if this is a fantasy game. So I modified the world generator to create a lake in this scenario. Sometimes the lake will have end up taking up enough space to be adjacent to a downward slope, and be able to have a connecting river continue towards the sea. Like this:

I am still working on roads, but they will be inside the hexes, as the rivers in the first screenshot. This also means that a road crossing a river will have a bridge or ford - an interesting geopolitical objective and a great site for dramatic battles. As the final art assets are added, these will of course be represented by actual images of bridges, natural fords, etc.

Rivers are taken into consideration by the world generator when creating the terrain - swamps, jungles and forests are more commonly found near rivers than deserts and wastelands. Magma fields will tend to give way to basalt plains if they adjoin a river. I would like to add more fantastical waterways - rivers of lava, blood or acid, but that's for the feature backlog while more essential game play elements are expanded upon.

The toponomy system will also be expanded to name the rivers and lakes - as it currently does with provinces, nations and mountain ranges.

While the current graphics are quite raw, I hope that the addition of a few screenshots to this design diary helped convey the concepts, and give an idea of what the final result will look like.

[LRex]

I've made my first video of loading a game and a bit of clicking around in the UI.





The load game code is made as a customized binary format. Every object in the game data model supplies a load and a save method, with some extensions for global data and engine-defined objects. When saving and loading a tree of references is the built and processed without actually loading/saving the objects. The actual load/save of the individual objects is done as the final step after the tree has been created or converted into a graph of objects.

[LRex]

I've made a new video, now with audio commentary:


.

To be honest, that was a lot more difficult than expected. English is not my native tongue, so it's quite hard to keep a good flow of speech, while remembering everything. I am sure it will get easier with practice and less nerves about recording a monologue. I am quite fond of blabbering and talking about stuff that interests me, but the difference between talking to a person and a microphone was quite interesting.

[LRex]

New alpha game play video:



Slowly starting to get more comfortable making these videos. I am still a bit nervous, which makes the thing a bit slower and more dull than it could be, but I am finding easier to keep a flow going, and not have to start over constantly because I trip over my words or say something completely gibberish.

I have gotten into a habit of doing sort of dual progress updates: A post on my forums with continual updates on progress for each month (https://wizardsandwarlords.net/phpBB/viewforum.php?f=8) and then a (roughly) weekly update on my blog where go into more detail. I am trying to include more screenshots in the latter updates.

A nice milestone was when I reached a point where the AI opponents were active and exploring, conquering and investing resources. Felt really awesome to reveal the map (ie cheat) and just watch the AI go about empire-building. I can't wait for the world to become even more interactive and see stories and conflicts emerge. I've always loved reading AARs, and I really want to make a game that lends itself to this kind of narrative gameplay.

[LRex]

New video:

. Wasn't entirely happy with the last one, so I made one where I explain more things as I go along.

[LRex]

I've added an editor, allowing users to create custom maps and scenarios. This will also be a very handy debugging and testing tool, since it allows me to quickly set-up a very specific test scenario.