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[JobLeonard]

Nice! The gif is just a bit too fast, I can barely read the tool-tip

[Greipur]

Nice! The gif is just a bit too fast, I can barely read the tool-tip

Ok, here's a written version:

"Followers who are close to death and live in the savannah, give food to antelopes."



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Tomas has implemented that priests go around and convert other cities to their own doctrine. This is based on influence which is its own system apart of the city needs that also informs their decision to change doctrine.

[JobLeonard]

How many cities will a typical game have?

[Greipur]

How many cities will a typical game have?

If we're talking about the finished game we've set our goal for a maximum of 20 cities, whether that cap is hard-coded or a dynamic result of the system I can't say right now. But we're acutely aware that things would spiral out of control (performance-wise) if that amount was unlimited. So let's say 5-10 cities for a typical game, this is of course when we've several islands implemented.

[JobLeonard]

Just asking because I'm wondering if you can end up with just one doctrine, or whether others can make a come-back. The more cities, the more fine-grained your buffer, of course.

[Greipur]

Just asking because I'm wondering if you can end up with just one doctrine, or whether others can make a come-back. The more cities, the more fine-grained your buffer, of course.

Ah, I see. Doctrines are mainly derived from city needs, which will vary depending on what they can achieve, which in turn is affected by their local environment. Since the player will order them to do things that will affect their needs, which in turn will have an effect on the doctrine. The influence is just one of the factors, as such it's unlikely that the whole world will have the same doctrine.

It would also defeat the point of the overall faith system, because if there's only one doctrine the player could very easily write commandments that would always please or displease everyone. It takes out the guessing game and political aspect of the experience. Crest is meant to be more like the Democracy series where there will always be someone that is unhappy with what you say.

[JobLeonard]

Ok, so how does doctrine conversion work then? Does it shift needs to imagined needs, like marketing makes people crave consumer goods they don't need?

[Greipur]

Ok, so how does doctrine conversion work then? Does it shift needs to imagined needs, like marketing makes people crave consumer goods they don't need?

Tomas tells me that the current implementation of the influence system is a separate mechanic which brainwashes the other city. High influence makes the priests work more efficient. When the people in the city have been brainwashed they are momentarily suspended from the city needs influence. And since their new doctrine affects what things they will follow their city needs will later align with the new doctrine. We're probably going to iterate on this system in the future, but this is what we're going for in the Faith Module update.





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We've decided to improve the mechanic for downvoting and upvoting commandments. Before commandments that didn't have a condition that affected someone stayed on 0 votes, and basically stayed forever in the commandment tablet. We have now come up with a new mechanic called "unaffected" (the X in the interface), basically if a condition doesn't affect people that counts as a downvote. This solves two problems hopefully, the first being that commandments will not stay perpetually, and now the player can understand if their commandments went completely off the mark.

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I'm currently working on the tutorial, suprise! But I took a small break today to work on the "logo" for the update, inspired by Armello's update visual language (and Darkest Dungeon). This will hopefully be appreciated by websites and blogs and spread that way, but I will also use a version in the end of the trailer, and probably as the YouTube thumbnail as well.

What do you think of this mockup?

The basis for the logo comes from the Faith symbol, which was made in Illustrator. Since Blender accepts .svg files it was easy to export into Blender and extrude. Really recommend this feature, import it and then use the "convert to" feature.

Here's another image teasing about the features. Please let me know what you think, what works well for League of Geeks' game Armello might not be clear for Crest.

[JobLeonard]

Perhaps a bit ironic; since the eye is strongly associated with Illuminati which arose during the enlightenment

[Greipur]

Perhaps a bit ironic; since the eye is strongly associated with Illuminati which arose during the enlightenment

I see your point, it's pretty ironic for a Western eye (ahaha), so that's certainly an obvious parallel, but I think there's room for a wider space of symbolism here, at least when you look at the wider context of the eye as a religious symbol. We have symbols such as the Eye of Horus, Hamsa, Third Eye (in general) and of course the Eye of Providence which was first a religious symbol that many today associate with illuminati and conspiracy theories.

When I designed the Faith symbol a few months back (you can see it in the city interface, among other things) I had a really hard time to illustrate the concept of "faith" in an abstract manner. I first thought of praying hands, but that's a very Christian notion, at least in the manner I had in mind. I eventually came to the concept of an eye, that faith means that you see clearly (at least in their context), or see beyond the mortal realm. To me the eye is a very good symbol for religion and faith, which I think religious people from the world over thought as well.

Sure, most of the people who will buy this game will be situated in the West probably, so you could argue that the Western eye is all that matters. But still, I'd argue that the eye as a concept can be used for more than freemasons or illuminati. Maybe the logo looks too much like the Eye of Providence? Feel free to give me pointers on how to avoid that, maybe I've the time to tweak it.

[JobLeonard]

Oh, I agree that the interpretation I gave was very Euro-centric . I wonder though if the particular way the eye looks can help address that.

For example, I would never say the same thing of the eye of Horus, it's just too Egyptian. Same with Hamsa.

Perhaps there are more African artworks of eyes that you could be inspired by to make the eye look such that it reduces the Euro-baggage in terms of associations?

[Greipur]

Puh, been a few hectic days to prepare for the Faith Module launch, which is tomorrow. Here's the trailer.

I will resume the almost daily posting soon, when we're resuming proper production and won't focus on bug fixing.

[JobLeonard]

 


Now that is a trailer

[Greipur]

Now that is a trailer

Thank you, Job! 


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If anyone is interested trying the new update out it goes live in about 8 hours on Steam and itch. As always feel free to share the trailer, it helps us a great deal.

[oldblood]

Wow, love that new trailer. Great mood, music, narration... It all comes together really nicely!

[Greipur]

Wow, love that new trailer. Great mood, music, narration... It all comes together really nicely!

Much appreciated, Jon.


The narrator is spoken word artist Vanessa Kisuule, I'm very happy that she came aboard and collaborated so... seamlessly. She basically took my rough text and translated it into something much more eloquent, without losing the message.








The trailer probably took me 3 weeks, a majority of that was of course planning and making the pre-rendered scenes. Capturing the gameplay takes me probably a day, at the most. By now we've done a lot of trailers, and I think the reason why this one is decent is because we've iterated and iterated for so long on how to communicate about Crest in the video format. I would recommend to all people who stay in Early Access a long time to look at trailers in the same way as their iterative development.



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I'm really hoping that we'll get a few eyeballs with that one, to ensure that it happens we're spending a lot of marketing funds, to coincide with the Summer Sale on Steam that started yesterday. This time we're trying out a joint effort with contacting lets players, traditional press (these are managed by The Indie Bros.) and Facebook ads. I'll probably write an analysis on what worked after the Summer Sale.

[JobLeonard]

She knocked it out of the park! But the visuals and the music match the narration perfectly as well

[Greipur]

She knocked it out of the park! But the visuals and the music match the narration perfectly as well

Oh sure, it was a good mix overall. I'm proud of my work as well. Roland did a good job with the music as well. Speaking of the trailer, thought I could share some stills from it.

[TheWanderingBen]

Finally got around to watching the trailer -- exciting stuff guys! The entire video had a great tribal feeling, and the black material on coloured backgrounds turned out excellent Job well done!

[Greipur]

Finally got around to watching the trailer -- exciting stuff guys! The entire video had a great tribal feeling, and the black material on coloured backgrounds turned out excellent Job well done!

Thanks, Ben!



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We've had a few new let's plays and some good feedback on our forum and we've begun thinking about tweaking the commandment system.












I think what the commandment system currently does with the up and downvote system is frustrating the player to much and takes away the feeling of being listened too. We need some way of keeping the doctrinal disputes, without frustrating the player. We're currently brainstormning in the team, but I'd gladly accept input from you lot.