Following the Eons of War announcement from last Monday were going to start publishing weekly developer updates to keep the community engaged. These past seven days were pretty busy as we were receiving feedback from friends and fellow game developers. It definitely takes time to process it and even longer to implement. Its exciting to be getting any feedback at all though!

New Graphics

One of the points that people kept making after the announcement is that the game looks too indy, which is not the look and feel were going after. We decided to spend time updating main promo graphics and changing the look of the game itself. Here is an updated promo screen (yes, Jupiter will be an important part of the single-player campaign ;) ):
We updated the battle mode with new 3D models for energy spheres and ringworlds. We also made lighting more bold, added contrast to the nebula backdrop, and added the stardust effect. Stardust is hard to see in the screenshots but it makes the scene look way more epic when the camera moves.

Interface

We added a star info panel with several relevant stats like the total energy output, supernova countdown, and remaining resources. It was added, so players can make better tactical decisions about which stars to abandon and which ones to attack. Depending on unlocked research or type of map some star stats might be hidden.
We also updated UI icons, made buttons smaller, added the main menu (and consolidated it with the game over menu) in the battle mode, and made padding around some UI elements smaller.

Game Mechanics

After several playtesting sessions, we updated the following game mechanics:

• Stars have more initial resources and it takes longer to harvest them.
• Star luminosity (energy output) is now calculated based on the star type (it used to be hardcoded) and, as the game progresses, the mass is reduced proportionally to luminosity. It was tricky to get the balance between stars physical properties and the gameplay right. We ended up with a mass to energy conversion ratio thats far different from the famous E = mc equation :)
• Stars go supernova way before their mass hits zero (as it should be). Now its based on a random percentage (10-30%) of the initial mass.

Originally published on Vasinov Games.

[ 2018-10-09 03:09:34 CET ] [ Original post ]