First things first, wishlist us on Steam!
We’ve been pretty busy over the last several months making as many updates and fixes as we could before we announced our “Coming Soon”. So many updates in fact that this may be one of the longest articles yet! But we need your help to make it a success. We need you, interested gamer, to wishlist us on Steam! You can visit our Steam page by clicking the button above, and once you’re there you can opt to wishlist and follow us for updates on the platform.
Onto the Updates!
We’ll be listing these updates a little non-traditionally by going into a little bit of detail and showing them off with either videos or screenshots. If you’re more interested in the Update TLDR, scroll down below. You’ll also be able to see the more minor changes we’ve made that don’t exactly warrant a whole section.
New Support Unit: The Medusa
If you’ve been keeping up with our social media, you may already know but we’ve implemented our 4th unit into the game. The Medusa is a ranged support unit, capable of summoning snakes that will slither down the lane, dealing damage to the first enemy they hit. More importantly, the Medusa can petrify an enemy when charged up! Petrified enemies are frozen in place for 2 seconds, and when hit they do not get invincibility frames. This allows you and your allies to combo on the petrified unit, dealing massive damage! But watch out, if you can deploy the Medusa, so can your opponents!
Medusa Stats:
- Hit Points: 30
- Tile Accessibility: Ground and Water
- Processing Power to Create: 2
- Research Required: Medusa
- Tier 4, Units branch
- Costs 200 Research Points
- Basic Attack: Snake Summon
- 5 damage on hit
- Slightly slower than the Archer’s arrow
- Can be hit/destroyed by enemy attacks
- Charged Attack: Petrifying Gaze
- Gives the first enemy in the lane the “Petrified” status effect
- Petrification lasts 2 seconds
- Takes 1 second to charge
New Character Illustrations!
We’ve taken some time to illustrate new character designs to fit more in line with the world we’re creating. You’ll be able to see these new designs for our main characters, Peter, Guy, and Annie, within the first act of our campaign. But if you can’t wait to see their new looks, we’ll show you now! (If you like these illustrations, you should check out more of the artist’s work on her twitter: christinya (^˵◕ω◕˵^) (@stinkl1ng))
Improved UI/UX: Drag and Drop Finally
When we started this project, we did a couple things that were less than user friendly. Creating units and squads was implemented fairly quickly and simply so we could test the other parts of the game. As the game has matured and we’ve tested the other parts more, we realized the old systems had to go. The storage of units was changed from each individual unit being a unique object, to the player having a pool of each unit class to draw from. Then we completely changed the format of the UI to accommodate drag and drop, making unit/squad creation so much faster!
Now instead of clicking on the unit class you want to make every time, you can just queue up as many as you want to make in a few clicks. Switching the order is also easier as you can just take the units you queued up, and drag them to the back of the queue. Some other slight changes will need to be made to get really specific, but for now we think it’s in an acceptable state.
For consistency’s sake, we’ve done the same for our “Spell Loadout” menu. Notice how there’s a description box for the spells as well? That’s been a reoccurring theme with our UI updates to give players all the information they need to play. Picking which spells you want to take can’t be any easier than this right?
New Backgrounds and Battlefields
You may have noticed that with some of the other videos that we have new backgrounds and effects. We wanted to add some variety to the world, while not being overly distracting. Geometric patterns and icons were our go to in order to create interesting backgrounds that are easy on the eyes. Feel free to admire the work, our artist would appreciate it. (You can find his twitter here: Jefé (@JefeLo_))
Research and Notifications!
With Net King’s Call being a strategy game and all, there needs to be some sort of tech tree/upgrade system right? Currently we’re still creating art assets for the tech tree, so we’re stuck with placeholders for now. However, the functionality is there! You can use Research Points to unlock new abilities, spells, and perhaps most importantly, units. The Swordsman, Archer, and Plague Doctor are all available within the first couple turns of research, but in order to unlock the Medusa and some other not yet revealed units, you’ll need to convert more Processing Power into Research Points. Additionally, if you’re not researching techs or building units now, you will get notifications on the side of your screen reminding you to use your turn to the fullest! In fact we won’t even let you continue taking turns unless you have some sort of research in progress (but don’t worry, you don’t actually have to have any Research Points if you really want to be like that).
Update TLDR
+Unveiled the Steam page as “Coming Soon”, which you should totally go visit and wishlist us on.
+Added the Medusa to the game.
+Implemented new character illustrations for Peter, Guy, Annie, and the currently implemented units.
+Updated UI to be more user friendly, implementing drag and drop design, adding help/tooltips to various objects.
+Changed how units are stored and handled in game.
+Added new backgrounds and effects to the game depending on map type, battlefield type, etc.
+Added new Coast battlefield where the backline is entirely water. Ground units cannot stand in water.
+Implemented proper research into the game, with unlockable abilities, spells and units.
+Added notifications for build queues, research, etc.
+Updated Overworld Camera to be less janky.
+Updated map tile preview icons to look better/less placeholder like.
+Added new spell icons and descriptions.
+Added new spells, such as “AntiVirus Down”, “Turbo Connection”, and “ConvertTile(Water);”, etc.
+Implementing new sound tracks, such as character themes and environment themes.
+Updated tutorial mission to be simplified and part of the main campaign.
+Working on new public demo.
+Currently in the middle of implementing unique unit abilities/interactions on the strategic board.
+Brought on board a new Rigger/Animator to help speed production of units into the game.
Bug fixes and known bugs
+Fixed pathing bugs on the strategic board where the enemy units would get into an infinite loop because they’re trying to target something that another unit is blocking. Long tests have been run but I’m always going to be suspicious about this.
+Fixed bug where after a mission the territories all disappear.
+Fixed player being able to capture their own buildings.
+Fixed a bug when selecting a unit for movement, it would display inaccessible tiles as available to move to.
+Fixed a bug where the player would be able to quickly click on menus and open multiple menus at once. Calm down fast hands.
-There’s a rare bug where a unit can get the “Dead” status effect but still be alive. Thus creating an invincible unit. This is priority number one to splat.
-There’s an interesting bug where the AI opponent can move multiple units at once.
-There’s a bug when the AI ends their turn, they can sometimes end it twice somehow. This doesn’t affect gameplay, but pings sound effects multiple times.
Developer Thoughts:
Apologies for the lack of devlogs
We’ve been working just about every day of the week to update the game, get assets, and contacting the right people to get this game to be what we envision it. It’s great to finally be writing this post and sharing all of the updates we’ve made (although I’m probably forgetting a few little details here and there as I write this). We’re more active on Twitter and Discord currently, so if you want more frequent updated you should join up with us there. We’ll also be posting updates on our Community Hub page as well, and hope to see you in the discussions!
While we’re talking about social media, here’s some extra link placement for you:
Steam: Net King’s Call on Steam (steampowered.com)
Twitter: Greystone Games (@Greystone_Games)
Discord: https://discord.gg/Kwv7qyp
What's Coming Up
More Research. More Spells.
At the moment we have the units tree just about done, but now we need to implement the trees for Spells, Diplomacy, Tactical, and Resource techs. We also currently have 11 spells in game, but there could always be more.
Animated Cinematic for Gameplay Trailer
We’ve already created a cinematic for our preview/Kickstarter trailer, but since it went so well we’re going to animate a small sequence for the gameplay trailer. Can’t show it yet but we’re excited to drop that.
More Tutorialization
We currently have a simple tutorial for the strategic board and battlefield, but we need to make a decent tutorial for the Overworld, and probably some added tutorials for capturing buildings and different game modes on the strategic board. Shouldn’t be too hard.
More Characters. More Units.
We have promises to keep making new characters and definitely need to add more units. There’s at least two units modeled and programmed in that just need rigs and animations to be implemented. We’ll be working around the clock to get those to you ASAP!
VoxPop Games is pretty cool, go check them out
If you haven’t heard of a company called VoxPop Games and are a streamer, game developer, or PC gamer, keep reading. They’re creating a brand new online distribution platform for video games, similar to Steam, Itch.io, Gamejolt, etc. The goal of this platform is to create a new source of revenue for streamers with a peer to peer model. Streamers and users can promote games, while developers can set aside future gains for these groups in order to get more exposure, helping everyone in the process. Of course the people at VoxPop know better than we do on this subject and you can find them linked below. We’ll be putting up our free demo on VoxPop when they launch!
Wrapping Up
Thanks for reading through our devlog! If you want to follow and have some influence on our development, you can join us on Discord, follow us on Twitter, and wishlist/follow us on Steam “Coming Soon” page. A link to our Discord server will be posted below. Feel free to ask us any questions or send us any feedback you may have!
