Net King's Call V0.2.5 Public Build Update, battlefields linked to strategic field.
Here we are again! In the latest update for Net King’s Call V0.2.5, we’ve linked the battlefield to the strategic field, but what does this mean? The biggest thing about this is that now, depending on where your squads are placed on the board, combat will change to look like where they were standing! For example, if you’re fighting on a grassland, there will be grass on the battlefield. No more boring grey panels (although I did like them!).
With this new system in place, we’re able to make custom battlefields that can appear on either side of the board in battle. This way we don’t have any wonky procedurally generated terrain which can ruin the experience, and we can rotate them out over 1 to 100 presets.
We’ve also made some additional bug fixes and minor changes as well, such as the grass tiles now having grass objects on top of them.
Updates
+Added Battlefield Terrain system, changing the board in combat depending on where the squads were when it was started
+Added grass objects to the grass tiles.
+Changed map generation so that all buildings are linked by land to the territory’s castle.
+Added “Rock” obstacle on the battlefield. This terrain piece blocks projectiles and Swordman charged “Step-Slash” attacks, however it has a limited amount of health (50). Take cover behind it or shoot it down!
Bug fixes and known bugs
+Fixed bug which would stop the death animation of a unit if they were killed while they had another unit standing on top of them.
-Swordsman occasionally gets stuck while charge attacking on the other side of the field. Only returns if it is able to slash again.
+Fixed a bug where the timer/transition panel on the Overworld would create an infinite loop after ending a turn.
-The player can “capture” buildings they already own, but this doesn’t do anything when captured again.
Current Gameplay Preview
Developer Thoughts:
Battlefield Changes
As said above, we’re quite excited to work on new battlefields to make combat more interesting and dynamic. While the amount of tiles/battlefields are limited at the moment, we’ll be expanding into making battlefields with trees, water, and other hazards in the future. The next on our to do list with this is a “stump”. Compared to the rock, this terrain piece would allow projectiles to fly over it, but it won’t allow anyone to stand over it. In short, protection from Swordsmen, cover for Archers.
On Maps
Currently in our Overworld, territories generate 18×18 tile maps (that’s around 320 or so tiles total!) which take a bit to traverse. While in the future it would be nice to fight on large battlefields, at our current state we’re thinking of reducing the size of these maps to something slightly larger than our current demo. We’ll possibly even make this part of our progression where players will start the game going to small territories, which will scale with the player’s progress.
What's Coming Up
Research and Spells
In the Overworld, we’re currently making an effort to get it to be a “complete” game loop. Meaning that there is progression and more to come back to after you finish one mission. One way we’re improving this is by implementing a research system and more spells to unlock. In the next build, we hope to show this off and finally make use of the “research” resource we have sitting in our UI.
Animated Cinematic and Kickstarter
We currently have a new cinematic in the works which will act as one of the promotional trailers for Net King’s Call. This trailer will mostly be doing world building, and should show our vision for what this game can become. Currently, we’re scheduled to finish this mid-late July, and we’re excited to show you the final product.
Shorter Tutorial
Playing through our tutorial these past couple months, we’re beginning to realize that it’s very invasive and annoying. When people play games they usually want to get to the game as soon as possible. Being bogged down by menus and dialogue is not the experience you came for. In order to get players to the game faster, we’ll be shortening up the tutorial dialogue into smaller snippets (or maybe just a skip button will do?)
VoxPop Games
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! We hope you enjoyed playing Net King’s Call V0.2.5 and if you haven’t tried it yet you can download this build on our itch.io page (which we’ll link below). Also, if you want to follow our development (and some dev-venting*), you can join us on Discord, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to our mailing list. A link to our Discord server will be posted below, and feel free to ask us any questions or send us any feedback you may have!
