We’re Rich Talent and this is our developer blog about our work in progress game, Salem City (Also a working title). We’re a team of 9 students at Falmouth University, 3 programmers, 2 artists, 2 designers, an animator and a writer. The purpose of this blog is to keep track of what we’ve been working on ourselves, as well as to show people outside of the team what we’ve been working on and hopefully, a finished project at the end of it all. We’ll be writing weekly posts detailing what we’ve been working on as well as some things we learn about development and working as part of a team until the deadline of April 26th.

Salem city is a multiplayer god-view turn based strategy game where you play as a god in the neo-noir city of 1940s Salem. You must recruit followers with faith points, build your military and religious strength and wipe your opponents off of the map. Within all of this, we plan on keeping the game relatively simple, as we aim to provide more accessibility than we feel other strategy games on the market currently provide. If you have questions about anything in our blog, comment below or on our Facebook page and we’ll reply.



Ashley (Programmer)

For just under a week I was working on camera movement inside the Unreal Engine. Unfortunately, due to the lack of experience I was making slow progress with the mechanics. Because of the slow progress towards the game Kyle and I knew that if we kept going at the current rate we would not have a working alpha version by Christmas. Kyle and I have years of experience with the Unity game engine and after a team meeting, the team agreed to move the game into the Unity engine allowing us programmers to make faster headway with the mechanics. Kyle and I understand that Chris might struggle with the Unity engine because of the lack of experience however We’re around to help out where needed.

Currently I have created and camera mouse script which allows the player to move around the level by clicking and dragging and have also made another script that also allows the player to move around the level using the arrow keys on the keyboard.



Kyle (Programmer)

We had worked on the game for a little while beforehand in Unreal Engine 4 but due to myself and Ashley being completely new to the engine, our work output was slowed severely and as a team, we decided to change over to the Unity engine. This decision was made more than halfway through the week though, so we haven’t been able to get a whole lot set up in engine at the moment. I set a little test scene up though, as well as some types for player units and the tiles themselves. I would like to set up an automatic process for giving the tiles their coordinates, as going through each tile and giving them their coordinates manually will become painful for designers later down the line and also gives the chance for coordinates to be incorrectly entered, as I’ve already experienced. I hope to work out a solution for this next week and will likely look at creating a Unity tool in order to achieve this.

Most of what I’ve been working on is just in preparation for the rest of the project so there isn’t a whole lot to show off, but below is a GIF of my lovely test scene. Each tile has its data set up and the player will spawn on one of the 2 ‘base tiles’ marked with a red material, changing their data to indicate the tile is taken for their faction. Up to 8 players can be spawned and each will get their own base tile, provided there are enough in the scene. You can select the player unit on screen and move it to each of the tiles, providing it has enough action points, which are reset each turn (Currently just bound to space).



Chris (Programmer)

Since we’ve moved from Unreal Engine 4 to Unity’s game engine, I will have to learn both the UI of Unity and also the language C#. This is a completely new language to me and therefore will no doubt mean I shall encounter many barriers throughout the development of our game. Currently I have been researching how networking would work within Unity and how about I could adapt the tutorials I’ve been looking at to work within our game.

Carlton (Artist)

This week I finished a horse model for the god of war

This is some of the concept work for it and for the main temples or ‘bases’ of the factions. I chose to model and get the shape right before adding more design so that the process of character modelling was a lot faster and easier

Josh W (Artist)

This week I set to work on some unit concepts. These include followers, faith militants, guardians of the faith and the God of war’s champion. These are in a coloured noir style reminiscent of the Wolf among us. The below is champion of the god of war. A powerhouse of strength and a champion boxer, blessed by the god of war. I played about with a couple of different ideas including giving him amour but I felt like it didn’t fit with our theme. Another idea was inspired by Solomon Grundy he would have tattered cloths and a ripped suit but again I couldn’t see him walking about in our world. That’s when it ‘hit’ me a Boxer. It fits into the time period as well as fitting into the ‘warrior’ archetype one would associate with the god of war.



Isaac (Animator)

Hey guys! Today has been quite the week where I’ve just been experimenting, making some animations and seeing where I could add more interesting elements to the game!

One of my first tasks was creating the building animations such as buy, build and destruction, I had a little fun with it and made the animations quite playful (bouncy as hell!).

I must say that cracking down on the shatter tool and how it works was an absolute nightmare, even though this animation is for of the shrines and it’s a placeholder, I decided to make the task a little more interesting, essentially gaining knowledge out of it. In the end I think it was worth it, give a much more intriguing destruction.

I also tried playing around with the lightning effect since it had me quite interested, honestly think that I could do things with this technique that’ll make our game look superb! The gif I’m showing right now is a batch rendered version but I’d be curious to see how it’d look in engine.

Anyways, that’s me for the week, ciao!



Conor (Designer)

Due to our lack of an audio specialist, I have taken on that role secondary to my design work. I have very little experience in this field and therefore spent a good chunk of time attempting to better myself through means such as tutorials and general practice in-software. Due to the nature of our game however, it has become obvious that there will be little required in terms of music, so I have recently decided to put this on the backseat and focus more on my design work.

This design work has included preparation for play testing through the creation of a balancing document that includes every number within the game’s system, with a battle simulation as well. We don’t currently have a playable version of the game, but once we do, this will make play testing a much easier task as it will be easy to track any variables as we change them. Not only this, but I’ve also been looking into the initial stages of the UI, beginning with creating a flowchart which maps out how all the UI elements link together. This is currently in its early stages and I will continue to work on it more in the upcoming week.



Josh K (Designer)

My initial contributions to the game’s development were the first iteration of the world, which was pitched to the group early on, as well as the game’s core mechanics in a prototype made up on a whiteboard shown below. After this prototype was chosen to be made into our full game project my first task was to play test it. I took it around some of my team and other students in the studio to get their opinions. I took down notes, timed matches, and changed rules/made tweaks in different rounds to find the best player experience. After this I moved onto a new, Hex based board printed on paper for a better looking, and better playing game, which then had to be play tested as well.

Next for me was to assist the writer, Dan, in editing and changing the world to fit with our game more. An issue I came across was that in concept art stages I failed to communicate the world and its aesthetic to the artists properly. This led to a miscommunication of art direction that had to be changed. After talking this over with our animator Isaac, we decided to create a document detailing the world, its aesthetic, possible colour palettes and outside inspirations such as The Wolf Among Us, L.A. Noire and The Maltese Falcon. This document was posted to the group slack and helped clear up any miscommunication and got the art back in the right direction.



Dan (Writer)

So far, I have written some information about the game world, which is based on Josh K’s world pitch. I am very happy about this as I was particular impressed with Josh’s pitch and although I initially struggled to come up with additional content for it as I believed that the premise had already been created, I am now confident that I have been able to expand on it and create some very interesting backstory and history. I have also created some information about the current events of the game world which I am also pleased with. As this is game that incorporates factions, one of my roles has been to come with these factions and their respective leaders. I am particularly pleased with my work here as I believe that I have created factions and leaders which have interesting and somewhat original concepts. Finally I have been asked to create some flavour text for each of the playable units of our game which I am also confident that they will make for an entertaining and hopefully somewhat humorous read for players.