Doors, Earth, and Patches

Hey folks,

Thanks to all of your responses last week in our Strawpoll we’ll be realigning the news going forward to focus on new assets and design changes to the game. Since the top spot in the poll was shared by both of these categories, we’re going to give you a small peek at both of them today, with more coming over the next few weeks. After that we’ll finish up with a few paragraphs that cover our overall development schedule going forward from today.

Concept Art: Midas Door

The Midas Door has been in the game for several months already, but it’s been using some rather… unfortunate looking placeholder art. Soon though, it will look very pretty:

This magical doorway is possessed by a very greedy demon. He can conjure an impenetrable barrier to protect your dungeon from even the most powerful assaults, but only for as long as you can keep him paid — for every swing your foes take at the door there will be a price to pay.

Beyond Earth: Updates to Terrain

Next week we’re going to take a look at several changes and improvements we’ve made to the various terrain types we have in the game, including the introduction of a few new ones.

Here’s a sneak peek at the placeholder art we’ve got for each terrain types… can you spot the new ones?

The Road to Release

Although we mentioned previously that we were planning to have Skirmish as the focus of our next major update, we are, unfortunately, not going to be able to meet that goal. We’re having to refocus our short-term efforts on the campaign in order to have it polished and localised before launch. This means that Skirmish will be coming a little later than we initially expected.

We’re also going to be slowing down our patches over the next few months for several reasons. The first is that due to the above, there simply isn’t a huge amount of content for us to be patching in as most of the work is going into the campaign. The second is that patches take time away from development, and over the coming weeks we’re going to digging deep into a much requested feature: saving and loading. However you can still expect one or two patches over the next few months, featuring a few new Aspects, new art, bug fixes and a few general improvements.

Finally, we’ve also decided to extend our temporary campaign preview into a permanent one. In addition to this we’ll also add the new tutorial (which is also the first level of the campaign) to the live build once it’s ready for public consumption.

Let us know how this sounds to you! We’re anxious for feedback and hope that you don’t terribly mind the change. We’ll keep you updated on our progress as we move forward with the campaign.

Extra Life Charity Stream (Saturday October 25th @ 4:00PM UTC)

Several members of the Subterranean Games team are participating in the Extra Life stream marathon this weekend, consider dropping by to chat and play games with us! We’ll be playing some Civ: BE, WFTO Multiplayer, LoL and probably some other games. Click here to check out our Extra Life profile and donate!

We’ll be back next week with a lengthy post on terrain changes.

Until next time Underlord,

– WFTO Team

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