Hey everyone!
In the last Devlog some of the team, were packing their bags and heading off to Köln for gamescom 2019. The team are now back and working hard on the next update and we are very happy to report that gamescom was a resounding success with Foundation being nominated for Best Strategy Game in the gamescom 2019 awards!.
We met many new fans as well as veterans of the game. The booth was full from start to end and we would like to say a big thank you to everyone that dropped by the booth during the week! Thanks also to those that braved the photobooth where it was all getting very medieval.
Whilst we were in Germany showing off Foundation, the rest of the team were still back in Quebec City so let’s find out what they have been up to whilst we were away.
To help the Gameplay Programmers Ben has been working on a behaviour tree Debugger which will show the current state of a villager in the Hurricane editor. This will make a big difference when searching for issues and bugs in the behaviour of the villagers, particularly as we add more content to the game.
Max has also been hard at work on the dev tools to improve the development process. One such improvement is allowing the Hurricane editor to be ‘moddable’, using Lua, by any of the developers. This will allow them to create their own functions/actions in the editor which are more targeted at their own individual workflow and job role.
On top of this, he has also been working on LOD generation, in order to increase optimization for low-end graphics cards.
Christopher and Loup-Gabriel have been working on Weather Systems. This will be a new environmental feature that has no direct impact on gameplay but will help to immerse the player in the world.
Each map will have Weather Systems configured individually to both add variety and ambiance to the maps.
Weather Systems are still work in progress but below you can see a couple of examples of work so far.
Additionally, Christopher has been taking an initial look at Villager life cycles including aging and eventually the death of a Villager.
As well as the Weather Systems Loup-Gabriel has also been creating placeholders for all the upcoming buildings in the game. These are basic visuals that will help to get an idea of how everything will look in the final game and make sure everything is fitting together visually.
He has also been working on some new decorative items for the stone bridge that will be placeable on bridge nodes.
You may have seen a horse rider in need of coffee in a recent Social Media post… Well, Michaël has been working to polish the horse and rider animations including the King’s Envoy animations as well as uphill and downhill animations for the horse itself.
Here you can see the new horse reins and improved rider animations as the envoy heads into town.
We have also been keeping an eye on player feedback and working on some of the major issues currently affecting many players. Phil has been looking at a fix for the housing building loop bug where houses will continue to be built and not occupied. As well as this he has been looking to improve the collision on the granary which can be too easily create stuck villagers.
Thanks for reading and we’ll catch you all soon with more news from the team.
The Whole Polymorph Games Team
