I've been working on adding height to the terrain of the next game and someone asked for screenshots. So here are some with some explanations.

This is a screenshot of how this scene would look like in Zombasite just for reference (except the player model is different). Pic details - 1358x737, 336KB.

We decided to change the art style a bit for our next game. We have changed all of the world and creature textures to be much more colorful. This next screenshot shows this.. Pic details - 1358x737, 367KB.

And finally, I've added height to the terrain which you can see in the 3rd screenshot. I'm standing on a hill in the path. You can see it's much lower on the other side of the wall. Pic details - 1358x737, 364KB.

Comments are welcome as usual

I'm seriously thinking of starting Early Access for the hardcore game sooner than usual, basically at an alpha level instead of the normal, for us, beta level. At least for my purposes here, alpha means very playable but lots of features and assets are not done yet. Beta means a few features left to do, but all assets are done.

The reason why I'm thinking this, is that it's going to be a while before we have all of the assets to get into beta, but the game is already pretty playable. So I could get gameplay feedback much sooner. Also, I really enjoy betas/Early Access which is why we have been doing them before Early Access was a thing. :) Getting immediate feedback on things as they progress is much more enjoyable and easier than working in a vacuum for a long period of time and then getting overwhelming feedback all at once. I also like you all getting a real chance to impact the direction of the game.

If I go this route, we would probably start Early Access in the next month or two. It is likely to only be on Steam during Early Access. We might still sell directly through us, but at the beginning it might just be a Steam key, with an actual build available when we hit beta or gold. The reasoning for this is that the Steam build system actually simplifies things quite a bit, but our patch system wouldn't work very well if we release publicly before all of the assets are finished. Our patches have always been cumulative which makes things simple since you only need to apply the latest one, but that means every change since going public has to be in the latest patch. If we keep adding art, this would make each patch fairly large and get bigger and bigger each time. Plus this means only 1 set of patches I have to deal with when things are changing often.

We do still have a few things that we have to do before we could start Early Access though. We need to settle on a name, do some of the marketing stuff (blurb, marketing graphics for Steam, and a few screenshots), create a logo, finish some art style stuff, add the new game to our website & Steam, and fix some game specific multiplayer stuff.

UPDATE: This took longer than expected (mostly because of our move), but it looks like this will happen in September.

Comments are welcome as usual

So I'm thinking about the name for the next game. I really don't like naming things; it's a pain and I don't think I'm that good at it. I'm actually more and more tempted to name it Din's Curse 2 and be done with it since there are plenty of similarities with Din's Curse. There are also some differences though.

A quick rundown of the next game: you play as one of the Mutated, characters are hardcore (permadeath) and mutate over time, the next generation of character is evolved from his/her parents and most of your total power carries over, you do have a lot of control of guiding your character's development (picking parents, picking skills, getting rid of unwanted mutations, etc), each world has a random setup and win conditions, and your goal in each area is to prove to the world that the Mutated is a "good" and powerful race.

Similarities to Din's Curse:

• Overall goal is to move to an area, more often than not to help the local people, and move on to the next area
• Both have same kind of resurrection mechanism thanks to the gods (Din in this case)
• Tighter focus than most of our other games (not controlling a clan)
• They are both cursed (DC your character is directly cursed by Din, in the new game basically the entire race is cursed because they are split off from Orcs)
• Random, dynamic world (this is also true of all of our games except Kivi)

Differences with Din's Curse:

• You're not playing a human, but a mutated (race introduced in Zombasite: Orc Schism)
• You're not forced into redemption, but simply trying to prove your new race is good and powerful
• It's not a true resurrection, but mutated and carry on from "parents"
• There are no direct hybrids, but guided mutations/evolution
• Not just a town and a dungeon (although many scenarios do this)

I didn't start this game as a sequel, but it fits pretty well; mostly just a change from Humans to Mutated as the focus. So what do you all think? Do you think I should go the Din's Curse 2 route or make this a separate game? Is it too different to be a Din's Curse game? Or do you not care what I call it as long as I hurry up? :)

UPDATE: I decided to go with Din's Legacy.

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I really need to start making more videos for marketing purposes, but the following story demonstrates why that has been difficult for me. The following story happened to me earlier this week while testing Orc Schism. These types of things happen often in our games since they have very dynamic worlds. I think this is one of the most compelling parts of our games, but I have no idea how I would every capture such a thing in a video.

So I'm doing fairly well in this particular game. My clan, Heart of Gold, and Order of the Moon are all allied together, which is good because Order of the Moon is much bigger and a higher level than me. I'm slowly getting the world under control. My biggest problem is that I'm a little low on food.

I'm allied with 2 clans and War Blades had already been destroyed so I figure there is probably only 1 or 2 undiscovered clans left. I decide to seek out the rest of the clans in the area so I can figure out the best path to victory for this world. After a little exploring, I discovered the last clan, The Mutants. They were less powerful than my clan and wanted to be friends. They were easy to ally with and once allied with me, I introduced them to my other allies, started a few rumors so that they would all be headed towards allying with one another, and then I went back to fixing the problems with my own clan.

Now my food supply has gotten low enough that we are rationing, so I sent out a hunting party of 5 NPCs (2 with foraging skills, 2 with trapping skills, and most of them had combat skills). I was going to go with them, but the town came under attack almost immediately by those pesky Dark Orcs. As I'm dealing with the Dark Orc attack, zombies (I forget which kind) also launch an attack. And then as if that wasn't enough, a 2 on 1 fight breaks out in the middle of town with some of my NPCs. All of a sudden my town is complete chaos!

While I'm frantically trying to get control again of my town, I don't notice that my hunting party is getting slaughtered by some powerful monster. By the time I notice, 4 of the 5 members are dead. I managed to recall them in time to save the last member. Apparently those 4 people were very well liked in my clan because just about everyone in my clan got really unhappy.

I managed to stop the town attacks and NPC fights, but now everyone is so unhappy (most of the clan was below -100 happiness and above 60 insanity) they are basically openly rebelling. They are selling town secrets, creating gates in town, poisoning people, starting fights, causing more town attacks, and more. I did all I could to try to contain the happiness: solved as many quests as possible, kicked out the members that I felt I could get away with, gave away all my gold and much of the remaining food, and even gifted all my gems to the various NPCs. I kind of held it together for a little while, but eventually all but my most loyal NPC fled the town or went insane, I have more problems than ever, and my town is under attack again.

Things look really bleak now. How can I recover from the disaster? Out of the blue, mostly because I was really distracted, my initial plan finally payed off. The rest of the clans had allied with one another and I got a Diplomatic victory!

So the conditions of my town when I finally won:

• The town was on fire
• I only had 1 clan member left (I originally had 17 I believe)
• My last guy was infected and dying from the Zombasite
• Two different groups were attacking my town
• My last guy was pretty unhappy but amazingly enough no insanity problems (I'm going to attribute this to his brewing and painting skills)

So how do I get things like that across in a video? And who would even watch the resulting 2 hour video? I should just make simpler games. Our next game is going to be a Tetris clone. :)

As always comments are welcome!

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