Version 13: Faces of the Enemy

Version 13 is here, and it is a turning point for the game. We feel the game has reached a point where it can actually be considered a mature product. This is quite surprising, as the game started its life as a semi-joke on Something Awful, and was continued thereafter off and on as a hobby game. However, development through the years has gone well, and we now believe it may actually be reasonable to call it a video game, not just a binary file generated by Unity and thrown onto the internet.

A very core aspect of this is the introduction of Enhanced Edition. While the game persists as an open-source project, and the free version will continue to have all gameplay aspects, we are releasing a DLC-like product which features graphical elements. This will allow us to better support the game going forward, hopefully, and we feel gives the game an aura of legitimacy. Free-to-play undersells it, as it gives the impression that we do not value the work we put in, nor do we consider it worth considering alongside paid products. Obviously we are still not charging AAA game prices, and we wish to maintain its open-source core, but we felt this was a good decision for the game itself.

Enhanced Edition

Enhanced edition introduces faces for the various nobles and agents of the world. These are assembled into different "cultures" which are distributed around the generated map. This should let players better identify and recognise the characters and perhaps increase immersion in the game world. The different cultures should then also give an at-a-glance idea of where a person is from. A merchant's rough homeland can be determined by their cultural appearance.

Conspicuously absent is the 'classic' culture of fantasy, the England/German style which is so common in fantasy, going back even before Tolkien, but certainly reinforced by Lord of the Rings and its immense influence on all fantasy works which followed. Instead we went for a trio of well known cultures which, while still familiar, might make the game a bit more exotic. Obviously the cultures are a bit stereotypical, but hopefully not in such a way to cause offense, and not too much to be cliché or obnoxious.

It also features a music player, which cycles through a set of permissive license music we found, by Alexander Westmacott. The music seemed a good fit, as it was neither too upbeat for a game about the apocalypse nor too depressing to be listened to for prolonged lengths of time. It also has a very solid presence by the musician himself, with the sounds of fingers along strings and very raw note sounds, which I felt worked well for the style of game we are going for. 

Obviously you can turn one or both of these features off if you feel the game was better before.

Whether you feel these additions are worth 5 quid is up to you. As mentioned, the free version has the exact same gameplay as the Enhanced Edition, it is the graphics we are selling, not the underlying gameplay.

Gameplay changes

This version brings us closer to the "final state" of the game. Politics merges with the agents with the introduction of the Dark Heirophant. This is a cult-leader type agent, which can enthrall a noble, and then break other nobles to provide them with political allies. The political allies can then support other agents by voting against security measures.

As we go forwards, we want the agents to be more personal, and hostile agents to be worth knowing by name. Hostile agents will be deployed in specialised ways, and specific agents can develop hostilities to individual enthralled agents, or become talented at handling particular tools you are using. 

Nobles, on the other hand, we want to make more responsive with the "crisis" political vote, which directly responds to events in the world by providing a set of special actions the nobles can select between. Hopefully this will make votes more powerful, as there could many very close votes which you can swing to a small degree to keep your plans on track. It will also introduce yet more ways for nobles to disagree with each other, and improvements to their political AI could allow the player to exploit this for their advantage. Critically, we want the player to be able to win because the nations fall in political deadlock and disfunction. They may have five times your military power, but be unable to agree on how to use it effectively, one of the core themes of the game.

Underlying system changes

The game, now a somewhat-professional product (since money is changing hands) now has to behave a bit more professionally. You will note that relevant files are stored in the user's APPDATA folder, as opposed to just alongside the .exe. This should make the behaviour a bit more reliable. Saves will not transfer between versions, and the game is aware of which version a saved game belongs to.

Possible Steam release

Currently, the game's main source of new players is Itch.io recommendations. This makes sense, as we put very close to zero effort into marketing (since it's mostly a hobby game, both of us are employed full-time, so can't really commit to that kind of stuff). As a result, if we want to grow the community a bit, we could benefit by having both the Itch.io recommender and the Steam recommender working together to suggest our game to new players.

While we do not wish to become full time game developers, having a somewhat larger audience could be interesting, now that the game is a bit less amateurish and a bit more developed. Even as a free open-source project, more eyes means more chances that someone will fork the project and develop their own variant.

Occasionally I remember a joke on Something Awful about a game with hyper-realistic water simulations, so agents can poison water upstream and your Deep Ones can have freshwater and saltwater variants. We aren't planning anything like that, but by leaving the core gameplay open-source we leave that option open, if someone wants to give it a go. But for that to occur, they must first be aware that this repository even exists.

Possible discontinuation of Linux support

The sad news is that we can't seem to get the game to work on Linux any longer. For whatever reason, Unity is completely failing to handle graphics on two separate Linux distros. We have tried different Unity versions, and searching online for help with regards to this, and will continue to investigate it, but at the present we can't say with confidence that we can produce a Linux version of the game. The executables can't even display Unity's own built-in splash screen, which suggests it is a problem deep in the core of Unity itself.

This is of course quite unfortunate. We both have great respect for Linux (my co-author having an actual Arch install, and myself using it professionally on a daily basis), but we cannot correct for fundamental issues in the Unity engine.

Conclusion

We have discussed the various facets of this release at length, and hope this is the best path forwards for the game, and hope your enjoy the new version, whichever you decide to go for.

I'll admit that I avoided drawing faces originally as I'm a programmer, not an artist, and faces are one of the hardest things to draw, especially when they must handle swappable features (eyes/mouth/hair/jewels) without major artistic issues. I would say I'm mostly pleased with how things turned out, but occasionally some are a bit cursed.

Anyway, enjoy