Over the holidays we spent quite a lot of our free time playing Dungeons & Dragons working on Parchment, and we’ve officially got a build that friends and family can play! If you’d like access, feel free to stop by our Discord Server and say hi. Be warned, the alpha is rough around the edges and has it’s share of bugs - but that’s what it is for. This update will detail the features in the alpha and the work we accomplished to get there.

BATTLES!

We’ve refactored our combat system (or rather, actually created it) such that it is no longer the standard RTS “unit attacks other unit on the screen”, but instead it will feel a bit more like what you’d see in Stellaris, where a battle takes place that produces artifacts. In our case, it’s loot! (See the LOOT! section). This battle system will be one of the primary fun mechanisms in the game, so we’re spending a lot of time on it. It’s still quite rough around the edges, and there’s certainly a lot of work left before we release a demo, but here’s a sneak peak of the different battle states you can get into:

LOOT!

After a battle completes, both the victor and the loser(s) can view the results, and collect some items. The victor will receive a majority of the loot - typically gold, food, and other supplies depending on what they’ve attacked. The loser(s) will be able to recover a little bit of what they had left. In the coming weeks, when we add the full functionality to attack buildings, you’ll be able to raid cities and get grander prizes. Be warned though, the farther away you are from your own territory, the more costly things will get.

Right now, the best way to get gold in the game is to battle other players - at least until we add the gold mine!

Mountains. Well, lines.

We’ve made some huge code progress and minor visual progress on the drawing of mountains. One will notice as they enter the game, mountain ridges starting to be drawn onto the map. This is the beginning of a new mountain driver that will hopefully draw beautiful mountains onto your map. After they’re in place, it will be tougher for your units to go through the mountains (slower speed) - and we’ll do something similar for water.

Getting technical…

The new mountain driver is quite exciting. For those technical, here’s essentially how it works.

  1. Import a height map of the terrain from the server.
  2. Run a custom built “peak finder” algorithm that finds all the tallest peaks in the mountain range from the height map.
  3. Curate those peaks so that they seem legitimate.
  4. Draw connections between peaks that are close enough to each other, to create potential ridges.
  5. Draw mountain ridge lines with jitter (pre-baked seed so everyone sees the same)

In the end, it’s a TON of math, as you can imagine, and a bit brutal to test, but here’s what it looks like inside Unity - we’ve added some “Gizmos” to draw the connection lines for ridges:

Next, we’ll draw the rest of the mountain lines that spawn from those ridges, so stay tuned!

Bots make the world feel alive

We’ve added some “starter bots” to the game, managed by the realm. Right now they don’t attack - just spawn a few units and do lots of research. Soon though, we’ll be adding some bot profiles:

  • Peaceful - These won’t attack you, making them easy raid targets.
  • Easy - Likely nearby, might send a scout or two over to take you on.
  • Average - On the outskirts of your spawn. They’ll be sure to want to take your territory.
  • Tough - On the frontier. These will not give up their land easily, and will strike back with power once you discover them.
  • Brutal - These are meant to play like players. They will expand and try to conquer everything they see.

Right now, all the bots are essentially on Peaceful, and we spawn about 8-10 bots per real player connected to the realm.

That’s all for now

We’ll make another progress update next month!