Hello!

Once again it’s been a little while since the last update’s gone out, and once again I’ll try to make up for it with a nice, big breakdown of what’s been going on.

After the last update, the first build containing a slice from the game’s opening went out to our alpha backers. I’ve also been spending lots of time attending local developer events to playtest the game. Finally watching and hearing from people play was pretty nerve wracking but incredibly helpful!

Feedback overall has been very positive, but looking back, I realize I fell into the trap of trying to over-polish certain features before putting the game in front of people. Following the first alpha release, I planned to shift to regular updates incrementally extending the game’s content, but watching people play made it clear that I’d need to go back and make some core changes first.

The UI

First, the combat UI had some issues. As you know from earlier updates, I’ve already invested a lot of time in polishing up the UI, but watching players made it clear that I over-committed to making things as minimalist as possible at the expense of ease of use and functionality. Eventually I decided to scrap a lot of what we had and give it another pass. Here’s a quick comparison of the old vs. new combat interface:

Old UI

New UI

I’m still trying to keep things as clean as possible, but I’ve changed a few things to be more readable and flattened the menu hierarchy so actions are more easily accessible. The art still needs to be polished up, but layout-wise this is very close to the final version we’ll see at launch. Hopefully this is the last time I need to talk about it here!

Combat

Over the past few months as the combat system continued to develop, I couldn’t shake the nagging worry that it all felt a bit stale. In all honesty, I didn’t feel like it was shaping up to be much fun.

Clearly, this is a big problem. I told myself it was all in my head, that I’d just been looking it too closely for too long, that adding new classes/abilities/polish would change things, but finally watching people play added to these doubts. I suspect that many of you who played the alpha will agree with me on this, but were just too nice to say so!

The game met all the criteria for the genre, but something just didn’t feel quite right. To some extent, I think the issue was an unexpected outcome of updating the graphics. HD characters standing around idly in a melee, waiting to be killed felt odd and immersion breaking. I also think the genre and our collective tastes have evolved; mechanics and pacing that worked 10+ years ago just don’t anymore.

After struggling with all of this for a while now, watching people play drove me to make the tough decision to implement some pretty major changes to how combat works.

Here’s what’s changing:

• Players can now queue up entire sequences of actions
• Action sequences can be edited and their outcomes previewed before being executed
• All units in a faction execute their turn actions simultaneously

Here’s some video of what it looks like:

I think this works much, much better. It took some time to sort through a bunch of tricky design issues to make these changes work (hence the delay). Everything from the AI, to the interface, to the animation system needed significant rework.

For those of you with concerns on such big changes at this late stage, things are still every bit as tactical as before, and everything from a decision-making perspective actually remains exactly the same. Since the mechanics were always designed to be completely deterministic, players don’t gain any advantage or disadvantage from these changes. The difference lies primarily in presentation.

At a higher level though, these changes mean:

• Faster overall pacing
• Better control of unit turn actions
• More clarity on action outcomes
• Shift from unit level decisions to party level strategy
• Much more satisfying execution of turn actions

Most importantly, I think it’s just much more fun to play now!

Coming Up

Alpha backers, the next build with all of the above changes will be uploaded to Steam in about a week. Non-Steam users, the build will be updated at the previously shared URL.

I’ll also be at the Game Developer’s Conference, PAX East, and some local NY/NJ events with builds of the game. If you’ll be at any of those and are interested in giving it a spin, let me know!

Thanks again everyone for your support, feedback, and patience. Player feedback is guiding the game in a really exciting direction, and has given me a second wind as we move closer to finish line. It’s been a long road already, but we’re getting there!

Hi everyone! It’s been a while, sorry to keep you all waiting. Here’s the recap:

Build v0.1.0

The first playable slice of Liege is finally ready to share!

I’ve uploaded our first alpha build to Steam and submitted the request to Valve for backer keys. Alpha backers, keep an eye on your inbox over the next few days. Those of you who prefer delivery outside of Steam, shoot me a PM and I’ll see to getting you a direct link. As mentioned before, to keep things manageable on my end I’ll be focusing on PC, Mac and Linux for alpha testing.

What to expect: The build contains the tutorial sequence shown two updates ago in its new, extended form. The demo is short and a lot of things are still rough, but I’m making it available in its current state with the following goals:

1) Identify any major system compatibility issues

2) Get a sense of how things are performing on a wider range of hardware

3) Start getting feedback on the tutorial sequence, mechanics, and combat UI

Following this first release, I’ll be putting out more regular updates which will incrementally extend the content. Once the keys go out I’ll be following up with details on where to send bugs, suggestions, questions, etc.

Dev Updates

With all that out of the way, I wanted to give you all a quick recap of what’s been going on since the last update. First, Kalen and Aakaash are pretty much waiting up for me to catch up with things on the dev side. I was hoping to be 100% focused on content at this stage, but I needed to go back to solidify things some more before moving ahead with production full steam.

1)Tools

There’s a ton of content that needs to be created, and pretty much all of the battles and narrative sequences are still scripted by hand. This is very time consuming.

That being the case I’m still investing a lot of effort in getting our tools into the best possible shape. Everything in v0.1.0 was rebuilt using the latest workflow, and things move much quicker now.

2) Optimization

With our technology stack more or less set in stone at this point, I’ve been spending a lot of time profiling the game to identify performance bottlenecks. There’s still more work to be done here, but the game’s now running smoother than ever.

3) Refactoring

I’ve been spending a lot of time taking apart rushed code from earlier and putting it back together in a way that’s more maintainable, extensible, and performant. While it’s frustrating to put so much work into something that yields so little outward progress, it was a necessary chore. On the plus side, our codebase no longer feels like a leaning tower, ticking time bomb, plate of spaghetti, which is good. In all seriousness though, the game’s on much more solid footing code wise now, which will pay off going forward.

4) A Million Loose Ends

The game’s been in a playable state for a while now, but it continues to find new and creative ways to break on me. My debugger and I have been spending a lot of time together addressing this issue.

Apart from bug fixes, I’ve also been continuing to work down a long list of changes to improve the game’s existing features. Of these, the biggest change was redoing the entire combat interface to be consistent with the character management interface I showed in the last update. Sadly this 1) took forever and 2) introduced a ton of new bugs, but it’s done, and it’s better now!

To sum up: things are still moving slower than I’d like, but I think the extra time we’re taking is worth it. Thanks as always for your patience, and have a great week everyone!