2018.08.06 - New upcoming campaigns and game mechanics

[Rasmus]

2018.08.06 - New upcoming campaigns and game mechanics

Hi all,
As usual my news post begins with me saying that I'm sorry for the lack of updates. But I promise you all I'm doing my best to find the time doing what I love which is developing Dwelvers
As I've said before the company Divine Robot (where I work) has invested in Dwelvers, this has enabled me to get a lot of help with the UI from UX designers. They have also had artist working on the game meaning that I have about 200 hours of graphics just waiting to be implemented in the game. This includes creatures such as a king, princes, archers and a lot more, these will be presented in future news posts as they get implemented in Dwelvers by me. Unfortunately I've had a lot of other projects that needed to be finished which has forced me to de-prioritize Dwelvers. But now things have calmed down and it seems that I now have a lot of time on my hands to continue with the Dwelvers development.

So enough about that and on to what's new.

New Campaigns

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I've said before that my focus right now is to create campaigns and polish the game after the campaign needs. For example the UI still needed to be updated so that it is easier to understand for the player. So we now have a second campaign where the player learns how to build training room, metal works room, use the rally flag, dig and explore and kill all enemies in the way.

New Portal mechanics

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A question I've gotten more frequently lately is "How do I take over a portal?", and that is a good question! It isn't all that clear that you have to build a road up to it. So now I've changed it so that the player instead can attack the portal, and when it gets destroyed the player is the new owner.

Update UI

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The UI has been updated even more since the last version. The resource bar that was in the top has now been replaced with non-equip-able, and in the bottom right menu bar we have two new buttons which opens a buildings menu and a items menu.

The buildings menu

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The buildings menu has four tabs which are:

• Rooms - Including Bar Room, Bed Room, Catacombs room etc.
  
  
• Objects - Containing anything that the player can build that is not directly related to traps or rooms. This includes Well, Statues, Doors etc.
  
  
• Traps - Including Cannon, hydraulics pipes, Dynamite etc.
  
  
• Unbuilables - Including buildings that you as a player can own, but can not build, such as portals.
  

The items menu

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The items menu has two tabs which are:

• Crafting - Here you can select what equipment to craft, you are also able to see how many items of that certain item type you have, and how much materials are available for crafting that item. This was something that was lacking in the old resource bar. One new cool thing about this menu is that you are able to see the supply and demand, meaning that when the bar right to the item image is green, then you are supplying enough equipment of that type to your creatures. But if it is red, then it means that you don't have enough equipment of that type to equip your creatures, and they have to go for their second or third equipment choice.
  

• Trading - Here the players can trade the items they what to sell or buy by setting certain parameters. For example the player can choose to buy bones if he has less than 11 bones in storage, or to sell rocks if he has more than 33 rocks in storage. You can see this in the screenshot below. If the "If condition" is red then the conditions aren't met, but if it is green then the your creatures will start to trade that certain item. And this will all happen automatically so that the player don't have to deal with micro management and sell or buy a certain amount of items at a time.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• What's next?
  
  

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• The next release will come as soon as I've finished another campaign, I'm counting on having it finished within one or two weeks.
  
  
  I hope all you liked this news post
  
  
  
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[Sebt]

I can see that menus will now take more space on the screen, but implementing them solved the issue with text going outside brackets and made player able too see more information (however I'm still with having such info in tooltip rather than separate window, because now players has to search for items needed instead of getting info about only reuired items). Also new menus would even fit in the discussion about modyfying trade system here - unless these "handshake" icons are about to be a pointers to portals we could trade with.

[Rasmus]

I missed including the tooltip in the screenshot, it will explain everything about the buildings / crafting / trades etc. And yes! The trading will be modified with the next releases, I don't like having portals as trading posts either. Instead I will do as you pointed out in the link to have trading outposts scattered around the dungeon, where one trading outpost only do one type of trade. The handshake means that the trade is enabled, the player can then easily disable the trade by clicking on it.

[Sebt]

No more need to decrease/increase unit numbers of trade item to zero. I wondered that what if could replace windowed menus with information given on bottom panel, like in most RTS games (creature menu would look like in Warcraft 3 bottom panel)?

Any chance to improve workers AI? I read that you want to spawn more Imps, but there are still issues with tasks I want my workers to do immediatelly - so, I may have solution --> we can command a creature after clicking on one (that makes that creature selected and you can see a white border appear on it) to move on specific point of the map right? What if we could assign any creature that could do task we want to do it right now leaving all tasks as secondary? Than with pressing Shift button we could assign more and more of them to make in order. So for exampel if we want an Imp or two to do a task to build two Piggeh beds than clicking on these beds construcion blueprints we could make these two Imps share their taks on half and make them build those Piggehs beds.

Also if we have menus for rooms does it mean the radial menu will be removed from the game?