Testing combat - enemy corpses with scenic backdrop

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Love the crisp foreground and how things get blurred further away but do not lose color saturation. However people and corpses seem to float a bit.

Yep, they’re definitely suffering from TQ air float syndrome. :smile: Looking very good otherwise though.

God I’m hyped for this!

Not gonna lie though. I wish this was a GD spin-off game, with the village being the Black Legion and the assailants aetherials and Bloodsworn. I can already see the major complaint: “I LOST MY ONLY BLACKSMITH TO AETHERGROUND!”.

Ehh… yeah. Joking aside. There’s no chance we can get an extremely vague hint for release date? I’ll even take Blizzard “soon” at this point.

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We already have it - 2021. :upside_down_face:

Where’s the Wololo?

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Not sure how much we’ll be able to do about corpse floating - this is a relatively zoomed in shot, so it isn’t that noticeable at normal zoom and, given the amount of stuff on-screen and hundreds of chars moving around, we probably can’t have super precise physics interactions. Well see though…

Beautiful day for combat testing.

Makes a change from epic writing. :wink:

Well my story started a combat scene yesterday, so clearly Medierra got inspired by my amazing work and decided to make this thread.

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schulterklopfen

Not sure if you can answer this Medierra, but is the game similar in its core gameplay to Banished? I really loved banished but felt that Banished became somewhat stale mid-lategame, due to the lack of more advanced building options and overall complexity. I’m just wondering if the easy-to-learn-hard-to-master will apply here, or if the game is intended to be more casual.

Also. Kind of off-topic but… I’ve gifted 3 copies of GD and DLC to people on Reddit now. So my guilt over pirating TQ nearly 2 decades ago (even though I did buy it legally after confessing to you), is now at an end. I hope this makes us even :slight_smile: Well… if you even remember it. It was a loooooong time ago lol.

But yeah. Love city building games. Looking forward to this one.

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The floating seems caused by an offset of every shadow.

Looking sick Med, cant wait to get my paws on this one…
I’ve alwaysd loved builders and this is looking amazing

Fundamentally it is similar to Banished - I’d say they’re in the same sub-genre of more intimate town-builder. I’ve wanted to make a town-builder like this since I got into the game industry as I played a lot of early ones growing up. When Banished came out, I felt like someone beat me to it, because, on the surface, it looked a lot like what I wanted to make and I was a bit disappointed by that but also excited to play it. While very impressive for a single developer, I was a bit relieved that Banished didn’t quite do it all. I had a similar impression as you and felt like it still gave me an opportunity, with the resources of a larger team, to create something with more complexity and multi-tiered economy / building progression.

I honestly am a bit worried I may have strayed a bit too far from the “easy-to-learn” end of the spectrum but I think it shouldn’t be too hard for people experienced in the genre to figure out the basics - some of the systems though are maybe a bit over-designed and we’re working to try to make them more clear with tool-tips and such. What I can say though, this was kind of a self-indulgent project. We did well enough with GD that I don’t have to worry about trying to maximize sales with Frontier. I think it will still do fine though.

Its funny though - no big ARPGs had come out for years when I started GD, then suddenly Torchlight, D3, PoE and others emerged. We released into probably the most competitive ARPG market ever.

Then for years I wanted to do this smaller scale, cave out a town from the wilderness style town-builder and there hadn’t been many for a long time, but Banished released and did well, now suddenly it seems like everyone is making one.

Now we’re working on an RTS, where the major competitors are 10 and 20 year old games, and suddenly AoE 4 is in the works and two groups of ex-blizzard employees have announced they’re making RTS… wtf?

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could it be that great minds think alike… or everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon :upside_down_face:

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Well, lets cross them fingers then that FF emerges from the dog-pile much like GD and becomes/remains a relevant part of its genres conversation.

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Thanks for sharing! This was a very interesting read.

But fucking LOL! Man… you are like the king of bad timing - I feel bad for laughing but it’s like from a marketing perspective they are all out to get you :rofl:

I can’t speak for others but for me personally the most important thing with a city builder is the joy of progress and seeing your city grow. Both aesthetically and in gameplay. But from an aesthetical perspective, that’s where I felt banished both lacked building options late game. In the end it just became “The same but bigger”. In a game like Rimworld, I actually managed to get this itch scratched properly by making cities with district. So I’d have a residential district, industrial district, palace district, crops and farming etc. It’s not really the size of the city and such that’s important though.

Another problem with banished was that mid-lategame, it didn’t actually became harder. And the gameplay loop was pretty much the same. Need food? More crops. Need more storage? More storage houses. So it was still a bit too simple, just a larger management requirement.

Pacing is also a problem not many people mention. For example in the game Frostpunk, the pacing is great early to mid game. But the pacing exponentially accelerates towards the end. Suddenly you don’t need 4 more houses or a medical tent, but 25 houses and 2 hospitals - NOW. And it felt very rush’y.

The thing that excites me the most about your project here is the fact that you can get attacked and need to defend. Not only does this feel cool thematically and gameplay-wise, but also in terms of difficulty.

I’m somewhat of a hardcore gamer. So having to equip or train villagers, defensive structures (I’m not sure how complex that part actually is), is very appealing to me. I’m also not a fan of “if everyone can make it easily, the game is too easy - and thus boring”. So the possibility of failure and losing, hard but fair, is something I personally like. This might not be appealing to most people though I don’t know.

Good luck with this one, looking forward to playing it :slight_smile:

37 posts were split to a new topic: Crate’s RTS project

Well I’m keen to see how Farthest Frontiers turns out and hearing about an RTS makes me quite intrigued.

The screen shot looks pretty good. I can actually see people managing to get inside said buildings as opposed to Age of Empires 4 giants living among a miniature golf course.

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