Devlog 18: Mystics & Oracles

Predicting the Future

The decision system is finally implemented in the demo, heralding a new way to interact with the Gods. Plus the predictions feature is back! In this devlog I'll give more details on both as well as future plans for the game.

Decisions Decisions

God anger and patience, which affect when and where disasters are spawned, are now largely driven by the "decision" system - The little story snippets and choices you make as a player around them mean your actions and the mechanics actually correlate to the story of the game. It's much easier now to know a) when the Gods are angry and b) why!

It does though somewhat rely on my skill as a writer to weave this all together. I'm happy with the stories so far, though I'll be refining them over time to emphasise that Greek-myth feeling of big personalities and ironic twists.

The writing time needed is why the Bronze Seas scenario is currently disabled in the demo - I just didn't have time to add in the decisions for it yet. Hopefully I can get those in game and tested before Steam NextFest in June.

Foreshadowing

I finally re-added the predictions feature to the game. You can now spend favour with the Gods to predict where on the map disasters may strike and their possible results.

It still needs a bit of balancing as right now it tends to give too-accurate predictions. I'm definitely looking for feedback both on how people use it and any suggestions on how it can be improved.

Early Steps

After taking the game to various events and conventions and observing how players actually interacted with the game and approached the map and core loop, I've completely rearranged how the UI in Critias Empire works. It feels just that bit more natural to play than before, which is really encouraging for me, but I'll still be looking to see how I can improve the UI further in the future.

The tutorial needed to be completely remade as a result of the UI changes, and I'm reasonably happy with how it shaped up. It has a similar narrative arc as before, but takes more time to explain the underlying game concepts, so players know a bit more why they are being told to do various things. Next step will be to put a skip option in, and add tips/advice pop-ups for some of the features not in the tutorial, like the Survey and Oracle screens.

Bugs Ahoy

Whereas last year I was making lots of regular smallish builds, the latest demo has lots of big changes, some to foundational parts of the game like disasters and saving. I therefore anticipate that, even with testing, there'll be plenty of bugs lurking in this build.

If you do find any problems, please report them using either the in-game button or via the Bugs Thread. I'll also make a new Feedback thread, so if you have any suggestions or comments on the game (from difficulty and balance to general frustrations or feature suggestions), definitely drop them in there.

Nearly There

In the last devlog update I spoke about the final push to get Critias Empire ready for release. Amazingly, I'm only a little way behind where I wanted to be by this point. Beyond what I already mentioned in this devlog, all that's left are to add the remaining disasters, and then balance the "main" game. That will come in August (I'm out of the country in July) and add another dimension to the game which is missing in the smaller limited scenarios right now.

Before then though, Critias Empire will be in TurnBasedThursday Fest on Steam. The organisers have done a great job putting the fest together and I'm honoured and excited they let me join in again this year. If you're a fan of turn-based games, be sure to check it out.