Playtest open and new Build

I've made a bunch of updates over the past few months so I'm opening up the playtest again to get more feedback. I'm thinking I'll keep the playtest open long term this time until the demo is ready to be released.

How to give feedback: feedback form | steam forum | discord

This update broadly,

• Improves visibility into unrest and rebellions

• Improves combat visibility

• Updates the UI visuals and juiciness extensively

Armies

• units, towers and army flags have a blinking hit effect

• army flags blink continuously as a warning when they have 3 or less units

• units in an army use the lead units speed when traveling between territories

• The army status also shows up in the army selection UI

• fixed bug with army flag setting itself to scale to 0

• rebel army flags spawn where the lead unit spawns so its not on top of the defending army (usually)

• armies rotate their formation towards their direction of travel

• army flags plant themselves when an army sieges or gets into combat

Territories

• Tsushima and Osumi are easier to select now

• buildings only degrade when a rebel army takes a territory

• fixed siege bugs when ending a siege early

• stopped the siege overlay lines from moving for better visual clarity

• the siege overlay transitions smoother from day to day

• the faction selection highlight pulses on/offinstead of a constant highlight

• recolored background to match the table color in the main menu

Unrest

• generated rebel factions are more common

• generated rebel factions color selection is broader

• added a stripe decal to rebel faction flags so they can be differentiated more easily from the main factions they rebelled from

• reduced conquest unrest gain from 20 to 10

• diplomatic factions don't have less conquest unrest anymore

• manually triggered rebellions can be cancelled

• territories under 30 unrest can't automatically revolt anymore

• the unrest slider, territory summary, and average rebellion risk will blink when a faction rebellion check is less than 30 days away

• the unrest slider will change color based on unrest level severity and starts blinking if unrest is over 70

UI - Rebellions

• added slide in/out effects for rebellion notices

• the Player Rebellion Notice displays the rebelling territories in a list

• made the Player Rebellion Notice draggable

• locked play/pause when the player gets a rebellion notice so they don't accidentally run the game while reading it

• reduced the size of the AI Rebellion notices

• AI Rebellion Notices stack on top of each other in chronological order instead of just showing the most recent one

• AI Rebellion Notices can be closed manually

UI

• pushed the UI to the edges of the screen for more visual room

• revamped the UI visuals extensively to be more paper-like

• added a hover scale-up effect to everything

• fixed bug that would take you back to the main menu instead of the game

• changed default game settings - vsync off, music starts at 25% volume

• fixed bug where "Restart" was not showing the faction selection UI

• castle and farm tooltips now show gold per day instead of per month

• fixed bug where gold would show +-0.3 instead of -0.3

• fixed tooltip accuracy for help UI

• added a slide in effect for the help UI and made it draggable

• fixed bug with faction name on army flag tooltips not translating to Japanese

• fixed bug with Japanese tutorial translation not fitting in its box

• added translation for the current month

• added more description to step 6 of the tutorial

• updated peasant icons to be more thematic

• zooming in will zoom into the mouse cursor position and zoom out of the mouse cursor position weighted 60% to the center

Audio

• music fades out when transitioning to a new track

• added a check so the same track does not play twice in a row

• when selecting which faction to play a musical note of 'sakura' will play

• changed the audio for army selection, added more death sounds, added different sliding sounds

• added fire audio for dead buildings

• normalized archer attack, cavalry dying, and army selection audio