Shrines, influence rings, stonings, death, commands and a map editor

Shrines

The biggest change this update is the introduction of shrines, where your followers can go worship you and generate mana. Shrines cannot be built, only captured, and they represent nexuses of power on the map. It is through shrines that you can reach through to the physical realm, facilitating your godly misdeeds.

As followers pray at shrines they generate belief that increases your range of influence, allowing you to use god powers further afield. Capturing all shrines on a map will bring you victory - and remove rival gods from interfering in your lands.

In a future update, expect shrines to be tied to how your god powers are unlocked or upgraded. Would love any feedback on which direction you'd like to see this go - should the different shrines on a map be tied to specific powers, varying the god powers you can unlock map to map, or should you be able to choose which power to unlock when you capture a shrine?

Influence rings

Related to shrines, you will now be limited from acting outside of your influence borders. Your influence borders represent the limits of your power, and can be extended by capturing shrines, followers worshipping at shrines, and the building and expansion of follower settlements.

The influence borders should help prevent some of the initial chaos of rival gods swooping in and throwing a meteor at your base at the beginning of the game. You'll have to think more strategically, and fight for the shrines for map control.

Stonings and death

What better way to wage a war between gods than with some stonings. Followers will now pick up rocks from the ground and lob them at nearby heretics. This makes the combat a little more interesting and lets larger mobs get in on the action at once.

Once dead, your followers now hang around a little while, so you can appreciate their dead-ness.

Commands (again)

In the last update I wrote about a new command power, that let you send followers to a specific target. After some playtesting I became less keen on the implementation. I've reworked the command power to allow you to select followers in a hex radius from where you click (drag to select more), and to send them to a destination with a right click. As before, followers without a command will do their own thing, exploring and picking fights or settling new land. In a future update, commanding followers will cost mana, with the cost scaling up with the area selected.

Map editor and custom maps

Lastly, I've started work on an in-game map editor that will ship with the game, I want you to be able to make and share your own maps. Growing up I loved creating my own custom scenarios for AoM - it's partly what got me into game dev, so I want to make it easy for anyone to make their own maps with God Brawl too.

The editor is a bit bare bones so far, but as I've started using it for creating campaign levels, so expect to see the tooling improve.

What's next

Looking ahead, I'm primarily focused on getting out a first version demo - currently planning for this to be a single map of the game with a short tutorial (or at least some helpful tips). If time permits, I'll be including leaderboards for the demo, to inject a bit of friendly competition.

If you'd like to get involved as a playtester, get in touch, and support the game by wishlisting!