Game Announcement!

I am so excited to be able to announce the name of the game is Hibera, Requiem for the Forgotten! This is my first steam dev log, but I've been posting some from a while back on badjuicegames.com. I’ve been working with two very talented people Eve Golden-Woods and Rafino Murphy on a big content push for this announcement and wanted to keep things under wraps. Having said that we’re due a milestone check-in. Since the last blog post here’s the list of features added to the game:

• Full Cutscene system

• Hold B to skip cutscenes

• Campaign & Save management

• Equipment Discovery and management

• Weapon Proficiency events

• Proficiency-based weapon unlocks.

• Light Steam integration

• Cinemachine camera overhaul

• Roofs and Roof reveals for city buildings

• Generic popup system

• Units joining the party

• Loading screen optimization

• New enemy class (Thug) for early missions

• 3 new missions with cutscenes and everything

• Prologue and Epilogue cutscenes

• New idle and walk animations for some units

• VFX overhaul

• Water and waterfall visual overhaul

• City lamps that work at night

• Overhauled night FOW visuals

• Rebuilt wall prefabs in blender

• New background art

• New logo

• Updated main menu

• Updated preview panel for equipment management

• Added Credits roll

• LOTS of new music and sfx

• Bug “fixes”

For me the big star of the show this milestone has been the work I’ve been doing with Eve and Raf. Eve has been absolutely crushing it as a Narrative Designer for the game. She and I have been doing a ton of world building, making sure that we can present a very grounded, living and breathing fantasy realm as the backdrop to our drama. She has been helping to chop up the story beats into mission shaped chunks as well as writing dialogue for cutscenes. Thanks to her work I really feel like the game has a solid foundation to tell a compelling story. Raf has been doing equally amazing work on the audio side. We have new music throughout the game and he’s threatening to do a full sfx pass as well. We sat down and talked through a ton of different inspirations, from games like Banner Saga, Legend of Zelda, Sword & Sworcery, and also listened through a ton of historical and contemporary material looking at instrumentation and composition. We stopped just short of ordering an EP-1320 medieval, but I think it’s very much still on the table.

The headline tech feature of this milestone is definitely the cutscene system. It’s a fully scriptable system where you can load maps, units, move them around, trigger animations, vfx, sfx, dialogue and backgrounds. And the whole thing is underpinned by Yarn Spinner. They have a dialogue system that lets you add custom commands into the script, which just runs in order. Here’s a snippet from one of our cutscenes so you get the idea: < >

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Tadgh: Another half hour of that reek would have killed me.

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Maebh: The sun is low. We're late.

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Aylet: Late isn't the word. What kept you?

It’s still a little labor intensive to build out a cutscene but the system is very powerful and I’m finding new workflow improvements all the time.

Steam post image I think the water and waterfall system is pretty interesting from a tech perspective. I was playing the Final Fantasy Tactics remake and got fed up with how good their water looks compared to mine, so I had to do something about it. The game board is comprised of individual tiles which have a specific tile type and largely don’t know anything about any other tiles. So when the map loads I take all the water tiles and use a flood-fill algorithm to group adjacent tiles into connected regions. Each region gets its own mesh and we can set the flow direction per region. The visuals are handled with a shader, it uses two layers of procedural noise and then a posterizing filter to make that noise pixel shaped. It also layers in sparkle and caustic textures. These are tiled based on world position so they tile seamlessly between water regions. Finally the waterfalls do a similar thing but using specific edge tiles, it continues the water effect on top and then makes a 90 degree drop with a second shader doing the flowing streams and the fade out. The three demo missions we ended up with don’t show them off especially well, but I’m very happy with how they turned out. Steam post image On the gameplay side, I made a big update to how we think about equipment. Previously all equipment had infinite copies and was gated solely based on a unit’s class, so more advanced classes could equip better stuff. I’ve completely changed it around. We still have base level items that are infinite. Wherever you are in Hibera, you can get your hands on enough Iron Swords to be getting on with. But in missions you’ll be able to find limited quantity items that provide small bonuses compared to the baseline. As a unit uses a specific weapon type they gain proficiency XP, and at certain thresholds they level up, gaining access to new equipment of that type. XP is shared for offensive and utility magic so mages aren’t left behind! Speaking of mages, each mage has their own spell list for unique spells in addition to the core set. So Tadgh for example, unlocks Enliven at rank D in Fire magic. Enliven is a great buff spell that increases might for several turns. This milestone is going out with another friends and family playtest build. And I hope to have a public steam demo build out before too long featuring the same content. This has been a year’s worth of work for me and we’re just getting started! Steam post image

My next milestone is going to be focused largely on content creation but I do have a short feature list in mind:

• Recruitable units

• New unit classes

• Options / Settings menu

• Allied & Neutral units

• Enemy Thieves & Lootable Chests

• Support / Friendship system

• Mid-battle triggered conversations

• Steamworks integration (cloud saves etc)

• Lots of new missions.

I’m also going to be showing off the game at a few events within the next couple months so keep an eye out! Until then.