May Monthly Update: Combat

Hi everyone, welcome to the second monthly update for Lichworks!

In this update I want to showcase a bit of the combat side of minions. A lot of work went into tuning combat AI and iterating on minion abilities this month, and while there will no doubt be many changes still to come, the general picture around combat is starting to solidify enough to talk through some of the basics.

Raising an army

One of the core pillars I have for the game is that automation and combat should feel natural and flow cleanly into one another. The same minion mining ore or hauling resources is the one that can stand its ground against aggression, or be recruited into a retinue on the spot with the recruit ability:

Minions in your retinue will follow their leader to the ends of the earth, engage hostile foes, and fulfill commands given by the player from rallying part of your forces to a point, guarding a target or charging forth into the fray.

The art here is still of a placeholder quality, but allows you to split up, assign, and maneuver your forces across the battlefield.

Minion Equipment

Another core feature added this month: on top of holding items in their hands, minions can now gain abilities when they wear equipment in the form of hats or from newly added spellbooks.

Hats provide passive stat bonuses that let a minion fulfill its desired role more effectively, and in some cases come with attached abilities that minions can use of their own accord.

The same goes for handheld items like spellbooks, which let you take the spells you discover in the world and mass produce them for your minions to wield, opening up some deadly combinations.

Scaling it up

Currently the benchmark handles 5,000 minions in active combat at 60fps on an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X. There's still more depth to add to combat, so these numbers may change though further optimization should help.

One of the big goals for Lichworks is achieving that large horde scale of combat that can be hard to find in necromancy games.

Looking forward

There is a lot of other work going on in the background and I'm working towards preparing Lichworks for public playtests via Steam. I don't have a firm date yet, but I'm currently planning to open it up to public applications in the next few months once I feel like it's polished enough.

In the meantime, if you'd like to check out the game today and help with early testing, we're still looking for people to join us on Discord for access to the private playtest: https://discord.com/invite/xBqD9Ureca