Development Update #2 - Rebuilding the World

We start here, Lords, with the grand rework of our...

Tile System

Its funny how overlooking a small detail in one's initial idea can have such massive consequences. When I first started designing Lords of Nether, my primary goal was to give the player much more control and agency over the construction of the dungeon and management of their space. Entirely absent-mindedly, however, I inherited the idea from our inspiration – Dungeon Keeper, that our tiles needed to be big enough for two creatures to comfortably pass each other. It was such a tiny thing, but it led to so many issues down the line. The different sizes of our units in the end made our tiles quite big, which led to numerous issues, all of which made the game more clunky, less intuitive and frankly, worked entirely against that initial design goal. When making a room, the main issue we kept stumbling over was that it would either be too small, or quite instantly, too big, and we were never able to get the granular control of the space that we wanted. Everything just felt too clumsy and unsatisfying.

Steam post imageSteam post image Eventually I had enough, and so in a fit of crazed insight decided to reduce our tiles to one 9th of their previous size as seen bellow:

This was no small matter, however. The tile system was the oldest thing in our code and as such was riddled with problems and practically pleaded for a complete rework. Eventually, however, we did it. The results were, quite frankly, fantastic even on first testing. The smaller tiles quite instantly allowed a much tighter control over the space underground and the shape of the dungeon!

Steam post imageSteam post imageSteam post image The object placement system now no longer needed to work on a completely separate grid, but would intuitively simply be the same grid as the tiles! Objects could now be made in much more varied and precise shapes and sizes to accurately fit this grid!

Steam post image And some... interesting, unconsidered side-effects came to be...

Steam post image Ofcourse, being the most fundamental system in our game, one that all other systems in some way interact with, this led to many of them effectively breaking or needing reworks. We will address the relevant things as we continue these updates, but in short, this led to the updating, rework and optimization of nearly all our code. This all took a great deal of time. We knew it was coming, unavoidable really, now or later, but we no longer felt good about presenting the project to you all in any form of demo or whatever we do, if such a fundamental and game-altering change was due to happen. We also couldnt keep accruing design and technical debt, so it needed to be addressed and dealt with to assure smoother future development. Now, at last, the majority of the things that were broken have been fixed and the game is almost back to having the full functionality it did before we began the rework, but now with the added improvements and polish! This has had some other knock-on effects, starting conversations about types of tiles, how certain tiles interact, the size, shape and function of the Throne Room and what we can do to make that better, as well as laying foundations for some important upcoming features, but I think I will leave those for upcoming updates.

And ofcourse, you will notice that we had to get rid of the old environment assets, as they no longer fit in this system. This was something we knew we were going to have to do someday, as the tileset designs were (As many other things up till recently) effectively placeholders that we were intending to replace. The initial intention for this was to do it after Kickstarter, when funding would have allowed us to focus more directly on the various systems, designs and assets, and we would know better what the game needed in terms of art style and mechanics. We ended up pretty much reaching this sort of position anyway, so we decided we might as well start the entire thing now. This does mean that for some time, the dungeon will look rather simple and use very basic placeholders, but we will gradually begin knocking these out as we now begin the creation of our final game assets from here on out. This does lead into a general question people tend to have about Lords of Nether's place in the development process. That is a topic that I feel should likely come with it's own update, as for now this one is risking into becoming a rather lengthy one, but we will talk about that soon! I would like to thank you all for sticking with us and being patient for all this time, we continue work and it helps a great deal to know we have so many dedicated people waiting and excited for what we're making! We will return with a focus on another aspect of LoN's development soon! Until then, my Dark and Insidious Netherlords!