Greetings once again, my meddling Lords! The skies have parted and revealed yet more of the hideous greenery of the Overworld, but with such an unfortunately unpleasant sight also comes the revelation of new developments on the progress of your underground domain! The wheels of progress are ever-turning, down here in the depths and our relentless efforts are bearing fruit day after day! So take a seat upon your tyrannical throne and hark, as we regale you with our exploits!
Art
- Goblin 2.0 3D Model
We have been making fantastic progress into bringing our final, 2.0 redesigns to life! The wonderful Rebecca Underwood has been putting her incredible skills to use in bringing the next 2.0 creature redesign to life – The Goblin! We gave you a glimpse into the early stage of this with the last update, but now you can look upon him in all his vicious and cunning glory! We decided to make a few changes to make him look more inhuman and monstrous, most notably, changing the size and shape of his mouth and teeth. We are incredibly happy with the final result! All that remains before the newly redesigned Goblin is in the game is to texture and animate him for implementation! We would like to note that what you are looking at with these 2.0 designs is the actual, final assets that you will see in the release of Lords of Nether, as well as the Demo! The previous assets we have showcased were always meant to serve as placeholders and were not made up to spec in order to save time, but with this line we can finally say that we are getting final game assets!
- Mystery Creature Tease
Why yes, a tease indeed! We have recently completed the redesign of a unit that we feel will be very iconic to our game. Something old, something new, but according to popular demand, not much blue. And I doubt our new friend will be good at weddings either. We will not reveal this menace that you will be able to recruit just yet, as we want to keep it a surprise, but rest assured, he is coming and all Hell will break loose when he does!
- Warlock Animations
Continuing on with our efforts to bring the placeholder Warlock model to a functional state for use in the game, Animation Kobold Benita has pretty much completed all of the animations the Warlock requires for conducting research! We are very pleased with his studious ways, even if a few kobolds have been blasted into oblivion along the way… nothing we cannot live without for such a mighty researcher and spellcaster! We will continue with the final animations we require from him at this point, such as eating and resting. Due to how satisfied we are with these animations, we are most likely going to re-use them when the Warlock 2.0 model is finished. This means that we will only have to make some small corrections and bring the 2.0 model to functionality with minimal work required. However, his 2.0 model is low on our priority list, as we have more pressing needs first.
- New Music
More work from the Audio Kobolds! Phillip and Martin have been hard at work, developing further iterations and intensities of our first ambient management track! We have decided to move towards a mix of orchestral, choral and synthetic elements, to create specific anachronistic sounding music that we believe will truly fit our game and make our sound have that much more character and impact! We hope you love it as much as we do!
- VO Progress
The Great Work continues on with our sound design Kobolds! One of our sound engineers, Eric, has been lending his voice to give Yours Truly, the Overseer, a sound in the game, by working on voicing messages and notifications that you will hear frequently as you manage your domain’s affairs. His is the very work you hear in our Early Announcement Trailer and he has been making fantastic progress here, to the point where we are poised to put this initial iteration in the game!
Programming
- Movement System Improvements
Programming Kobold Kriss has been hard at work as always! He has been working on ways to make the movement of our units more efficient, effective and realistic, using splines to supplement the already existing movement and path-finding we have. This should result in a much better ability for our creatures to move through the dungeon and specifically, to position themselves in combat and avoid hazards. This improvement was made as a precursor to the heavy work that has begun on the Combat System. While we do not have much to announce on that feature just yet, as it is rather early into it’s true development, we have spent considerable time mapping out exactly how we would like it to look and function, creating a clearer set of goals towards that end result. We are building the combat so that it feels in essence much the same as to what you saw in our Early Announcement Trailer. While that combat scene was simulated for cinematic effect, we do already have a basic combat system in the game, but it was also more of a placeholder than the complex result we are looking to achieve here. We will update you on the progress of the new Combat System as work continues!
- UI Updating fixes
More in the realm of bugs than anything, we have been encountering some issues with the UI not updating properly, due to various errors between Unity’s UI solution and how we used to do things. We have been going back to this bit by bit in order to smooth these issues out and remove them. We have fixed the issue of values such as gold not updating properly and now we are looking to remove the issue of certain UI elements remaining on screen when they should not. Not much else to say here, but an important bit of dungeon-keeping.
- Room/Area System
As we may have mentioned last time, we worked on updating our Ownership system in order to cascade into this and the feature that will follow bellow. The Room/Area system keeps track of… well, rooms and areas in the game, surprisingly. Notably, it also keeps track of their owners, stats etc. This allows us to continue with developing mechanics that directly interact with these properties.
Other News
- Steamworks
That is correct! Your be-helmeted ears do not deceive you, my Liege! BlackHeart Games is now officially a part of the Steamworks program! This is a big and extremely heartening event for us! While we work on this project day after day, watching it grow bit by bit and being awestruck by some of the things we manage to create, we all to an extent still very much deal with the impostor syndrome that comes with not being proven devs with an already established track record and this particular moment marks a point that brings a further air of legitimacy to our efforts! What will come of this you ask? Well, as you may be aware, we plan on first and foremost bringing a Free Demo of Lords of Nether, a direct cut of the actual game as it stands in it’s development, to you all when the time comes! And the time is indeed coming! We will be creating a store page specifically for the Demo very shortly, so that you may all wishlist it and await it’s coming reveal! We intend to keep the Demo and Full Game store pages separate, as there are certain issues with how Steam handles demos on full game pages. While it is an option to have a Demo on the actual game page, there are issues that arise with wish listing and notifications, due to the fact that, as last we checked, people are not properly notified, as technically a wishlist on that page counts for both the game and the demo, making the whole thing a bit of a mess. So, for the time being, unless we see a change in this, the store pages will be kept separate, when the full game page does come around.
- Testing
In the time leading up to the Demo, we will also be gradually opening and expanding a Tester program! We will start out small, with some of the most trusted and active members on our Discord server, and gradually grow the size of this group! If you want to have a chance at this happening earlier rather than later, stomp your menacing armored self to our ever-growing Discord following this link!
https://discord.io/lordsofnether
- Kickstarter Plan Changes
And finally, it is time for a bit of an evaluation of circumstances. We have been taking a good, hard look at the state of things in the world, as well as our own personal matters. With the global crisis continuing, we are still a bit hesitant as to the viability of this year as a launch window for our Kickstarter Campaign.
While this alone would normally not dissuade us, as there is still a decent chance of success, there are other factors that make us more hesitant. Most notably, events that happened over the course of 2020 have left us in a position where we are most decidedly not prepared to launch a campaign. While the state of the game’s functionality is progressing quite on schedule, we have found ourselves in a position where we must replace all of our previous art assets. This moment specifically was inevitable and always planned, however it was not expected to come this soon. The majority of the art that you’ve seen before, specifically the complex and time consuming things such as characters, were always made to be placeholders intended for the Demo and Kickstarter. These were always intended to be replaced with better assets, which would also be properly crafted to account for animation and various in-game mechanics post the Kickstarter. However, with the departure of our former 3D Artist, Blutonium, we have found ourselves in a position where the former assets need to be replaced effective immediately, prior to the Kickstarter and Demo. This is where the lovely Rebecca Underwood has come in, with her work on the Troll and Goblin that you have already seen being the first mind-blowing forays into this process. The assets she is now creating are in fact final game assets, as mentioned above. This means that once these are done, they will be the assets that feature not only in the Demo, but in the very final game itself, so you can now track direct art progress towards the full release! Luckily, there are not that many assets that require replacing, so the additional time we have decided to take should be enough to revamp everything that is necessary and we assure you, the quality of what you will see over the coming months is a staggering improvement!
In addition to all of this, we must admit that due to personal events and things that have occurred in 2020, either due to the outbreak of COVID 19 or other issues, we have had very little time to prepare for the actual campaign. A massive amount of research has been done in preparation for the campaign production, but the process itself is still in it’s infancy and at this point, it would be sheer suicide if we continued with our current deadline. An unprepared campaign is destined to meet with failure and that is not a risk we are willing to take with a project that is so very dear to us and instrumental to our futures both as individuals and as a company. For all these reasons, we have decided to further extend our deadline with another year, meaning regrettably that you will have to wait for our Kickstarter Campaign to launch in April, 2022.
Fear not however, for this is not at all bleak news! Quite the opposite even! You see, with this additional time, comes a great opportunity to further develop and provide an even better experience at the launch of our campaign! On the side of mechanics and functionality, as mentioned, we are actually moving very much on schedule! This means that we will have a whole year of extra time to further flesh out, finalize and polish key game features to deliver as seamless and true to the final release, partial slice of the game as possible! With the extra time it may even be possible to bring more mechanics or even surprise units and enemies into the game for an even richer experience! Who knows, perhaps even the wretched Overworld will come to fear you… And yes, obviously, with this extra time we can now effectively replace all the placeholder assets with final game assets, the quality of which is an overwhelming improvement, both in the artistic direction, design and execution, but also made to accurate specifications, such as the right topology for animation and newer industry tricks and techniques to help both visual quality and eventual performance!
During all this time, we will also be looking into the possibility of acquiring some other forms of funding, so that we can hopefully secure enough of it to be able to move to full time development for some time prior to Kickstarter. As you may know, everything you see in Lords of Nether has been made entirely with our part-time involvement, being able to only dedicate our free time to the project. If we were actually able to dedicate a full-time production schedule even for half a year to LoN, we would be able to achieve a staggering amount. So, we will put efforts into trying to secure this for at least long enough to carry us to Kickstarter. While we understand that the Kickstarter delay is regrettable, we are right there with you, we would like to get this project funded and some form of it into your hands asap. We are not happy that we have to push the deadline back again, but we also recognize that it is better to do so at this point. We are however extremely excited for the progress we are making and this does not phase our resolve in the slightest. We will make the most out of this time and hope to deliver something truly inspiring next year! However, as we have found ourselves on Steamworks, we have been considering potentially bringing out an earlier stage of the Demo this year and updating it right before Kickstarter. We have some deliberation to do on this, but we are thinking about it. In addition, as we mentioned, testing will start happening soon, so some of you will get your hands on the early stage of the game very shortly! We will notify you thoroughly when this stage begins, as well as when the Steam page for the Demo is live so that you can show your support and add it to your wishlist!
With all this said, we’ve come to the end of our update! We would like to express our infinite gratitude to each and every one of you who follows and supports us! It means the world to us and your continued support, whether by being active on our discord, following us on social media, or even just reading this, all keeps constantly motivating us and letting us know that what we’re doing is worth it! You are all truly wonderful and this project would not feel the same without you! We are about to start getting much more involved and your impact and the weight of your support will deepen even further!
Thank you all, from the bottomless, abyssal depths of our little Kobold hearts!
Until next time, My Lords, keep the Light at bay!
~Your Loyal Overseer.
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