These last weeks i have continued testing the game with 2 other players and proceeded to re-balance a lot of different settings in the game, which is always good to do.
Treaties are now effective, and you can send treaty proposals to other players as well as text messages, send counter offers ect… Rights of passage are also effective and you can’t enter other’s regions without it.
I’ve also fixed a good number of memory leak issues and one major networking issue that showed up during the tests.
But most importantly i’m writting this news to inform you guys that there’s now only 5 things left to do before ‘finishing’ Ymir.
Once these tasks are done, i will initiate the releasing process : closed beta testing and then Early access release on steam.
So that’s it, the finish line is now on sight! I hope to finish these within 6 months (there’s often unpredictable side tasks to do).
- – complete all graphical contents of the game : buildings, resources, units… (in progress, more than 20 new buildings planned of production, entertainment, services, administrative…)
- – implement service buildings ( ‘services’ are a type of resource that is not material and cannot be stored, distributed directly to the population. ex: doctor, entertainments, education… )
- – implement technologies
- – implement trade routes & trade offers
- – NPC ‘free cities’ and barbarian camps with wave raiding system
* free cities will be very basic , just world regions that import and export random resources to make trade routes
* barbarian camps will launch raids of growing intensity in a ‘tower defense’ fashion to add military challenge to players ( on top of their own conflicts ). This is mainly for games in ‘solo’ or in local multiplayer to add challenge but also so that players can practice their defenses and military before real conflicts, considering war with players will be much rarer and more serious.
There is also a 6th ‘secret’ task that i will maybe do before release, but i’m not sure if i’ll have time. It will be done after release if can’t.
Currently i’m working on finishing all the graphical assets once and for all for the planned release version.
I’ve already redesigned all the houses to be more ‘Celtic’ and era specific, with more details and colors to make them more interesting.
I’ve also added a new category of houses that only shows up in the ‘classical’ era: the town apartment that has a shelter capacity of 2 or more households (instead of 1 for all other houses).
I’m also adding a bunch of new cosmetic assets: parks, new road types, decorative fences… They’re unlikely to have any effect on the planned release version, but eventually cosmetic infrastructures will affect the life-quality provided by all the houses nearby.
