Update Time!

This time Anthony (Producer) has a look at one of the bigger challenges the team faced recently with combat development. Annah also showcases a few more bits of art & unit design.

Production - Anthony's Words

"After several months of intensive work, the result we reached with the Warbands pathfinding system is closer than ever to what we envisioned for the game. Let’s look back at the challenges we faced."

"As you already know, we really want to have fluid and responsive Warbands in the game. A pathfinding system already exists in Godus, but we needed to rewrite considerable parts of it to make it compliant with the combat system and our ambitions. "

"For example, we no longer only want your followers to access shrines or new lands to conquer, we want them to be able to reach pretty much any point of the map and react correctly to the sculpting you or the AI might do on the map. One thing we don’t want, is frustrate you because your Warbands did not reach a point, for no real reasons, resulting in a battle loss. Visually speaking, we want them to stay in formation as much as possible to convey a real sense of military discipline. Again, no matter what is happening on the map, you should feel like you’re controlling armies."

"There is still work left to do to reach our objective, but hopefully this gives you an idea about the kind of experience we want to create for you, and we hope you will love it."

Programming - Ryan's Words

Ryan previously mentioned about the AI Pathfinding in a previous update but at that stage the size of the task wasn't quite known.

"The pathfinding system, written by Dimitri, was designed for navigating followers from point A to B as the crow flies. Sometimes this can fail because of sculpting issues or invalid leashing. In Godus, followers adhere to a queue to allow a set amount of followers to move at any one time to increase performance."

"However, with our Combat Warbands, each member must have priority over this system to allow for fluid gameplay and a smooth combat experience. Each warband has it’s own navigation system object that calculates the paths that it is being ordered to move to. Given that Warbands can have many members, the navigation object must be aware of the states of each of its members, where they are in terms of the path laid out for them, if a member has come into any problems and ensuring they stay together along this dynamic world."

"To do this, I have had the assistance of Dimitri who knows the system best, he's worked with me to figure out any edge cases and issues that could arise from this. We have had to do some significant work on this to allow the Warband to be more intuitive when it comes to navigation."

"For example, if a Warband has been told to move to a specific position but that position is in the water, we will travel as close as we can and then cancel the move order and await further instructions or attack anything within our range. We want players to feel like they can safely send a Warband to a position even if its illegal and they’ll try and work something out."

Art & Design - Mustering Fields

We thought it might be a good idea for Annah to show off a little of what she has been working on but before that it's probably best Konrad actually details what Mustering Fields actually are..

"Mustering fields were developed with the aim of solving two distinct problems with the way warbands are generated from citadels. Firstly we needed a stable space for a warband to appear. The ever changing terrain of Godus caused a lot of problems for the navigation system when a spot chosen for a warband to generate became invalid during the process, such as a new abode appearing in their chosen spot. Without it you were never quite sure where a warband would try to get to as it spawned."

"Secondly, having individual soldiers stream out of the citadel as the warband was generating took a long time especially with larger warbands. During this time before the warband got into formation, all the soldiers were vulnerable and could not be commanded. They could all be easily mowed down 1 by 1 by enemy warbands without being able to respond. This problem was especially prominent in large bases where a soldier would have to travel quite far before finding a large enough space to generate their initial formation."

"Having mustering fields part of citadels ensures warbands always have a valid location to form and allows us to generate the entire warband instantly right next to the citadel without it looking like they popped out of thin air en mass."