Hello guys! After almost four months since Anthropomachy’s Early Access debut, we’re working on its phase two, which will bring some major changes to gameplay! In this post, I’ll be listing all we did on the phase 1 and explaining our thoughts, goals and challenges for phase 2.
If you are already following us on Steam, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, you probably are very aware of all I’m going to explain about phase 1, so feel free to skip to the second topic about what’s next.
Phase 1 – Fixing bugs and introducing the first big changes
- Tutorial added on the very first day for everyone playing the game for the first time. You can enable or disable it by going to Main Menu -> Options -> Hide Tutorial;
- Fixed some news that had special characters;
- Fixed bug where the game volume was at 100% when the game first booted up;
- Fixed bug that caused a high frame rate in the Skill Tree;
- Implemented a fix to always boot the game as fullscreen the first time the game is initiated;
- Fixed bug where the resolution and quality dropdowns in the options menu were not correctly populated the first time the game is booted;
- Fixed bug that prevented some players from changing the audio volume during the game;
- Minor fixes on power details texts and impact for clarification;
- New Skepticism events system;
- Added 31 Steam Achievements;
- After converting a country, a preacher is sent to a neighboring nation;
- Added text to inform current levels of conversion and skepticism on their respective bars;
- Updated the Tutorial to explain the new mechanics;
- Fix allowing native fullscreen support on older monitors;
- Fixed bug that allowed countries to have over 5000 conversion;
- Fixed bug that allowed traits to be upgraded above 99% on certain situations;
- Fixed bug that lost the game with faith under 100 (you’ll lose if your faith goes lower than 50);
- Changed purchase cost of certain abilities;
- Added an Early Access banner to main menu.
Phase 2 – Working on flow and immersion
Since our last update on the game (which happened on July 19th) we’ve been testing around to find ways to make Anthropomachy a more realistic and immersive experience for those playing the game. Also, we wanted to make its goal easier to understand (and more reachable as well). So he’re what we’ve been doing to achieve that:
- Instead of using a generic 5000 points of conversion for all nations in the game, we decided to use each country’s population as their conversion goal. Yep, we were serious about making the game more realistic;
- Because you have to deal with a bigger population to convert in comparison to previous versions of the game, the country conversion limit per affected attribute raised from 10% to 25% – small countries will be entirely converted faster than very populated ones;
- Since now you have to deal with the whole population of a country and not a generic amount of conversion points, your conquering mission became bigger and demands you to trace a different strategy. So now, your goal in Anthropomachy is to convert 75% of the Earth’s population and not 100%. But watch out – if skepticism hits 25% of the population, it will start to affect those who were already converted;
- You will lose the game if skepticism reaches 50% of the world’s population. There’s a way of making skepticism decrease while you still have time: once you convert 50% of the population, even skeptical people will start to be converted when you cast your abilities;
- Anthropomachy’s old skepticism bar is now updated and shows your world conversion and skepticism numbers together, plus the milestones to win or lose the game;
- The progress bar of world’s conversion will also appear in a custom color for each god;
- We’ve also changed the preacher mechanic. You won’t be sending preachers anymore. You can acquire them (or with them through certain events) and once you got enough, you’re able to build a temple on a nation of your choice;
- And to make it easier to understand where you’ve built your temples, we’ve added a border on countries that already have them, even if you haven’t cast any ability on the land – just pass your mouse over the nations to see the borders;
- The more temples you build on a nation, the better the chances your abilities will succeed when cast on that specific country. However, we reduced the bonus from 10% to 1% per temple;
- To convert people, you must impact the attributes of their nation. If you impact an attribute that is already extremely positive with a blessing, you won’t get a massive conversion as you would if you’d have cast a curse. More than that, the honor level and population multiplier will be ignored if you choose to do that, making your conversion on that nation even lower. To make even more clear to the player how bad or good the situation of an specific attribute is, the icons will be shown in the following scale:
- The honor bar now works in the opposite way that it used to be: the more evil you are, the bigger the your bonus when casting curses and the more kind, the bigger the bonus when casting blessings;
- Besides this change on the honor system, it’s bonus range was reduced from 1.5x – 4x to 1x – 3x;
- We’re adding some VFX and SFX when casting abilities;
- Also, SFX when upgrading traits and empowering secondary deities on the ability tree were fixed;
- Faith, the currency of the game, has a different icon;
- The informative popup about the God’s ability is now fancier and contains a lot more of details, like accuracy, power and cooldown (oh yeah, now your abilities have a cooldown time after you use them);
- Raised accuracy on most abilities;
- Casting abilities of opposite impacts in the same nation won’t get you anywhere. Now, we decided to show a error message when this is the case;
- But the skepticism impact of consecutive ability failures was reduced from 5% to 1%;
- Even though they won’t be featured on the next update, we’re already working on adding the other 8 major Gods on Anthropomachy! Those who visit us on our booth during Brasil Game Show that will take place on São Paulo, 9-13th October, will have the chance to play with them first;
Where’s continuing to work and test new features and little improvements to add to Anthropomachy, but for now, that’s what we have to show you!
In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be feeding our social media with news about the 8 major Gods to be introduced in the game and our participation on Brazil Game Show! We’re working very hard these days on both Anthropomachy itself and on the materials we’re going to bring to the event. Hopefully, we’ll also be able to publish the final trailer for Anthropomachy and even announce our final-official-long awaited launching date!
Thank you all for support, feedback and reviews! 🙂
See you soon!
