Hello guys! Happy Valentine’s day! Are you doing fine? Did 2019 started looking promising for you? I hope so!
Today I want to tell you 2 very important things:
1) Tomorrow is my birthday! >=) So be gentle and send me happy birthday! hahaha
2) Anthropomachy is very close from being ready for Early Access! Yeeeeeeeeeeey! We are even already working on our Steam page but it’s not live yet since since I’m waiting for some content to be perfect to show you.
So now, how about I invite you to an exclusive look through our almost finished early access version? Let’s go!
Options: The more it suits you, the better!
Ivan always wanted to make Anthropomachy a game that would be playable in all kinds of machines, from the powerful gaming desktops to those that may have been around for a while. Since we live in a country with a massive equality gap, is natural for us to have this mindset since making a game that could only be played in the newest hardware would leave a great amount of potential players on the sidelines. Making the UI fit a variable number of resolutions was a little challenging, but it’s nice to know that more people will be able to play Anthropomachy!
There’s all sorts of resolutions available. Audio was suppressed from the video because we’re not sure if this will be the theme that will be playing on this section of the game.
Starting a new game: Choose your main God
You remember how Anthropomachy works, right? It’s the XXI Century Earth, and you’re a Deity from ancient Greece looking to gain worshipers and conquer humanity again. In the Early Access version you will be able to choose between 4 awesome Gods: Athena, Hades, Hermes and Persephone. As you can see, in the final version we’ll have 12 Gods <3
Probably this is the screen that needs more visual improvements so I didn’t even bother to make a video right now. ^^’
What’s still to be done here:
1) When you select a God/Goddess, his/her icon is supposed to bright up indicating the selection – Now we just have a static aura as you can see in Athena. BTW, did you like their icons? It’s always nice to give players a different view of the characters, right?
2) The background painting is not ready yet. There’s a lot of little mistakes I have to correct – but I promise it will look charming!
3) The descriptive banner needs some adjusts in typography and alignment. It will also contain the complete lore (including why this deity wants to conquer Earth again), which attributes are impacted by the divine abilities and which traits are already developed in his/hers personality, giving the player an initial bonus.
The main game mechanics: Spread your faith through the Priests
First thing you have to do as a powerful God is send priests to the first country you want to start converting: Gods won’t appear to mere human beings, so you need someone to spread your word.
Do you see how the cursor change its color when you click the parchment? That means you now ‘carry’ a priest in your cursor and you have to select a country to left him there, working for you. In the top bar you can also see how many priests you have on a country.
Possible improvements:
a) Add a number to the cursor so you know how many priests you’re carrying – it can be very useful in the middle of the game!
b) Add a tooltip text so you know what the parchment means;
Still missing:
a) A little tooltip over the ‘+’ button indicating how much is costs to have one more priest.
Using abilities and converting nations
You start the game with 3000 of faith, 5 priests and must choose which on of the 71 countries will be your first attempt of conversion (Choose wisely as some gods are more suited to certain situations and there’s always the chance that your abilities won’t work). Let’s suppose you would like to start with Australia! As you can see in the top panel, it is a wealthy country with nice educational levels and very good health system…
Examining the curses I can purchase, I found ‘Shepherd’s Suffering’ that negatively impacts wealth… so a good ability to use on countries that have a strong economy right? A wealthy country like Australia feels a decrease in wealth a lot stronger than it would an increase (after all, it is already rich). After using the ability, you can see the conversion of this nation going up and some faith being acquired by the God. He now has some worshipers in that country and his quest has started. Good.
Shepherd’s Suffering in detail
What’s missing:
a) Every time you use an ability, you should lose a bit of faith. (check that the ‘usage cost’ is still a zero in the video). Think about real world: If a miracle happens multiple times, people will think it is some kind of natural phenomena or that someone is behind it and it loses it’s “divine” aura. Be responsible with your powers!
b) A panel when you put your cursor over the abilities icons in the main game screen so you can remember what each one of those do.
Wow! I purchased so many abilities that I even have to open my ‘drawer’ to organize all of it! And look how I’ve evolved Hermes’ traits! 😀 Keep reading to discover how I did it all!
Evolving your Deity
The magical special place in Anthropomachy where you’re able to purchase abilities, evolve traits and everything else to make your God a powerful being it’s called the ‘Ability Tree’. In the main screen, bottom panel, there’s a beautiful Vergina Sun button showing the amount of faith you have to spend. Faith is the main currency of Anthropomachy and is gained as you convert countries using divine abilities. Click it and make your God even more powerful!
What’s to improve:
a) To exit the ability tree we are just giving you the option to press ‘ESC’. We think you might miss a button to click on the screen;
b) Tooltip with how much is costs to evolve a trait;
c) Descriptive text over the impact icons.
Events & Impacts
Each nation in the game already starts with attributes modeled after official data. But c’mon, things change. Besides you interfering with your divine abilities, humans also do things. And humans doing things usually results in some changes worldwide. This is what I personally love most about this game. We came up with some fairly realistic news possibilities that will make gameplay much more dynamic. Keep an eye on the news bar. Everything can change.
My favorite feature! News that cause changes in the world will be bold: click on it and see which country is impacted! We are still thinking about showing which attributes are impacted and where it would appear. In this demo we have just seven news, but the early access will have about 500~1000 and the launch version will contain 5000+!
The Minor Gods
The Main Gods are able to impact just 7 of the 9 nations’ attributes of Anthropomachy! So there will be a couple of countries whose conversion is very, very difficult for the god you have chosen. That’s when you call an divine ally: a minor god!
As you can see in the video, I had some trouble trying to convert France and Portugal. So I realized ‘health’ wasn’t appearing as a critical or extremely good attribute in none of them. I know Hebe is a minor God that impacts this attribute, so I empowered her, having her two abilities added to Athena’s tree. As I just needed a special power to impact ‘health’ for the moment, I purchased just ‘Divine Food’. In Portugal, ‘Divine Food’ worked perfectly! In France, not so much. But no problem, I’m pretty sure it will be useful for other countries as well. 🙂 But pay attention, you guys: You can only empower ONE MINOR GOD in the game. Pick wisely when to empower this powerful deity and analyze which is the best very carefully!
What’s to improve: Since we’re just coming out of testing the minor gods interface, you can see that it doesn’t have a faith cost attached to it. It will, we’re just figuring out how much should it be.
Next time we talk, I hope to bring you The Official Trailer and the Early Access Date! There’s not much missing right now as you can see, but some time is still needed since we’re a two-people team dealing with a lot of tasks, and some of those for the first time. xD Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook and Youtube!
See ya!
