Hello! I'm Monika from Boomzap, a Southeast Asian virtual game studio. We are currently working on a new game based on what we've learned from our first strategy game, Legends of Callasia. I'll be sharing our developer blogs in the Blogs section too, but thought I'd also make the announcement here. :)

We kept details exclusive to our Discord community but now we're finally sharing it to the world.

• Website/Blog: http://lastregiment.boomzap.com/
• Discord: http://discord.gg/MJQGQEV
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/lastregimentgame
• Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/lastregiment
• Twitch: http://www.twitch.com/lastregiment
• IndieDB: http://www.indiedb.com/games/last-regiment/
• Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/lastregiment
• Steam Group: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/boomzap

Developer Blog #3 - May 4, 2017

How do we make a game from nothing to something? We use a bunch of editors we build ourselves, and other tools that are generally available.

Our Hex-Editing Tools

Believe it or not, one of the biggest tools we use is Microsoft Excel. It’s a great management tool to put a bunch of data in one place and do automatic computations. We also use SVN, a repository system that allows us to control file revisions and easily revert to previous versions if needed. We use it is to keep the most up-to-date files without worrying about getting overwritten.

In this week’s stream, we shared how we made the individual hex tiles used in creating the maps in the game. The artists make different base terrain tiles and decals using Photoshop, then they have to be tagged properly on Excel. Each tile has to look different to make sure there is no ugly tiling. It takes a lot of work to make different kinds of tiles and decals, but this also makes it easier for the player to make their own maps, and also faster for us to rebalance levels and release more content. (Watch in dev blog video #3.1.)

As mentioned in the video, we also follow strict naming conventions to make it easier to localize into different languages later on.

In-Game User Interface

This week, we also made a mock-up of the in-game screen, which we’ll start to implement soon. (Discussed in dev blog video #3.2)



On the top left: regimental colors, player info, chat menu, scoreboard, hex grid toggle, settings menu
On the top right: number of units without assigned moves, resources, turn counter, end turn button (which turns green after all moves are assigned)
On the bottom left: active unit, HP and ATT stats, number of moves, powers and costs, buffs and debuffs
On the bottom right: the regiment bar – select 10 units that you can summon on the map at the start of the game from up to 3 factions, which you can save as a regiment and assign its regimental colors

How to Win

There are different game objectives depending on the mode and game settings. (Starts at 4:08 in dev blog video #3.2)

Campaign mode: Has specific victory conditions depending on story or lore such as to take over a particular building, survive in X number of turns, defeat a certain unit, build X units, collect X amount of gold, etc.

Multiplayer mode: Let players set up victory conditions at the start of the game ad create different gameplay modes. By default, you have to defeat all your enemies and take all their structures so that they can’t summon any more units.

Structures

So far we have built prototypes for different kinds of structures and the powers that they have, then one of our next tasks is to put it in the game and test to see if it’s fun or not. (Starts at 5:38 in dev blog video #3.2)
Units can take over structures and take on the structure’s properties. We also use these structures to give the maps a sense of place and have them tied to the lore and the culture of the different races in the game. Similar to the weaponry, fashion, and technology we’re using in this game, we have slightly modern structures based on the 1700s.

Lore: The Infection

The Orcs are responsible for the Infection, which is a deep part of the lore. (Starts at 11:34 in dev blog video #3.2) They were losing in the great war many years ago, and they prayed to the God of Death to help them destroy their enemies – and so they were given the power to infect the dead with fungus and spores, which eventually took over the lands, driving away the other races.

A different faction of Orcs went to the Sun God and banded with other races to form a community that is simple and peaceful. This is an example of how not all creatures from the same race are the same – so we made factions that aren’t racially based.

Factions

We’ve divided factions from races, to make sure that players have different options instead of strictly playing a certain race. (Starts at 15:20 in dev blog video #3.2) Each faction, such as Redkeep, has its own lore and may have a mix of elves, humans, constructs, and other summonable units. Meanwhile, Ivoria is a huge jungle area with wizards of different races who have powers over animals and beasts. Tirezia also has its own beast units, but in a farmland area. Adding these different faction choices gives the feeling of being involved into the lore and history of the game, and also allows players to mix and max different units.

Monetization

How are we going to monetize this game? (Starts at 17:56 in dev blog video #3.2) It will NOT be free-to-play – everyone should have reasonable chance to play this game without putting in a lot of money to buy packs for a chance to get better units. We haven’t set a price point yet, but we are discussing whether to price it differently on the various platforms.

What we can tell you is there will be an initial purchase where you get the full game, and unlock the factions through the campaign. We received various feedback from people who want everything immediately available, but we felt that it cheapens the experience. We want players to have a sense of success and completion in unlocking new units, so when they player multiplayer, you know which people have played the game. And again, they also become more involved in the lore and story.

Developer Blog #5 - May 29, 2017

Two weeks after our previous update, we went live for the first time with a multiplayer game of Last Regiment! It's still far from done, with a bunch of placeholder art and broken things that we already know about.

We also realized that we haven't done an intro about the team yet. Some of us also worked on Legends of Callasia. We have:

• Chris, designer and Creative Director from Japan
• Adrian, also known as "Tentaklor", our coder in Malaysia
• Ben, animator and artist from Malaysia
• Artists Edwin, Erwin, and Jun from the Philippines (plus Karen who occasionally helps out with the UI)

That's the core team, but we also have back-end support from Allan (Technical Director), JD (coder), and Monika (Marketing).

We also share a brand new screen - "Choose Your Regiment". One of the big parts of the game is all about building some sort of deck or regiment. This is still a first cut of this screen which still used black squares with text for their internal names, which we'll replace with pretty art sooner of later.

When you build a regiment, you can choose units from up to three factions (Note: The limit is not yet working in the game, so you'll see us choose factions from multiple factions in the video.) There are various factions to choose from:

• Redkeep - A massive fortress city set on the edge of Kothia where the local Highborne (elves) and Portellian colonial powers (humans) work together to begin their reclamation of the ancient land.
• Ivoria - A wizarding city deep in the jungle where mages and beasts (such as the monkey warriors), are led by dark, powerful sorcerers
• Silverwood - An overgrown wilderness which was once the home of the ancient Highborne kingdom, now filled with Woodspawn spirits summoned by the vengeful Moonpriests
• Darktalon - A deep, dark forest inhabited by ferocious, magic-hating Goblins.
• Polliva - A large and powerful fleet coming from a great capital across the sea
• Ruma - A rough port of sailors, traders, swashbucklers, and the assorted flotsam and jetsam of the Portellian Empire

These are the first six factions, and we'll add more later on as we build the game and get it working. Each faction comes with heroes, which are super powerful, heavy-duty units. Each faction is limited to one hero (for now - maybe later we'll add a special faction with more than one hero?)

Once you've created your regiment, you can just save and exit. When you go to the Multiplayer screen, you can choose which regiment you want to use then host/join a multiplayer game.

Watch the video below for our multiplayer playtest with Ben, and also do a bit of Q&A with our viewers. (Warning: Lots of placeholder art and bugs.)

Developer Blog #6 - June 8, 2017

To begin this week’s dev blog, we’ll share something that not only applies to Last Regiment, but to game development in general: how does the theory of all our ideas actually play out?

This is a really hard part of game development. Game ideas start out as really cool on paper. But when you start to implement it, you begin to realize that there are things you forgot or didn’t think about, and it ends up not being like what you thought it would be. This is the point where some new developers fail: they say to themselves, “This sucks, I give up.” But that is something you cannot avoid in game development. The real task is getting from that point to another.

Before you can be good, first you have to suck. It’s easy to get real disheartened that you’re not good at this. Instead of giving up on idea and just changing it to something else, you have to be able to critically look at it and figure out: Why does it suck?

So you’ll notice in our updates that we’ll continue to try out ideas and keep switching them up. For example, as we talked about before, the concept of steamrolling or snowballing has been a common problem in strategy games. As you become more powerful and acquire more resources or units, you eventually reach a tipping point where you’ve guaranteed your victory and there’s nothing else anyone can do. Of course, most players would like that, but if it happens too early, people would feel disenfranchised for their game. If in the first five turns it becomes impossible for anyone to go any further, that’s when strategy games fall down. The challenge for us developers is to find that balance. In Legends of Callasia, we have the card mechanic that enables you to make turnarounds in battle. These are the types of solutions we want.

For Last Regiment , we’re currently looking at two ways to handle resources:

1. Hoarding resources. This is the basic Civilization model. For every turn, I get more gold. My pile gets bigger and bigger. I keep hoarding so I can go form armies, build structures, etc.
2. Limited resources. In Hearthstone or Magic the Gathering, you get a certain number of resources which you can use for each turn. At the end of the turn, it replenishes.

If you remember, we moved to limit-based model precisely because we wanted to prevent steamrolling. We played it like that in the past weeks, but it wasn’t fun.

Why was it not fun? It reaches a point wherein I’m over at your castle, trying to finish the game and get you out. But because both of us have the same amount of resources every turn, you would just keep on spawning more units to fight me off. At the same time, if the game continually refills your resources (example: 10), we need to make sure that nothing costs 11 resources. Getting the same amount of resources creates a mechanic with fast turnaround, which works really well in Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering. But in a map-based strategy game where you want the units to move around, last longer, and do things, it’s not such a great mechanic.

So we switched back Gold and Mana into hoarding resources.

We still have the concept of control points, which is a limited resource. Like the population limit in LOC, you only have so much control but you can increase it by getting more buildings. Now the number of units I can make and control becomes limited by how much you can hoard. This is something we haven’t balanced yet. What happens when my hoard gets really big? We’re still figuring it out.

Meanwhile, we’ve also been working on a bunch of core technology to make sure multiplayer is functioning properly. We’ve also added stuff like new effects and new art. We are also playing with idea of having some neutral units and the concept of healing.

Another big change is the camera movement. When we were playing, things would happen on a different part of a map, but I would be looking at something else. That was hurting the game: people thought it was broken because you didn’t see or know what happened. So we changed the way you visualize the game. Theoretically, the camera would be dragged around to show you things as they occur.

In terms of ideal game length, we’re still struggling with that. For Legends of Callasia it was about right: 30 minutes for 2-player games, while bigger games can be from one to two hours. It’s a nice spot for players to be drawn in and get involved. But some want it shorter, some longer; others want more options or less options. This is always an issue in game development: getting everyone to agree on something. Since different things such as more players or bigger maps can affect game length, we’ll continue to play around with that during the course of the development cycle.

But the bigger questions are always: What it is that we ought to be doing? Who are the players we are targeting? You never really know if you’re building the right game, especially at this early stage.

For example, we’ve been getting some feedback on how we’re writing the fantasy or the lore of this game. People have certain expectations about what things should or shouldn’t be, which is a challenge as we create a unique lore for this game.

We also did a multiplayer playtest during our stream (full, unedited video here) and these are the things that we learned today:

1. Movement is a lot of fun. The camera movement is really good.
2. The attack/damage values of the heroes are within the range we expect. They’re not perfect and would still need more balancing, but overall, they’re pretty good.
3. The economy is still wonky. You’re consistently getting your Gold and Mana, but there aren’t many places you can spend them on. After a couple of turns, it gets to a point where the resources don’t matter because you already have everything you want. You keep hoarding and continue spawning, which makes the game basically endless.

In general, we are pleased with the progress we’ve been making and the feedback we’ve been receiving. We’ll be looking at various solutions to address the current issues. Hopefully by next week we have figured something out.

Developer Blog #7 - June 22, 2017

We spent the last two weeks working on two really big parts of the game: the game flow and the back-end.

Design: The Game Flow

As seen in our previous updates, we had to plan out the full game flow from starting the game to playing it, as well as the resources and the victory conditions (the reasons why players win or lose). We spent a lot of time on each of them , then now we are putting all the parts together and making them all work in a way that makes sense. This involves adjusting the values to make them fun and right now, it’s not yet balanced. Thus we continue to playtest: if something’s not fun, we find out the cause, and then we adjust.

The game flow begins by building an army, which you can do at the Choose a Regiment screen. Each faction has a hero, who has bonuses such as gold, or in some cases, gives you special abilities.

For example, Major Carl L’Averi leads the Redkeep faction , which is a colonial settlement ran by humans and elves. Redkeep has very straightforward units such as scouts, militia, and artillery. Carl has a Siegemaster bonus, which means it would be more difficult for enemies to take a city if you have him placed there.  All other factions have their own heroes and minions.

To recap the other factions:

• Ivoria – A city deep in a jungle ran by wizards, who used their magic to empower beasts such as apes and lemurs
• Silverwood – An old Elven capitol in the forest, now taken over by Moonpriests and other forest spawns
• Darktalon – A dark forest inhabited with goblins, spiders, and other wild beasts
• Polliva – A royal city on the other side of the ocean, home of the colonial powers coming back to take over the continent
• Ruma – An island halfway between the old and new worlds, which has become the center for trading and filled with pirates – one of them is our lead character, Olivia.

Back-end Development: Servers and Multiplayer

The second major thing that we are doing is fixing the servers and getting multiplayer up and running. We have 4-player working now, but it still includes some broken stuff. For example, we found a bug wherein embarked units don’t take any damage (which Nelson exploited) and while some had -1 HP and never died (Ben’s immortal Chainsaw Shocktrooper) – so nobody won. The full unedited video of the 4P game is 

Art: Pretty isn’t Good

Another thing we’d like to share is something that really plagues developers, which we also mentioned two weeks ago when talking about the game’s ideal game length. Same with art, we don’t always get on the same page. When artists are create the structures, characters, or map decals, they’re looking at the art way up close and make those that look good in that perspective. However, people play the game zoomed about.

This is not a new problem – and it’s an amateur mistake that happens over and over again. It is partially a communication issue, but also partially because the people making the game don’t play enough of it.

Sometimes we get WIPs of art in a gray screen, then the artist would ask,  “Are these good?” The last thing a designer should say is yes. You don’t know if they are good, you just know that they are pretty – and pretty isn’t good.  Pretty is just pretty. What you want to know is if they are good for the game, and to know that, you have to put them in the context of the game. If they don’t look good in the game, it doesn’t matter how pretty they are. They are not good, and the definition of good in game development is not if they are pretty, but if they achieve the goal that you’re trying to reach with this particular piece of art.  This is something we forget sometimes, so right now we’re working on altering the maps a bit and modifying some of the art to make them look better.

Developer Blog #8 - August 11, 2017

It’s been a while since our last update (more than a month actually!) but while Chris was away, the rest of the team has been happily working and making changes to Last Regiment.

However, one thing we should point out about game development is that what it looks like from the inside is different from what it looks from the outside. There are several things we’ve added and changed to the game that won’t be obvious when you look at it from a player’s point of view. A lot of what we’ve been doing a lot lately is implementing a lot in the back-end which you can’t see, but it’s critical before we add anything else – such as setting up rules before we can program the AI.  So aside from that, here are the more obvious stuff that we’ve done in the past month.

New Factions and Units

We’ve added two new factions, making it a total of 8 factions so far (and we’ll add more later on!):

1. The Tirezia faction is large agricultural community in a sheltered valley near the colonial settlement of Redkeep. With Guildmaster Silvio Longfinger as its main hero, Tirezia includes units such as Clockwork Footmen, Harvest Spirites, and Enraged Peasants.
2. Mugroot is a massive forest of gigantic diseased fungus, overrun by the Infected. This infection was brought about by a particular Orcs who prayed to the God of Death to unleash such power. They have units such as the Mindless Thing, Deathly Legion, Halberdiers, Lancers, Sporebeasts, Rotwyrm, and more.

Updated Abilities

Some new abilities were added such as Embarking, which allows units to move across water tiles from the docks. Structures also have abilities of their own: Windmills boost the amount of gold you earn; Cathedrals allow you to heal; Inns provide buffs to your Attack; and so on.

Art and UI Updates

We’ve also updated some of the UI such as when forming your regiment (which now requires you to select a hero in order to get heroes from that faction), the multiplayer lobby, selecting a map, and a working chat window. There are also some little changes that improves the game visually such as making the tiles and map art two times bigger, and intuitive highlighting for hexes during movement.

Gameplay

We still do daily multiplayer playthroughs of the game to test out the new units and abilities we are adding. During the resolution mode, all abilities take place first such as ranged attacks and spells. Visually they appear sequentially, but they are all happening simultaneously. After this phase, unit movement and melee combat follow. You can replay the multiplayer game from our livestream through the VOD.

Our Current To Do List

Based on the live playthrough, here’s what we need to do next:

• Continue making improvements based on feedback from Legends of Callasia and address issues such as how to simplify game mechanics and communicate them clearly to the players
• Fix weird graphics bugs and visual effects
• Rebalance units and adjust powers for the new factions
• Build more maps for playtesting
• Look at different win conditions to add
• Research on how we can integrate tournaments and other external social features within the game
• Get the build ready for the upcoming conventions this September
• Put a schedule together on when we can have Early Access (hopefully by January 2018)

Overall, our main goal is how to make this game FUN – and all the feedback we can get is very much appreciated. We plan to show more of our progress next week, and hopefully we can get back to our original weekly schedule.

Developer Blog #9 - August 18, 2017
(http://bit.ly/LRdev20170818)

Is this fun? Do we like this? Are we happy with this?

Lately we’ve been receiving feedback from the people playtesting and those who saw the progress on stream that the game doesn’t seem to be interesting or enjoyable. When you get to that point, you have to stop and ask why. This is very concerning, and so we gathered the team for a ‘come to God’ meeting on what we should do about it. There were two options: 1) cancel the project, or 2) barrel down to what those reasons are and find out how to fix them in a systematic way. This is a decision that we often have to make when developing a game, and for now we chose to keep fighting and go with the second option.

Here are the reasons why the game wasn’t fun:

1. There is no turnaround event. This is a big problem, and it was similar to what we encountered with the early versions of Legends of Callasia, and solved later on by adding cards as a feature. You knew relatively early in the game whether you were going to win or lose. For the players to have fun, everyone should still have the chance to win even when it’s pretty close to the end of the game. During our games, it’s clear what’s going to happen next, and you just keep building and summoning units until someone wins.
2. There are so many things to think about. The process of figuring out what the different options are and understanding them is time-consuming. Right now, 45 minutes of gameplay seems long, though there are several games which take longer but are still fun. It’s tedious not because you have to think too much, but because of the constant struggle to get more information. For example, when you have a unit with a long list of abilities, you’d have to click each ability one by one to know what it does. And there are several factions available too! While it’s true that playing the game enough would help you know what all these abilities are, it does provide a steep learning curve for newer players, and it might be a better decision to just have one or two *defining* abilities for each unit in the game. The abilities of both the unit and the structure it is occupying can be overwhelming.
3. There is no midterm goal. Currently there are clear short-term goals (summon this unit, capture this building) and long-term goals (destroy all enemies, take over everything). This lack of midterm goals was also a problem in the early version of Legends of Callasia, and our solution was to create the concept of kingdoms (a group of territories) which you can capture completely for more resources and points. This would be difficult to do in Last Regiment especially with its hex-based maps, and it doesn’t really match what we’re trying to do. So how do we create something that’s visual and gives players a sense of accomplishment?
4. There is low sense of player agency in not allowing you to build your own things. Right now it’s dependent on the person who created the made the map. If there’s a farm on a certain hex tile, you can’t do anything about it. Players do not have the power to define how their structures are placed, and that would have been a strategic decision that would contribute in making the game more fun. Another source of confusion is not knowing when you can summon units, which is only allowed when you have occupied all hexes of a city. Players would assume it’s a bug when they cannot build a unit – it’s something that is not currently explained when you first start playing.

What can we do to fix these?

1. We thought we’d first address the issue of building – maybe if we solve this, we’ll be able to solve all the other problems we mentioned. Instead of having premade structures, we can instead have builder units and upgradeable spawn points for buildings. It would give players a larger sense of agency so they can start defining how they want their world to be built. This would also address the lack of midterm goals. Right now we’re looking at making the heroes of each faction have the Build ability in order to ensure that each player has a builder and would be able to build structures.
2. Simplify stuff. We need to have units with fewer abilities so that players have would have less to think about and instead spend more time making more strategic decisions. It should be clear enough what units do, where they can summon them, and how they can win the game. In terms of spawn points, we will be limiting the classes of structures by tying them with the races, instead of the factions where the lore is based. One of things we’ll also do is to remove docks, and instead allow ships or water-based units to be summoned on spawn points next to the water. 

Aside from these, we’ll have to continue balancing the game. We realized that after ending the turn, your resources are immediately replenished and you can continue to summon more units on the next turn, which makes the game become less fun.

In line with simplifying the game, we’d like to have fewer units with more interesting choices – like in Legends of Callasia with only four heroes per game making it nice, snappy, and strategic. In Last Regiment, you are pressured to move and build units quickly, which makes it less tactical.

What we plan to do is to adjust summon costs for units (some expensive, some cheaper) as well as increasing the resources cap, but decreasing the rate at which they fill. This would hopefully motivate players to do some other actions to get their resources up, and afterwards make the strategic action to attack or use their abilities.

We also want to create more spells that are buff-based as opposed to just doing damage, to make it less about bombarding with lots of units, but more of using specialized units intelligently.

Hopefully by next week we’ll have progress for some of this stuff and playtest if they work. We’ll also create at least one new bigger map and bring in more players to test. We’ve also been doing some changes to the art, so you can also look forward to that!

Developer Blog #10 - August 31, 2017
http://lastregiment.boomzap.com/2017/08/dev-blog-10-on-data-management-and-what-weve-changed-so-far/

Aside from our progress based on the discussion two weeks ago, today we shared some game development tips on how we manage our data using Microsoft Excel. As we said in a previous entry, we make use of spreadsheets as a repository for all the data that drives the game, so that it would be easy to manipulate and export into LUA files that the game actually uses.

Naming and Localization

An Excel file would have various tabs that relate to various things that are in the game, such as Minions. Each piece of data is related to one object in the game and follows a specific naming convention. For example, a creature called Tusked Apes in the game would be named “fact02_unit02”, since it’s the second unit in the second faction. We’d have records for “portrait_fact02_unit02”, “icon_fact02_unit02”, and so on. This allows us to quickly change things (like rename to Angry Apes?) without having to go through each of the records. It’s easier to cross-reference.  But in terms of powers, we went the other way and decided to be more straightforward. We follow “pow_mountedguns” or “pow_invisibility” as our naming convention, but it’s still a systematized and reasonable way of naming and understanding things. This also makes it easier for us to localize the text later on.

Unit Stats and Costs

In terms of assigning units stats, we rearranged the data sheets and implemented a new two-level data management system in the last few days. We have base stats for Attack, HP, and Movement which are scaled in reference to each of the units. This is the first step in balancing: how strong or how weak compared to everyone else do we want our units to be? The next step is to say: how strong do I want attacks to be in general compared to everything else in the game? Then we’d multiply it by a constant to get the actual stats that we see.

After some playtesting we get two kids of feedback: 1) If a unit is too strong or weak, we change that unit’s base stats. 2) If a player thinks that attacks take too long or are too weak, then we change the constant so that all units become stronger. This way we can very quickly make adjustments, especially when we add more units in the future.

We use the same system in deciding the unit costs. How much do we think control points should be worth relative to others, and in general? We first created a basic rule that we can later on adjust when we know which powers are stronger or weaker than others. The formula is based on all the stats for each unit, rounded up to the nearest multiple of 5, to make it easier for players to remember.

Gameplay Changes

We spent some time adding in a lot of building types in the game with various fun abilities. However, we realized that it was less fun to have more stuff. We want players to make great, important decisions, not a  thousand little tactical decisions. So we reduced the number of buildings with a substantial difference compared to the others.

The way buildings work now is that you can only build on a hard point if you have a unit with a build ability. All heroes can build, but there are some units such as Highborne engineers who also have the same ability. However, they can only build one kind out of the four racial building types (Human, Highborne, Goblin-Orc, and Kobold). These buildings can be upgraded along the racial type’s build chart.

We’re also adding in the concept or portals. Before, we had a rule about only being able to build on cities and ports which no one understood. These would now be removed from the game, and replaced with Portals.

We’ve also added a bunch of little changes, like additional animations, art changes, and updated UI.

Meanwhile, we’ve realized that most of factions that are too similar and have the same unit types. One of the things we should change is to create factions that have specific strengths and weaknesses.

Developer Blog #11 - September 14, 2017
http://lastregiment.boomzap.com/2017/09/dev-blog-11-challenges-in-game-development/

This week we’ll talk about some of the challenges we face as developers. How do we make our fantasy game different from others? How do we make all of the game elements consistent and coherent? What features and platforms should we focus on?

Before we talk about what we’ve been working on, we’d like to take a step back to discuss the lore of the game again. Some have been wondering why there are a variety of units and how they all go together, so we’ll start by going over the history of Kothia, where the game takes place.

Behind the Lore

When we made Legends of Callasia, we were focused on creating a solid one to two hour multiplayer experience with simultanous turns and missed out on building the story. It was predominantly based on multiplayer, and won’t do well when you don’t have enough players, thus shortening the game’s lifespan. There is a cycle of a) needing a certain number of players to make the game fun, and b) if the game is fun, you’ll get  more  players. We eventually had many dedicated users, but it was not enough to power the game.

For Last Regiment we knew we had to do something different in order to generate the audience. We realized that in LOC, there’s a silent minority who didn’t play multiplayer but instead played the single-player campaigns. This is where we should start: to build a world, set its foundation, and write the story.

So the questions were: Where do we draw from? How do we get started? We needed to find a year, and usually, the characters, technology and culture in normal fantasy is based on the middle ages. But we did want to follow  the typical stereotypes that every other game already has. We’re still sticking to the genre, because the team is good at beautiful fantasy art.  So what if we changed where we pinned the history instead of moving away from fantasy?

We decided to choose a much later period and a quite advanced year in history: 1772. There was more scientific development; there were trading companies, colonization, and nationalization. What if we had that history in a world where magic did exist? How would elves, orcs, and goblins deal with all these new technology, culture, and social structures? What do armies look like? What weapons would they use?

In Last Regiment, we call this period The Reconquest. The world is composed of a number of continent, the biggeest one being Kothia, which is similar to the Roman Empire. There were massive wars that involved magic, summoned spirits, infected creatures, constructs , and more. There is a massive apocalypse and civilization is largely destroyed.

Humans fled to the old world until centuries later when they decide to reconquer the continent with better technology and tools to fight back. This is the setting of the game. You as a player will have to go back and explore this new world.

Gameplay Changes

And so here’s what we have been working on in the past two weeks.

1. We scrapped mana and decided to stick to only one type of resource for the game.
2. We’ve been testing the concept of hard points, which does make the game more interesting and offers a lot more strategy, but we’re not yet happy with the actual types of structures you can build. We made so many art and animations for these buildings earlier and we’re not sure where to use it. We built the assets too fast and some of them don’t make sense anymore, so we’ll have to revisit them.
3. We tweaked some of the data and rebalanced some of the units. Making them have higher HP made a positive difference in the game: they now last long enough, but are more expensive and take longer to build. You as a player would now spend more time trying to keep your units alive, instead of churning them out and letting them die endlessly. You have to learn to manage units better, and this accelerated the pace of the game.
4. We changed how the fog of war works, revised the visual presentation of effects, and continued fixing some of the art and user interface.
5. And some other bug fixes!

Artistic Coherence

One of the things that makes a polished game look really polished is artistic coherence. It’s the developers willingness to stop and make it something that it needs to be. For example, we have reasonably good art for the hero Tristan, but it looks visually different from the rest of the art in the game, such as the Chainsaw Shocktrooper (aka elf with the chainsaw).  We can’t have both art that are aesthetically different from each other, and this is an expensive decision to make. This is one of the realities of game development: there’s always going to be something that comes up that you didn’t expect that you have to come back to and have it redone. Even if it doesn’t affect the gameplay, the extra level of polish makes a difference.

Multiple Resolutions and Cross-Platform Support

Multiple screen support is something you don’t usually think about. When developing games, you must keep in mind that changing resolutions could cause the user interface to be misaligned. There are two things you have to look at: the scale (bigger or smaller) and the ratio (widescreen, etc.). You need to go through each of the different elements of the user interface and decide where you want them aligned – to the center or on the edges of the screen. What if some players want the elements in the same size? What about retina size?

Meanwhile, there’s the concept of supporting the game on multiple platforms. There are features that are desktop-specific and tablet-specific. There are things on the PC such as hotkeys and mouseover highlights which are not available on a tablet, which is touchscreen. You need to focus down on your audience in order to know which platform-specific features to address. For Last Regiment, we’ve decided to make it PC-centric.

Focus on Single Player

As mentioned earlier, another thing we’d like to focus on is the single player campaign. We had players in Legends of Callasia that were vocal about wanting everything immediately unlocked when they get the game, instead of having to play the campaigns to unlock more content. This created a created knock on effect. What’s the point of single player now? Suddenly it became meaningless, and this is a mistake we want to avoid in Last Regiment. There is pleasure in working hard to unlock something, and the sense of completion is compelling for most players.