Age of Anything

Devlog

War beasts that walk, heroes for every race, and saves

Elephants with knees

I noticed the war elephant didn’t walk. It just slid along with its legs frozen and fell over like a cart. Same for the other beasts.

Now every beast is built from a body, a head and legs, and walks like an animal. The elephant is slow and heavy, the boar is quicker, the tarantula’s legs go in a wave down each side and the heron strides. They each attack their own way too. The elephant rears up and stamps, the heron pulls its neck back and stabs. Bent knees were required for sure, so every leg has a proper joint now.

The first falls were brilliant. The elephant rolled onto its side and its two legionaries just stayed standing on it, bolt upright, on a dead elephant. And on its first stab the heron’s whole neck shot off ahead of it like a javelin.

War beasts striking and falling; at the end of the top row two legionaries stand upright on a fallen elephant
A war elephant with its riders and two siege engines on the move in a match

Heroes

Every race gets heroes now, from its creature and culture, each with a name, a little gold crown and an aura for the soldiers around it. In the first big test battles the heroes won 60 out of 60. They cost more than the whole enemy army and still won, because their auras kept giving each other armour. A hero is now worked out from its race’s own swordsman, so a frog hero and a centaur hero are fair against each other.

Three frog heroes leaving their Town Center, Hopsworth the Damp selected

Saves

Save and load wasn’t planned, I just asked for it. Since the whole game runs on commands, a save could be a replay that plays the match forward again. That worked first time, but loading 20 minutes of play would have taken about 100 seconds. So a save is a snapshot of the match instead, about 400 KB and it loads in about a tenth of a second.

I also want saves to survive updates, so a save from an older build loads in a newer one and picks up the new stats where it can.

White boxes

On the Deck, starting a second match turned everything into white squares, and it loaded suspiciously fast. The art was all there. Each match had been adding to one big sheet of art until it got taller than the graphics card allows, and the card just refused it. Now each match only keeps its own art. Loading fast was the clue the whole time.