Hello and welcome to the 22nd Dev Diary!

I have been busy with background research and making a couple of low quality mockups, as promised last week and they definitively are low quality ones. Even though the final looks will be nothing like them, they functioned as a simple test of how to design things as fast as possible, without a digital pen and writing pad (which would be a huge improvement on making concept art). But one thing is, I have never been good at arts - drawing is quite foreign to me and I'm much more comfortable with exact measures and tools to realize those measures. But it would be very good for me to learn to draw better, so it would be easier to test out ideas on paper first, before making anything and possibly having to do major changes after the fact.

The After effect project is on hold until I get the 16gb memory sticks I ordered. Since my computer is so old, there is not much sense in upgrading the ram to more than 16gb, which keeps the price under 80 euros. This simple upgrade should make the after effect render a tad faster, as well as keep the computer usable while the after effects is doing it's thing in the background. The plan to use an old basic computer didn't pan out in the end, as it has even more reliability issues than my main computer and only 4gb of RAM, which would make the rendering take too long, possibly weeks, if the PC could even handle it without crashing at some point.

But here are the mockups with a real concept art of a hill-fort from an actual artist (Hjalmar Appelgren-Kivalo) from the 19th century (Copyright expired - PD-US-expired);

The tower was made using the simple Lines -tool in photoshop and the pentagon shaped fort was made by the Polygon tool. All the details could be made by copying assets over and over again, which made the process quite fast, but when making these on a day after a very poorly slept night, it tends to suppress your flow, no matter what.

I'm not sure about what Hill-Fort this concept art depicts, as I couldn't find any information about it specifically. I do know what book I have to buy to find out, and I certainly will.

Another Hill-Fort

Here is a HIll-Fort I do know more about. This fort is more than 52 000 square meters in size (within the walls) and the latest use was timed at between 800–1000 AC. A closeby grave site was dated to be from the 600AC, but since only 1% of the site has still been studied archaeologically, all the dates could still change. Currently it has been estimated to have been used only as a temporary garrison fort and for trade and legal proceedings. The Wikipedia article is somewhat outdated, especially the English one, as it states that the earliest signs of agriculture in the region is from 200 BC, though the most current findings from last year put the agricultural activity to have been started closer to 3000 BC.

There is several cases of historical Hill-Forts being used in multiple ages, since hill-forst have been mostly built on naturally good defensive positions. Due to this, it is not uncommon to find out, that the same hill-fort has been in use in several time-periods, ranging from stone age to late viking age, or even late medieval times.

This is a reconstruction of a stone age house in northern Europe and I won't tell where - this is a little game of search for those who would like to know more  The region this house has been built in has been permanently habituated since 5000 BC and has unusually tightly built buildings (considering the location), dated between 7000BC - 4000BC.

I just had to include the hill-fort concept arts and the stone age house picture and a little trivia as a teaser of [Redacted] for you to enjoy and ponder

This is it for this weeks Dev Diary and I'll see you on the next one!

And as always, you can check out every possible mid week announcements about the project on these official channels;

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Edit; Fixed the links to project sites.