Developer Blog #12 - Road to ESGS 2017
http://bit.ly/LRdev20170928

Starting this week’s dev blog with some fun news: we’re bringing Last Regiment to the game conventions!

Upcoming Conventions

• E-Sports and Gaming Summit (ESGS) – The first showing of Last Regiment will be on October 27 to 29 in Manila, which is the spiritual home of Boomzap (with most of our staff composed of Filipinos). This is the biggest gaming event in the Philippines, and would serve as a great testing ground in knowing what players like and don’t like
• PAX South – Happening on January 2018 at San Antonio, Texas, this would be our great reveal of the game to the worldwide press after all the improvements based on the feedback we would be receiving during ESGS.

Convention Preparations

Most people don’t see how much work goes on behind conventions. Here’s what we’re planning for our booth in ESGS.

We had one of our artists come up with the design for the panel walls and fascia boards, and we had to keep in mind where we wanted to place our tables and equipment.

Usually we bring our own banners and have to worry about where to place them in the booth that’s not blocking anyone, but luckily the organizers at ESGS allowed us to have our design on the wall itself. It’s also more convenient for us that we don’t have to make the materials ourselves and haul it over from wherever we had it made. It can also be very costly.

The other thing you have to think about is: what do you want to achieve at the show? Since we’re not selling the game yet, what do we want the players to do? For now, it’s all about the mailing list. The goal is to have them sign up, so we can let them know when the game is ready. Since most people are not willing to give out their personal info, we have to find creative ways to make them interested.

There are also some dangers in showing your game at a convention, especially when you still have a very rough build. The media is not that great in knowing how deep a game is in development, and may not be as forgiving on what they see so far. There is a minimum bar of quality that you have to hit, but you have to balance it out against showing it too late that you don’t have enough chances to make changes. If you wait until it’s finished before letting people know about it, then you miss out on the ramping up time where you can get them involved in the development. You have to ask yourself: is this game good enough to be shown but still early enough to allow me make meaningful reactions based on feedback from show?

However, if you want to be at a convention like PAX, you have to reserve a booth around three months in advance. We don’t know what shape the game is going to be by then, so it’s almost like a bet if we’re ready to go by then or not. Developers would like to think that they know, but they don’t know. So there’s a chance you’ll be at a show with something that’s not yet ready for public consumption. That’s the struggle not just for us, but for many developers. You also have to hope that you are surrounded by other great games in the area where you are in, since this increases the chances of press and convention-goers going to that area and seeing your booth.

Game Changes

So in preparation for ESGS, here’s what we’ve been doing in the past two weeks:

1. The Choose a Regiment screen has a revised UI, but still uses some placeholder art. The faction icons are now located in one row on the right, and you’re now able to rearrange the units you’ve selected. The first one on the list would be the first one to be automatically summoned at the beginning of the game.

2. New borders have been added, so maps now have a solid edge.  This means some of the hexes are cut in half, making them not reachable. You can only go to spots next to them.

3. On the regiment bar, units which you can’t afford yet are now crossed out.

4. We’ve added in the concept of heavy vegetation killing the line of sight. We still need to test out if this is fun or not.

5. Before building a structure on ruins, you can choose to explore it first for a chance to earn resources… or experience other bad things.

6. Area-of-effect powers can now be placed on a hex, instead of restricting them to enemy units, which means you can anticipate where your opponents will move next and attack them on that spot.

7. Several character portraits are being revised. This includes our main character, Olivia. Here’s what she looks like now on our main menu. By next week she’ll be wearing something new!

We’ll share her new portrait on the next dev blog, and keep you posted on the progress we’ll be making.

Developer Blog #13 - October 19, 2017
(lastregiment.boomzap.com)

We had to shift our schedule because of ESGS, so for today’s dev update we have three weeks worth of progress to show.

1. We listened to the feedback we received from Discord and changed the portrait art for Olivia, who now looks like a more privateer, pirate-y character. The backstory is that she was in the military force but got kicked out. While on exile in the Ruman  islands between Kothia and Portella, where she is originally from, she developed a badass crew of swashbucklers and pirates. Note that this isn’t the final art yet, and we’re still considering making more changes.

2. We added some functionality to the main menu so that now when we switch from mode to mode, the options, information, and art would change.

3. We are making the map editor more up-to-date. Right now it’s not yet as user-friendly and still very much a dev tool, but it remains to be a planned feature for release.

4. We’ve updated the Choose Your Regiment screen and added the option of creating emblems per regiment, which are like alternate decks that you can use depending on the map. It’s largely based from the emblem system from Legends of Callasia, and there are different themes separated into tabs with up to four different colors that you can use for the background. We’re no longer adding flags as a background option since that piece of reality pulls you out of the whole fantasy feel (although you can make it thematically similar).

5. The map edges are now a lot wider than they’re supposed to be, because previously some of the UI would get in the way. Now when you select a unit or hex, the UI would not intrude much of the game. We also revamped the power and summon system wherein you can view their descriptions using mouse-hold, then play them on the map via drag-and-drop, similar to how cards are played in Legends of Callasia.

6. The selected object panel was also revamped, with a clear separation of what the unit can do (top) and what the current territory allows him to do (bottom). There are also different shapes to indicate if they are passive or active abilities.

7. The fog of war no longer has the cross-hatch lines and now looking better, but we still need to make the edges look more organic.

8. We’ve been playing around with the water: now we have deep and shallow water tiles. We spent some times making the coastlines look clearer and more interesting, but we’re also considering to have make it a game effect  such as units that can or cannot go there.

9. Another slight modification we made is on the movement arrows. They look cleaner, don’t sit on top of the meeple anymore, and no longer have placeholder programming numbers. Now as you drag the unit, you can see how many moves it’s burning.

10. We’ve added 8-players maps and they’re a lot of fun. It’s a little bit slower because resolution takes a bit longer but still pretty snappy.

11. We’ve added a game logs feature which would appear in two places: at the bottom of the screen as it happens, and a history which you can collapse from the upper left panel. We’re still playing around on how we want it to look.

12. We’ve added cone effect damage that would allow you to target something that’s not in a round range, which would give us more interesting options in our spells. We haven’t made any units yet with that type of damage, so maybe in the next livestream we’ll have some to show.

It’s going to be busy in the next few days because of ESGS, and hopefully we’ll still be able to get a lot of stuff done for the next update (most likely because of various feedback we will be getting).

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Developer Blog #14 - November 9, 2017
(lastregiment.boomzap.com)

On the last week of October, we went to two conferences in Manila! First was Gamefest, a game development summit with speakers from both the local and international gaming industry, and E-Sports and Gaming Summit (ESGS), one of the biggest consumer conventions in the Philippines.

What We Learned From ESGS

We usually don’t bring our games in the state Last Regiment is currently in: it’s an early build without a tutorial and lot of placeholder stuff. But since we’re blogging and streaming it, people have already seen it anyway. At the same time, whenever we want to do something big, we want to always do it first in the Philippines, the studio’s spiritual home.

On a practical note, not showing the game before we attend PAX South next year would have been bad idea. ESGS provided an opportunity for us to watch people play and see what we need to do to bring our A game to PAX.

One of the problems we had during Legends of Callasia was that nobody knew we existed. Although people in the industry knew Boomzap, the vast majority of gamers in the Philippines play AAA games and e-sports titles. As an indie strategy game in a world of huge production value games, how do we survive?

We were surrounded by huge companies at ESGS, and some people just took a quick look at out booth and walked on by. But it’s fine, they probably weren’t our audience. However, there must be a niche strategy gaming audience somewhere. Where do we find them? How do we get them to know we exist? We do all sorts of marketing efforts such as streaming, but how do we get people to know about the stream? How do we do marketing for the marketing?

At the convention, most of the major exhibitors had “booth babes”, but it’s something we’ve sworn not to do (aside from the fact that we can’t afford them). Last year, we had Callasia fans volunteer to man our booth at PAX – people who are able to share their love for the game. During ESGS, it’s the actual development team who was there to explain how the game works. We know this is more effective in attracting people who are actually into the game, rather than those only interested in getting pictures with pretty girls at a booth.

We also had a second booth at the ESGS Indie Arena, where all the other indies are. When people went to this area, they are actually there to play and talk to the developers about their games. This is our goal for the next conventions we’re attending. By next week we’re submitting to Indie Prize USA and Indie Megabooth at PAX East – hopefully we get chosen! The important thing we need to do now is get the game ready.

What We Changed In the Game

1. We revamped our UI art assets! During ESGS, the game trailer showed endlessly on the big screen, and we realized that the UI is old and dated. Thus we looked at the time setting of the game and asked ourselves what the visual design was of that time. The answer: rococo and filigree!

2. We’re adding two kinds of structures: Destructible and Permanent. While we were working on the map editor, we started to talk about what single player would look like and got to thinking about buildings. Does it make sense that you can build a village and have a large building tree within the lore of the game and still present a tactical feel? What if we separated it out: things that can be built and things that can only be placed via the editor. Thus, these permanent structures would become an object in the story.

3. In-game notifications have some improvements. Now you get more info as to what is actually happening on the game in the next few turns, including player resource upkeep. During ESGS, the most common question we had was which happens first? The game needed a clear language to explain the order of actions, and for now we added indicators on top of the screen during the resolution phases.

4. We’ve updated the movement arrows and the way they behave. We observed that players often made errors when dragging and moving heroes, and end up selecting additional hexes, so this hopefully fixes that issue.

5. As requested by the people on stream, we’ve added player emblems from Legends of Callasia!

6. We’ve added a new goblin faction called Darktalon led by Captain Hollythorn. They are masters of the environment who are against magic.

7. We noticed that there are too many heroes in the game. They are so powerful, and you basically end up with a screen full of heroes, which made them a bit unspecial. We decided that we wanted to have fewer heroes available to players available during the game. We want to make faction choice more critical, and now we’re experimenting limiting them to up to two factions per regiment.

8. Other things we’re working on are updates and reorganization to the minion powers framework, addition of cool new powers, and VFX improvements. We’re also still working on optimizing the game since as people noticed the low framerate it plays on.

“Earlier Access”

So now people are asking: all these people at the convention got to try out Last Regiment, when do we get to play it? We’re planning to launch as an Early Access title on Steam in 2018, but before that, we’ll do a closed beta with some special people.

Instead of the usual signups, we’re choosing our betatesters from our most active Twitch viewers and Discord chatters.

• Watch our dev streams on Twitch and earn 2000 boombux. (Click here for the leaderboard.)
• Be an active member of our Discord and reach Level 15 by chatting. (Click here for the leaderboard.)

We’ll also invite press, content creators, and our betatesters from Legends of Callasia into the closed beta.

For now there is no estimated date on when beta would be available. We’re currently focused on making a solid demo build for PAX South in January. So in the meantime, stay tuned to earn those points for beta and watch out for our updates.

Developer Blog #15 - November 16, 2017
(lastregiment.boomzap.com)

Before we get started, we want to talk about some industry stuff: Kickstarter has launched its own competitor to Patreon called Drip. As a game developer, this is interesting news to us.

Struggles in Marketing

 

We've had two unsuccessful Kickstarter campaigns for Legends of Callasia and the major thing is that if you're not able to fund the project in a certain number of days, you get no money at all. Despite that, we made the game anyway. Afterwards, we gained some users and had another Kickstarter for the DLC, which went through. But honestly, we've set our bar of success really low. Technically, we haven't been able to fully fund a project yet.

We believe there are three scenarios to make Kickstarter work.

1. You're already really famous.
2. You have a famous IP.
3. You have something so marketable and memorable that can break into the mainstream media.

The first two are not options for us, and the third one is very rare, so Kickstarter has been problematic in our case. Patreon is a different thing. It's very straightforward in how you have a service or product, and people can support you. This is good for those who consistently produce content, such as comic strips or write-ups, and Patreon is a way to help those people keep on producing that content.

And this is the same subscription tool that Kickstarter is now doing. According to the website, "Drip is a tool for people to fund and build community around their ongoing creative practice".

This is obviously a big thing but we're not sure yet how it works with games. There are already subscription options and other existing ways to do it that don't involve going outside the game to another thing. As of now, we don't know yet if we want to do it with Last Regiment. It's definitely useful in the creative world, but we're not sure yet about the game world.

There is also the question about discovery. The one thing Kickstarter does have is 14 million people who are willing to throw money at things, largely on games. But why did Legends of Callasia not become a huge financial success? There are certainly problems about the game, but even so, people never knew it existed. We think there are a lot of people out there who would love to play but never heard of it. That problem is something Kickstarter might be able to do something with, but it has a narrow focus wherein you need this money *right now*. We are curious to see how Drip would address this issue.

Obviously there are other services like this but the problem has always been: how big is your network? That's where platforms like Kickstarter and Steam makes it makes its money in. They already have a huge group of gamers and they're giving you the ability to be able to talk to those gamers through their system.

Aside from the question of how big is their userbase, the next thing we need to ask is: How many products are they offering? This is a problem with Kickstarter: they do have the people, but there are also at least 200 new games in a week. Other services have few people but few games, so there is a bigger chance for people to actually see you. There is a trade-off, and an argument has to be made about whether or not it's worth it.

The other thing we've been doing to get our game noticed is attending game conventions, and we are actually working on our Indie Megabooth submission right now! We're trying to be part of it in PAX East. It's a great show, as well as PAX East, but the value of going to same show with same game degenerates over time.

During the first show, it becomes a big deal because nobody seen it before. On the second show, it is less so since they've already seen it, and you'd just get looked over a bit. So right now the plan is if we get accepted to the Indie Megabooth, we'll be going to PAX East. If not, we're not going to buy a regular booth because the return on investment is not worth it.

Another thing is that we're not really a fancy game and can't have a big screen showing a huge fight. We're a strategy game, which is slower and quieter, and when showing it by ourselves., it is difficult to get people to come to our booth. Again we go into the rabbit hole of how do we market our marketing?

From the perspective of the press, streamers, and other influencers, they would have a list of what they want to see at the show. Nobody comes to PAX to see what Boomzap's up to. Getting them to come to our booth is actually a struggle. We have to reach out to them early on and make an argument for them to come.

If you're in the Indie Megabooth, everyone in the press would check that out. It's on their list. They would come by, but you still need to try to get them to play, though at least you get some eyeballs. Like Kickstarter and Steam's user base, the Indie Megabooth is a big thing that people know and would come to.

Another option is to sign up with boutique publisher that has a PR agency that makes everything happen for you. That's great but we don't want to have a publisher. So we're trying to find a place where we can be on a "to do list" that doesn't involve a publisher because we are trying to be independent.

More about "Earlier Access" aka Closed Beta

We've also started to receive more questions about Earlier Access. The hope is that we get around 20 to 30 people in the beta list, and we're expecting them to be those who are already interested in the game now.

There is no definite date yet on when it would begin, but the plan is sometime in January or February. There is the question of how far along do we want to be in the game before we start. We can give it to you relatively early with broken stuff that would likely change and entirely different from final version, and we're hoping that the people who are in the closed beta would be cool with it.

It's likely that we'll do the beta through Steam, so that it won't get pirated as much. We'll probably do a weekly build where we can turnaround balance decisions like altered stats and address other feedback we receive. Internally we can do daily builds but putting it over on Steam would be a real task, but if we have something new to add, we can go do that.

It won't be a full game. The game modes such as single player campaigns and other content won't be complete. It's something that we'll gradually work on as we get closer to release. But that is the point of beta - you'll get to see it earlier than anyone else, before a lot of it is done.

Plans for Single Player

Given our schedule for Earlier Access, we need to start thinking about how the single player modes would work.

The length for single player campaigns depend on the number of missions and hours of gameplay. There's still a lot of testing before we know how long missions take. If they take longer, we'll make fewer missions. If they are shorter, we make more. What we might actually do is build a series of missions that have variety in length, with around 20 hours of total gameplay.

We also want to make skirmishes more interesting by having goals that aren't always exactly the same, such as capture the flag, king of the hill, etc. A lot of discussion still needs to takes place to sort out how the game works. It's time to start thinking about the lore and story and how we do the single player missions. We need to look at other games and listen to feedback from players to see what they want.

How much would single player impact multiplayer? It comes from our experience in Legends of Callasia where we had a user complain why everything is not yet unlocked, so what we did was when you bought the game all the factions and units were available in multiplayer. The players then asked "Why am I even playing single p[layer?"

That was a mistake we made and for Last Regiment, we want to make sure that single player has meaning and what you're doing has value. We have not figured it out completely yet, but the plan is to have players unlock factions through the campaigns, starting with Olivia and Ruma faction. While going through story, you meet new people, interact with different characters, then unlocking them as playable factions.

We also want to make sure that players learn how to play the game before trying out multiplayer. The plan is to integrate the tutorial into the story, and have Multiplayer mode unlockable by playing. By the time you show up in multiplayer, you should know what you're doing when playing against other players and know what's happening.

Cool New Stuff

As always, we've made several adjustments to the game, but for this blog we want to focus on the UI revamp, because that is what players would immediately see. Aside from adding more rococo elements, it is important that the UI is able to communicate how the game works.

In-Game Screen

• The Regiment bar now shows a max army limit of 11, with only two heroes (which are substantially bigger so that you clearly understood who they are)
• We still have the nice control mechanic where you can click and hold units and powers
• The look and feel for the next unit toggle and timer was changed to look like clockwork and machinery
• Some of the UI panels now match the regiment color you've selected
• An indicator on top shows which phase you are in during resolution

Regiment Selection

We were looking at the old way of choosing regiments, and we didn't really like it. It was difficult to select a hero and find out what it does or what value it brings to me. And so we looked at how you built decks in other games where you can see all the cards in one glance.

It's still placeholder, but we've made the framing better. We also wanted to fill the screen with pretty art and make sure you saw them. We've added a player language wherein grayed out units can't be selected, and you can only choose the colored ones. We've made it easier to click on a unit to view its description and abilities.

In the future, we want these panels more themed to the factions. Right now just looks like a set of cards. We want this to be a place where we could express some of the history and lore of the game. It sounds trivial, but later on when we add new factions or release DLCs, there is a sense of discovery and excitement.

Other Changes

• Update to support segregated hero slots in game screen
• Update to support new design change: minions can only be summoned if hero is in play
  
• Updates to select army UI: manual army sorting works again; power lists work now
• Update to victory moves to support multiple stages
• Prototyped unit adjacency traits (increased ATT is highlighted in green)
  
• Fix to editor object selection: minions show up now; mouse scroll works properly now
  
• Change power targetting recticule to use video asset
  

Developer Blog #16 - November 23, 2017
(lastregiment.boomzap.com)

Last week during an interview, we were talking about livestreaming and the reasons why we’re doing it.  For us, the biggest threat to game development is not making the game happen. Making a game is not a huge challenge, and we’re relatively confident that we can make a reasonably good game. But can we make a great game? Like we’ve always said, the even harder part is getting people to know that it exists and get them to play it when there are so many great games and other things they can do out there.

Being Real in the World of Entertainment

Let’s look at the grand scheme of what people can be doing. Before, the main sources of entertainment were books, television, and radio. Then computers happened. There is now a vast source of content thanks to the internet to keep people entertained for billions of hours. On Twitch, there are literally thousands of people broadcasting something. In terms of games, there are also so many options available on Steam and all other game platforms.

And here we are, a small independent studio, saying “Hey don’t look at any of that, come play our game. We want you to look at this!” It’s a very difficult argument to make and we can’t really directly talk to people to convince them to do that. We have to go around the corner a bit and ask people, “Why don’t you come and watch our dev stream?” then maybe the game is something interesting to them, that they would eventually play it.

How do we get them to watch? We post on Facebook, Discord, Twitter, Reddit, 9GAG, and everywhere else. We need to start a discussion on another platform. Essentially, we are making marketing for our marketing for our marketing for our marketing, to get them to play a game that doesn’t even exist yet.

But another thing we find of value on Twitch is that it’s all real. This is the actual team doing actual development of the game. There are no scripts or press releases. When we look at all the time and energy we spent marketing our game and building our brand, we hope that the one thing that we have shown our supporters is honesty. When you come to our streams, we are exposing what real game development looks like and the life of building creative content: figuring out how all of this works.

We think that in a world where there are unlimited options, what people find valuable is to be treated like humans – and that is what we’re doing. We hope you appreciate all the time and energy we are putting into this as we share our real experiences and real lives of making games. Just like how earlier this week we had some extra livestreams of working on MS Excel to design the scripting system for the single player aspect of the game.

Developing AI for Single Player Games

There was an article about writing wherein the author talks about how the biggest problem is sorting out the commas when the story isn’t done yet. In terms of game development, it’s something that we’re also very guilty of. We’ve been going through balancing issues and fixing the user interface when we still haven’t made the main game yet. We needed to step back and decide what’s really missing from the game that we should have been doing.

One of the things we promised is the map editor. It’s easy to make the editor and it’s already there, because we need it to make the game, but we haven’t finalized yet how it all works on the side of the player. There are a lot of issues we have to resolve such as how they are uploaded, filtered, moderated, displayed, and so on.

The other thing we said was that we were going to make this primarily a single player game. Though a lot of players are interested in multiplayer, we learned from Legends of Callasia that some players don’t want to be pressured by the turns and time limits. We need this bulk number of users to build up the player base in order to make multiplayer a great experience.

But you can’t just make a single player game. You have to figure out several things, and it’s not really the most obvious stuff like the story. For instance, how do you make the AI actually do stuff? How do you give missions to the player? How do you tell the AI and the players what to do? What kind of missions do we have? How do we script those missions? As we dig deeper, we realize that there is a huge chunk of design that we haven’t done yet. We need to go build the scripting system, which is then up to the coder to integrate to the game. This is only the first step.

The next step is the AI, and not yet the actual missions. If you make a single player game, there is no other human to make intelligent decisions. People think making multiplayer is harder because of the obvious server and connection issues, but it’s actually easier when there’s another human playing with you. Instead, single player has algorithms that predict behavior.

In a simpler game, there are simpler AI and limited rulesets, so it’s quicker to do forward thinking and predict what’s going to happen in the game. In a game like Last Regiment that has so many hexes, units, and powers, the brute force approach in letting the game forward-project all the possible things that could happen in any given turn is extremely difficult, if not impossible. We have to look at AI in a different way and pretend that he’s human. We give it a series of goals and look at threat levels to determine what happens next. We can’t give it limitless power and classify smart or dumb AI. We assign them behaviors, whether they are aggressive, defensive, cowardly, and so on.

We then have to relate it to all the other aspects of the game and create rulesets such as when AI can use certain spells or which units to bring in certain situations. It gets really big real fast, and we haven’t even made the missions yet.

The other thing we can do is to “cheat” by granting the AI an advantage by having better tactical situations than the player. This can come in the form of increased reinforcements or territories, but as a human player, you should be able to think and come up with better strategies.

As a small indie studio, improving the AI is a challenging promise to fulfill. At this moment, a lot of the mechanics are still changing as we keep on rebalancing the game, so for now, we need to make sure that the AI is adaptable to various rulesets.

Most of the work we’ve done are still in the backend, so there’s not much progress to show right now. Next week we will be building more maps and hopefully there’s something more visual we can present.

Developer Blog #17 - November 30, 2017
lastregiment.boomzap.com

We’ve been getting some questions from Discord about Last Regiment and game development in general, so we’ll take the time to answer those today.

A Quick Overview on Game Licensing
Are we interested in having people write about our games and publish novels related to our content?

This is not the first time we got asked if books can be made within the license material of our game, or if we could hire someone to write a story for us.  We wanted to quickly walk through the business of that. There are basically two frameworks by which that happens.

1. An author says, “I bet I can sell more books if I attach game content from license X to the story.” He/she then pays a license fee, and the license holder gets rights to look at the book before it gets published.
2. A license holder says, “We want to have books about our game, profit from them, and have complete creative control, but we don’t have an in-house writer who can do it.” They would then hire a writer (full time or by contract), pay a fixed fee, and work with him/her them directly.

Having said that, the Last Regiment license is not yet worth enough to charge a license fee for, and we don’t have the resources to do it ourselves or pay anyone else to write for us. So unfortunately, no Last Regiment books to look forward to in the near future. Speaking of stories…

Creating the Story and Lore
What is Last Regiment all about?

We’ve always said that we were going to take the lore building and story seriously. It’s an easy thing to say, but before we delve further on that, we’d like to share another fun fact.

Not many people know that 99% of game designers are frustrated authors, and sometimes it shows in the games they make. One of the real challenges in writing a video game is to take that author part of you, the one who wants to tell a story, and shove him down. You need to stop yourself from writing that story, because in games, the players want to make their own stories.

In books, the characters do precisely what the author tells them to do, think, and say. You can’t do that in games. There’s this other person who wants to do their own thing and make their decisions meaningful. The game writer must fight the urge to say “You’re not supposed to do that! You’re supposed to go here and do this!” For example, players would have a choice if they want to go here or there, so a designer has to make both of these places interesting.

This brings us to writing the lore of Last Regiment. Before you can write a specific story, you must first create the world where it takes place in. Months ago we started putting together a skeleton outline on the basic ideas about the universe, and gradually adding notes on how the world is, who the characters are, and what the history is. Since we were looking at it from a wider angle, there was some confusion on what would actually be happening in the game.

What is going on? Why do we have these characters?

As we build the art for the game, we started getting questions on why we have a variety of characters with very diverse themes. For some it didn’t make sense, and that was problematic. Then we continued to flesh out the ancient history of the world to show how all the factions and units came to be, and conveyed this to the team.

The next story dump included more details on the period called The Reconquest, when people from the old world started to go back to a continent that they had tried to colonize in the past. This is where the story takes place, after several years of apocalyptic wars between the races where they used both magic and machinery. This was inspired by the modern age of the Enlightenment Era, and we looked at the colonial histories in Europe instead of the usual medieval setting of fantasy games.

Should we share the lore with our community?

This is where we are a bit torn. We want to keep people involved, but we also don’t want to spoil the game. We want players to have a sense of discovery and exploration when they play it. At the same time, we’d still like to have the freedom to change it.

Where are our characters in this lore we are writing?

If you look at the heroes and units in the game, none of them appear in the history. When you’re putting together a world, the first step is the large history of that world. The second step is detailing the facets of that world such as the technology, magic, transportation, weaponry, money, language, races, and a bunch more data that needs to be compiled. After these two are done, the final step is the actual story of the characters in the game: where are they going, what do they need,  how do they meet, etc.

Doing the first two steps is important before you start anything because you need something that could lend something before you get to the end. But even when you reach the final step, you should be aware that sometimes the world and some of its faces might change because of the new things you are adding to the game.

What is the scale of your story?

Again, we take a look at Legends of Callasia, which has an epic scope. You’re a general taking over chunks of kingdoms and saving the world. Last Regiment does not have an epic scope. By design, we want to keep everything much smaller. Yes, there is a huge thing happening, which is the Reconquest, but you are only a part of it. Your choices are probably not going to change the entire world history of the game, but it’s about the characters going through a journey within this environment. They are not captains or lieutenants. As the title implies, you are controlling a regiment, not a huge army. It’s a much personal story and we want our players to care about these characters.

What We’ve Changed So Far

Back to the game, we had a big conversation about the dialog system and scripting the single player missions. The work is underway, but it’s not going to be done in a few weeks. Developing scripting engines is an iterative process that would take several months.

Right now we are trying out a variety of mission types and determining different variations of environments, failure goals, and other things that can be considered fun.

We’ve also made some changes to the user interface! Now you can preview the units in each regiment without going to the Choose Your Regiment screen.

Starting a skirmish or multiplayer game also looks better now, although still WIP.

There’s another screen we’re currently updating, but we have to stop and think about it mathematically.

The Cost of Adding New Features
Can we please change X to this? Why can’t you do this?

Every time we consider adding a new feature to the game, it has to be a cash-positive decision. Let’s take for instance the Choose Your Regiment screen.

A couple of weeks ago, we had the idea of having different background art per faction. Each background would take an artist  at least 3 days to make. With 14 backgrounds in total, it would take 42 working days. Since the team gets paid a monthly salary, we need to look at the cost of making it and how many more copies we need to sell – and it’s a bigger number than what most people would expect.

If we look at new game features, you would have to consider the time it takes the coder to implement it, and for QA to test it. Everyone of those ideas needs to put into this math, and this is why sometimes the seemingly simple things don’t make it into the game.  For the moment, we’re happy with keeping the Choose Your Regiment screen as it is with a black background and customized emblems per faction.

This doesn’t mean we don’t welcome any new suggestions. Keep your comments and questions coming, and we’ll see you in the next dev update.

Developer Blog #18 - December 7, 2017
lastregiment.boomzap.com

After last week's update, we looked at some feedback on what the community thinks of Last Regiment, and we began to wonder if the project is worth continuing. We ask some critical questions.

The Funnel of Decision Making

When you think about selling the game, imagine a great big funnel. It starts wide and gets narrow each step.

1. Audience. Are there enough people out there interested in games like this to make a game like this worth making?

2. Awareness. How do we let those people know we are here, and get them interested in our game, and have them come check us out?

3. Curb Appeal (to download). When they get to the Steam page - is this game obviously good enough, quality enough, pretty enough, and obviously what they want enough that they will actually make the download, and open the game and give us a chance?

4. Accessibility. They downloaded it. They started playing. Is it intuitive and easy enough to learn - and interesting enough to keep them amused long enough to play enough to understand, enjoy, and appreciate the core mechanics of the game? Are they going to stick around long enough to ACTUALLY play the game?

5. Conversion. Will they buy it after the demo? Is there enough clear, obvious value in buying the game that they will put the money down to buy? How much? What is that price point? How do we clearly convey the value to them of a full purchase?

6. Retention. They bought the game. Is it sticky/interesting enough to keep them playing? Is it good enough to keep them from the game's competitors? Will they come back and play the whole campaign? Will they participate in multiplayer? Will they keep playing? Will they bring friends?

If we fail at any of these steps, all of the following steps are not even worth discussing. We take a look at two examples from the games we've made: a success story, which is the Awakening series, and where we failed, Legends of Callasia.

We apply this to Last Regiment, which is a niche game. So the main question we're asking now is: who is our audience? We have to know what their interests are and where we can find them.

We realized that most strategy gamers are not on Twitch, so what is livestreaming for us? It is no longer a marketing vehicle, but a testing vehicle. It's good for driving people to our Discord, get them interested in the development, and talk to them about what they like and don't like. Getting feedback is extremely valuable and it's a more realistic expectation of how Twitch can help us.

Rethinking PAX and Refocusing our Marketing

Next month we're going to PAX South and instead of focusing on getting all of the media to check out our game when it's not yet complete, we're considering doing a bigger version of what we did at ESGS - to have people try out the game and get feedback. We learned this from 

" rel="external">a lecture during GCAP 2017. They also talked about how trailers are very critical in getting people to know the game, which makes us think how we should refocus our marketing efforts.

Big Changes in the Game

We're also testing out a lot of new ideas in the game. For reference, this is how it currently looks like, and it's going to have some major changes.

Some of the issues we're addressing now:

• Improving the fog of war - make them lighter or replace with tiles
• Revising the  user interface (UI) so they don't cover too much of the screen
• Rethinking the way we show powers to the players
• Improving the overall look and feel of how we show hexes, how we aim things, and combat animations
• Redesigning  how factions are handled
• Reorganizing  some of the powers to better theme the heroes
• Looking at the way we are building and summoning things

With all these stuff that we're doing, the game is deeply broken right now. We're still checking which ones actually work. Some of them could be bad ideas, but we hope we'll have something to show by next week.

Developer Blog #19 - December 14, 2017
lastregiment.boomzap.com

We've got some new things this week!

First off, we've finally become a Twitch affiliate and the Subscribe button is now live on Boomzap’s official Twitch channel! Subscribers can now get  double the boombux (which gets you into the beta) and we've also got some sub-only emotes up.

Back to the game: we've made visual improvements and gameplay changes.

Because of the feedback from last time, we've changed the way fog of war displayed and replaced our old, blocky user interface. Passive traits, structure powers, and unit abilities are now clearly separated.

You'll also notice that there is now only one hero per regiment, and we've added units from a mercenary faction that can be used in a regiment without hiring a second hero.

We are also playing around with Build and Raze abilities for all units.

We've also removed cooldown for powers and made it gold dependent instead.

Watch the video for the full breakdown.

Next week, we'll be having our last dev stream for the year. We've also been doing some silent gameplay streams if you like to check out our multiplayer testing. See you on Twitch!

Developer Blog #20 - December 21, 2017
lastregiment.boomzap.com

This is our last dev update of the year for Last Regiment. Most of the week was spent fixing bugs and addressing a bunch of corner cases, but we're adding new things to make the gameplay more interesting plus more visual improvements. We're also getting a build ready for PAX South, so there are several things we need to mark off our checklist.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

People have been discussing artificial intelligence on our Discord. One of the hardest things in making AI is making it seem human. In strategy games, the challenge is how does the AI make a grand strategy/plan and decide to do something in the game? For Last Regiment, we take a different way of doing it by setting decision-making metrics that the AI can look at. However, you can't get to this point until you already have a game that's well put together.

Creating the Tutorial

Another thing that had to wait until now is the tutorial, which we are unable to do until the game exists and the rulesets are defined. In the game's current state, and with PAX South approaching, we are now starting to build it. It's very challenging work, especially with strategy games being more complicated than normal games, and with our relatively new turn-based simultaneous mechanic. We have to make a fun and interesting tutorial to make our players think it's easy and draw them into the game step by step.

What We've Changed So Far

1. Added gameplay significance to deep and shallow waters by introducing new naval units, such as the Tentaklor of the Deep and the Giant Diseased Crayfish.

2. Added themed bridges and fords that can be crossed by people and boats.

3. Improved the way structures look to make them more "hex-y"

4. Improved the Choose Your Regiment screen and added faction backgrounds for the cards

Watch the video for a more detailed breakdown.

We'll continue working on these before the holidays and resume next year. We'll definitely be busy with conventions in January, but you can always keep updated through our Discord.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone!