Developer Log
Stay up-to-date as we improve Constelleum, document our process, and generally post about the stuff that we enjoy! We’d love to have you follow along, so make sure to subscribe to the RSS feed or get on our mailing list!
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New Characters
Read moreSince the last devlog, we have been heads down building, polishing, and testing. We are very happy to announce 3 new playable characters, Gimbal, Gnamma, and Selene! Check them out on the character gallery page! For the rest of this article, I will dig further into each character than the summary cards present.
People who follow the game or have had a chance to play test it will recognize
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Patch Notes - v0.5.9
Read moreThis month we put a lot of effort into polishing our keyboard / controller experience and improving our tutorials. With Constelleum feeling more and more complete, we are working hard to better our new player experience so we can broaden our community and get fresh players testing our game! As part of our input updates, we completely revamped the settings menu, making it fully navigable with a controller only. We hope the menus feel snappier and more intuitive than ever, and that our new players have a better experience with the tutorial!
In addition
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Patch Notes - v0.5.8
Read moreWe’re keeping up a good monthly stride with a new slate of features and fixes. As per usual you can jump to the bottom for a more concise bulleted list.
This month we put a lot of effort into improving our map creation workflow. There were certain elements of map making that were tedious in the past so it’s been too burdensome to quickly try out fun new ideas for maps. With our new map editor this is a problem of the past and we are excited to show off some pretty dramatically different map ideas at this month’s play test
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Patch Notes - v0.5.7
Read moreWe have a lot of exciting updates this month! Read the following paragraphs for details or jump to the bottom for a short bullet list summary.
In this patch, the animation queue got a lot of love! Now all movement and forced movement types have their own animations! Several characters have special Drag animations now, and Sayyora even has a Jumping animation. This also comes with improvements to the directions that pawns face. Everything is looking smooth
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Patch Notes - v0.5.6
Read moreHey folks we’ve got an update chocked full of goodies for you this week. You can read more about the high-level big new features below or skip to the bulleted lists below.
Meet Sayyora, the newest addition to the Constelleum cast! She is a traveling prosthetist who gains a “Rambling” resource with each space she moves on the field. This resource counter affects when and how she can collect orbs and score, and also enhances several of her cards. She was inspired by the Rambler prototype character, but she is fully unique with reworked mechanics and full art/vfx. She is still movement focused with exceptional positioning options, but her “Rambling” status resource management is now much more interactive and will remain an
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Developer Log 8
Read moreCleaning up the Lobby
This week I’m reporting in for Alex who has been hard at work on our new lobby system. This new system is going to provide a number of great benefits for our development pipeline as well as the future player base.
As a small development team we rarely have
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Developer Log 7
Read moreStill Here
It has been a loooong time since we posted our original dev blog articles as an experiment about a year ago. At the time we were still fledgling and figuring out where we wanted to take Constelleum. And the good news is that our lack of posts was because we had our heads down working hard to bring our game to life. Now that we are getting close
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Developer Log 6
Read moreSandbox
This week I implemented a Sandbox mode in our game client. This allows us (and any player) to run the game locally and test cards and mechanics against dummy players. To accompany this, I also made a new map with clusters of obstacles. Here’s how it looks:
This project was particularly valuable to us because it makes testing significantly easier. Before this, to test any card, we had to
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Developer Log 5
Read moreAnimation
This week Dev-Level animations were completed for the first three characters, Adrenaline, Flow, and The Elemantalist replacing Juggernaut, Grappler, and Archer.
These are our first non-placeholder characters (though how they look will certainly improve.) These characters are why this game idea excited me so much when Mitch first proposed it. Each character has a completely unique
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Developer Log 4
Read moreBugs and Bugs and Bugs, Oh My!
Our first playtest in mid-April revealed nasty bugs already present in our still simple game. Players reported crashes when viewing their own hands on other player’s turns, starting positions were determined based on connection order instead of team (“A feature” says Mitch), and attacks that were not meant to deal damage could be buffed to deal damage. The bugs were fantastic to see and fascinating to squash, because they drew us deeper into the very powerful Godot engine
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Developer Log 3 - Part II
Read moreCard UI Goes to the Spa
A fun project I tackled this week was updating our card layout and UI. In our game, the cards pose an interesting design challenge because there are two opposing forces driving them. On one hand, our cards need to have a broad and expressive language to enable rich and complex strategies. But on the other hand, cards are a fundamental component of our gameplay and therefore they need to be easily understandable and concise.
Cards right now consist of an initiative value, a title, and a list of actions. We have a special action type called SelectTile which encompasses all user input (ie target selection, path selection for moving, and orientation selection for area of effect). We chain actions together by passing targets
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Developer Log 3 - Part I
Read moreFrom Version to Version
This past week the team switched over to the next version of the game, V5 to V6, so this felt like an opportune time to share a bit of our process. I can’t say it’s anything special, but it works for us so on some level that just means it works.
The first step is our roadmap. A while back we created a list of rough grain features
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Developer Log 2
Read moreAnimation: When Push Comes to Shove
Time to get things moving. This week we attacked the first pass on animations, not letting ourselves sit on idle hands.
Before animation, the game state was updated as soon as a turn ended. For players not taking their turn, characters popped from point to point and swung an axe without moving a muscle. Fantastic material for theater of the mind, but a hint as to why your character is halfway to defeat is usually appreciated. You want to see fists fly, boots scoot, and heads bob.
During
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Developer Log 1 - Part II
Read moreStarting Positions and Where to Find Them
One thing I worked on this week was adding a new game phase for players to select their starting positions. Previously, starting positions existed in a predefined list, and they were assigned to players on a first-come-first-serve basis upon character selection. When you started the game, you were placed somewhere on the field with no explanation—maybe near friends and maybe near foes.
Our new implementation is to instead define an area of possible starting positions by team, then have players choose their individual starting positions from this area. This allows more control, more visibility, and a new element of strategy.
The starting position draft phase begins when everyone has selected their characters. All possible starting positions are sent to everyone, and players must decide where in a highlighted area they want to pick. Clicking / keyboard-navigating to a tile will move your character icon to the tile both locally and for all teammates. (This was the first place in our server with an RPC to all players on one team and not the other; progress!) Here is a screenshot of this process
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Developer Log 1 - Part I
Read moreThe Big Picture
We recently asked for some help with narrowing down our name choice for the game. We asked friends, family, and the DayKnight community to take a short survey and with 20 responses these were the results
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