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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!

  • Patch Notes - v0.5.7

    We 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 and even more readable.

    Speaking of animations, all of the pawns are now using our new animation and vfx system, and the game now has dynamic timing tweaks to normalize animation durations as well! We may need more tinkering to dial in timings, but already our longer animations are feeling more snappy.

    In other art news, we have several new map backgrounds in the works that better fit the game’s aesthetic and are focused on the World Beasts of Constelleum’s lore. We are showcasing some new background concept art in this update as a teaser and to hear your thoughts.

    We got a lot of great user feedback last month, and on top of bug fixes and some quality of life tweaks, we improved the UI for deck select. These updates will make it clear when you are waiting for other players to select decks and make the tutorial more intuitive.

    And lastly, we have a few big gameplay changes in this update. First, Gimbal got some big improvements – check out the refinements to existing cards along with three new ones in deck builder! We hope you enjoy the new and improved Charge status and find creative ways to use it’s Refresh and max value mechanics. Second, cards in your hand will now have a vision indicator showing whether or not other players are able to see them. Played cards have always been revealed to other players, but now each character has their own unique hand slots that start visible. We think this will add a new layer of strategy and intrigue to deck building while also giving new players a bit more info on what cards to expect in the game.

    Wishing you a happy Valentines Day from the Constelleum team!

    Gameplay

    • Gimbal updates: 3 new cards, Charge status now increases when Refreshing and has new effects when at max value, existing cards reworked to better utilize multi choice functionality
    • Some cards now start visible to opponents based on position in hand (even before being played)

    Art

    • Selene got most of her new vfx
    • Tophat and Mulberry got their new animations concluding our migration to the new animation system
    • New map background concept art

    UI/UX

    • You can now invite friends to your lobby or join friends’ active lobbies via Steam
    • Major animation queue rework: all movement/forced movement types are distinct
    • Improve when and how pawns change which direction they face, particularly in interactions with forced movement, AOEs, and ranged targeting
    • Deck select now better signals when you have completed selecting vs when action is required
    • Minor tutorial visual and layout improvements
    • Added character names to tooltips when hovering characters on the field
    • Added secondary confirmation step to abandoning a game or restarting a challenge

    Backend

    • Game engine and Steam library upgrades to the latest and greatest
    • Background work on our tutorial management system, new visuals and experience for these coming soon!
    • If someone abandons a game, the server now defaults their selections without waiting for them to timeout

    Bug fixes

    • Submitted card now always shows up correctly in the hand
    • Re-added missing action information in tooltips
    • Characters now correctly disabled once picked during Character Select
    • Fixed a bug where typing Disrupt in a search bar returned all cards
    • Improved notification upon entering a wrong password when joining a protected lobby
    • Made focus-based tooltips a little less intrusive in Deck Builder
    read more....
  • Patch Notes - v0.5.6

    Hey 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 important consideration throughout the entire game instead of just the first and last round. Her cards also have some creative new uses of old mechanics, so expect novel gameplay beyond her Rambling status! We hope you have fun with this new character. To learn more, check out Sayyora in the Deck Builder and Sandbox.

    A ton of work this patch went into making the game fully playable via focus. All while trying to make sure that as little functionality as possible was lost when not using a mouse. This means that everything can be traversed and activated with a keyboard. There were some interesting technical challenges with getting the UI to play nicely with the hexagons and to making sure tooltips worked whether you hover something or focus it.

    This work will go a long way towards our goals of being playable with almost any input scheme imaginable which has already born fruit because Constelleum now also supports controllers! This does come with a caveat as Steam’s built in input system collides with the one we use in our game. For the time being if you want to use a controller you need to go to Steam -> Settings -> Controller and disable the feature for your controller type. We are already investigating solutions for this and will come up with a full fix in the future.

    Lastly we added some automated data recording so that we can more easily analyze the numbers behind the gameplay and move towards fine tuning the game. This may not sound big, but being able to have easily accessible information about how much disrupt characters are doing or when people are running out of time will all be incredibly valuable for future work.

    And that’s all the “big” stuff this patch, but there’s more great stuff below too! Please report any bugs you find with these new features so that we can continue to iterate on them and make them as good as they can be.

    Wishing you a happy new year from the Constelleum team!

    Gameplay

    • Rambler added to the game now known as Sayyora with brand new cards, reworked old cards, and fully implemented character art with animations and vfx

    Art

    • Awali got his updated animations with a whole bunch of cool vfx
    • Selene has her new base animations, vfx still to come
    • Gnamma has her new base animations, vfx still to come

    UI/UX

    • The game is now playable with just keyboard through a suite of focus improvements
    • Constelleum now supports controllers. See the above paragraphs for a note about a known issue with Steam Input
    • The round history display now behaves more like a popup that closes like normal popups

    Backend

    • Added some automated data collection from matches
    • We worked on the reconnect functionality to hopefully improve the ease of reconnecting
    read more....
  • Developer Log 8

    Cleaning up the Lobby - Mitch

    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 enough players for a full match of Constelleum. Because of this we often need to play with unconventional game configurations like two versus one. In order to do this we needed to restart the server with new parameters which just slowed things down. More recently we’ve been using this very simple lobby system depicted below.

    Old UI for queueing and creating lobbies.

    read more....
  • Developer Log 7

    Still Here - Mitch

    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 to an alpha state it feels like a good time to start sharing what we’ve been up to.

    Three character silhouttes on hexagons against a starry background.

    read more....
  • Developer Log 6

    Sandbox - Matt

    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:

    Map with circles of cracks, vines, and walls

    read more....
  • Developer Log 5

    Animation - Alex

    This week Dev-Level animations were completed for the first three characters, Adrenaline, Flow, and The Elemantalist replacing Juggernaut, Grappler, and Archer.

    Dev art Adrenaline tapping her foot and bobbing her axe above her shoulder.Dev art Flow holding onto his walking stick.Dev art Elementalist holding his hands in a spell casters pose at chest height.

    read more....
  • Developer Log 4

    Bugs and Bugs and Bugs, Oh My! - Alex

    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 -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.

    Matt posted last week on how he implemented a Starting Position Phase to fix the initial violation of personal space.

    Two players starting next to one from the opposing team with the words fancy meeting you here.

    read more....
  • Developer Log 3

    From Version to Version - Mitch

    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 that we thought were essential to our games completion. Using those features we project out about 2 months on our roadmap on Trello.

    Two Trello lists for our V5 and V6 roadmap.

    read more....
  • Developer Log 2

    Animation: When Push Comes to Shove - Alex

    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 my original pass on some developer assets, I had put together some crude animations. As the reader will witness shortly, the graphic arts are not my strength. Each animation is two to four frames of 100 X 100 pixels made in GIMP. The frames are pixel art only because I had dabbled in making custom avatars for Kingdom of Loathing 10 years ago. The final art style, though still being discussed, will not be pixel art.

    The following idle animations feature our placeholder characters:

    Archer idle animation.Grappler idle animation.Juggernaut idle animation.

    read more....
  • Developer Log 1

    The Big Picture - Mitch

    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 with literally no context of the game.

    Column graphs rating the names Celestian Accord, Confluence of Light, Constelleum, and Fractured Constellation 1 through 4.

    read more....

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