Game Announcement!
I am so excited to be able to announce the name of the game is Hibera, Requiem for the Forgotten!
Hibera is available to wishlist on Steam. And is in the “Coming Soon” section of the Games from Ireland Steam sale happening this week!
It’s been a little while since I have posted a dev blog and it’s not for lack of development. I’ve been working with two very talented people Eve Golden-Woods and Rafino Murphy on a big content push for this announcement and wanted to keep things under wraps.
Having said that we’re due a milestone check-in. Since the last blog post here’s the list of features added to the game:
Full Cutscene system
Hold B to skip cutscenes
Campaign & Save management
Equipment Discovery and management
Weapon Proficiency events
Proficiency-based weapon unlocks.
Light Steam integration
Cinemachine camera overhaul
Roofs and Roof reveals for city buildings
Generic popup system
Units joining the party
Loading screen optimization
New enemy class (Thug) for early missions
3 new missions with cutscenes and everything
Prologue and Epilogue cutscenes
New idle and walk animations for some units
VFX overhaul
Water and waterfall visual overhaul
City lamps that work at night
Overhauled night FOW visuals
Rebuilt wall prefabs in blender
New background art
New logo
Updated main menu
Updated preview panel for equipment management
Added Credits roll
LOTS of new music and sfx
Bug “fixes”
Revamped night fog shader feels much more organic and spooky.
For me the big star of the show this milestone has been the work I’ve been doing with Eve and Raf. Eve has been absolutely crushing it as a Narrative Designer for the game. She and I have been doing a ton of world building, making sure that we can present a very grounded, living and breathing fantasy realm as the backdrop to our drama. She has been helping to chop up the story beats into mission shaped chunks as well as writing dialogue for cutscenes. Thanks to her work I really feel like the game has a solid foundation to tell a compelling story.
Raf has been doing equally amazing work on the audio side. We have new music throughout the game and he’s threatening to do a full sfx pass as well. We sat down and talked through a ton of different inspirations, from games like Banner Saga, Legend of Zelda, Sword & Sworcery, and also listened through a ton of historical and contemporary material looking at instrumentation and composition. We stopped just short of ordering an EP-1320 medieval, but I think it’s very much still on the table.
Excerpt from our in-engine cutscenes.
The headline tech feature of this milestone is definitely the cutscene system. It’s a fully scriptable system where you can load maps, units, move them around, trigger animations, vfx, sfx, dialogue and backgrounds. And the whole thing is underpinned by Yarn Spinner. They have a dialogue system that lets you add custom commands into the script, which just runs in order. Here’s a snippet from one of our cutscenes so you get the idea:
<<show_portrait "Tadhg" "default" 0>>
<<set_name_badge_position "left">>
Tadgh: Another half hour of that reek would have killed me.
<<hide_portrait 0>>
<<show_portrait "Maebh" "default" 0>>
Maebh: The sun is low. We're late.
<<hide_all_portraits>>
<<hide_backdrop 0.5>>
<<move_unit_path "aylet" 2 12 1 12 2 13 2>>
<<move_unit_path "tibault" 2 12 1>>
<<show_portrait "Aylet" "default" 2>>
<<set_name_badge_position "right">>
Aylet: Late isn't the word. What kept you?
It’s still a little labor intensive to build out a cutscene but the system is very powerful and I’m finding new workflow improvements all the time.
A scenic river bisects the battlefield ending in a little waterfall.
I think the water and waterfall system is pretty interesting from a tech perspective. I was playing the Final Fantasy Tactics remake and got fed up with how good their water looks compared to mine, so I had to do something about it. The game board is comprised of individual tiles which have a specific tile type and largely don’t know anything about any other tiles. So when the map loads I take all the water tiles and use a flood-fill algorithm to group adjacent tiles into connected regions. Each region gets its own mesh and we can set the flow direction per region. The visuals are handled with a shader, it uses two layers of procedural noise and then a posterizing filter to make that noise pixel shaped. It also layers in sparkle and caustic textures. These are tiled based on world position so they tile seamlessly between water regions. Finally the waterfalls do a similar thing but using specific edge tiles, it continues the water effect on top and then makes a 90 degree drop with a second shader doing the flowing streams and the fade out. The three demo missions we ended up with don’t show them off especially well, but I’m very happy with how they turned out.
Tadhg just leveled up his fire magic, isn’t that fancy?
On the gameplay side, I made a big update to how we think about equipment. Previously all equipment had infinite copies and was gated solely based on a unit’s class, so more advanced classes could equip better stuff. I’ve completely changed it around. We still have base level items that are infinite. Wherever you are in Hibera, you can get your hands on enough Iron Swords to be getting on with. But in missions you’ll be able to find limited quantity items that provide small bonuses compared to the baseline. As a unit uses a specific weapon type they gain proficiency XP, and at certain thresholds they level up, gaining access to new equipment of that type. XP is shared for offensive and utility magic so mages aren’t left behind! Speaking of mages, each mage has their own spell list for unique spells in addition to the core set. So Tadgh for example, unlocks Enliven at rank D in Fire magic. Enliven is a great buff spell that increases might for several turns.
This milestone is going out with another friends and family playtest build. And I hope to have a public steam demo build out before too long featuring the same content. This has been a year’s worth of work for me and we’re just getting started!
Shut your mouth Carney.
My next milestone is going to be focused largely on content creation but I do have a short feature list in mind:
Recruitable units
New unit classes
Options / Settings menu
Allied & Neutral units
Enemy Thieves & Lootable Chests
Support / Friendship system
Mid-battle triggered conversations
Steamworks integration (cloud saves etc)
Lots of new missions.
I’m also going to be showing off the game at a few events within the next couple months so keep an eye out!
Until then.
