Hey folks, welcome to another Uncivilized newsletter!
I wanted to show how much the game evolved visually in the run up to the announcement for Steam's 4X fest, which I was absolutely determined not to miss. This is what Uncivilized looked like from the prototype phase right through until about three weeks before our announcement:
Yes, those are Advance Wars assets. And yes, it looks terrible. But it was super quick to set up, and it worked while I refined the game into something playable and fun. While I was doing that, Evan was working on concept art:
⚠️ Nintendo lawyers look away now ⚠️
He kind of nailed it in one. I was imagining a much more traditional forest style biome, but that's why I'm not an artist. This look is a lot more striking, and retains the colour palette from our last game (though slightly expanded), which we were fans of.
And this is how the game actually looks now:
Pretty similar! We're really happy with how it's turned out, but there's still a lot of work to do.
For starters, as soon as I was done making the trailer, I undid almost all the visual improvement between the two screenshots! They were almost all hacked in as quickly as possible, and not suitable for anything other than making a trailer. Since then I've gone back in and re-done most of it properly.
Even then, there are lots of improvement to be made. Particularly in getting the visuals 'off-grid' so to speak. The trees and coastlines especially look very blocky and grid like, which I already have a plan to fix. I also want to have more visual landmarks, like large one-off terrain features to give more visual variety, and to aid navigation and orientation once you've revealed the whole map.
The city sprites and fog of war are also very crude at the minute, just the best we could do to meet our announcement deadline. I also want the game to be juicy and satisfying to interact with, which was a particular strength of our last game (imo!), and something usually missing from the often stodgy and plain 4X genre.
Anyway, that's all for now! I've set a deadline for myself of the 9th of February to put out a playable build to subscribers of this newsletter! Before then I need to add analytics and a way to submit feedback, otherwise what's the point?! After a few rounds of private playtesting I feel like the biggest kinks are worked out, but fair warning the game is still very much work in progress!
I'm simultaneously scared and excited for more people to try it, and as soon as it's ready I'll let you know.
Cheers!
Dan
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