Hello everyone Citizens: Far Lands is now participating in the Lunar New Year Sale 2024 with a 80% discount. Hope you can enjoy our game!

[ 2024-02-07 08:53:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Fixed Hunter achievement
• Fixed Great General achievement
• Fixed Art and Crafts achievement
• King achievement now also unlocks Duke and Lord achievements
• Duke achievement now also unlocks Lord achievement

[ 2023-10-10 18:14:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello Citizens! The game has been out for a good while already and it seems many of you have enjoyed it very much. We have a good standing in reviews, and to celebrate our game's success we've added a number of Community Items to the game! You can now collect trading cards, craft badges and gain awesome community rewards!

Trading Cards

Trading cards will allow you to craft badges. At the moment, you can get five unique trading cards. You can gain trading cards by simply playing the game (at some point they will randomly drop into your Steam inventory), trade with your buddies, or get them on Steam Marketplace.

Badges

You're able to craft the following badges, in order: Explorer, Founder, Settler, Mayor and King. Additionally, you can craft one very special Foil Badge.

Rewards

Collecting badges will yield some cool rewards! First of all, you can get a number of emoticons to use on Steam chat!
Secondly, you can get one of three unique Profile Backgrounds!


Here's an example of how one would look on a Steam profile:
That's all for now! We hope to bring you more good news in the near future! Keep building, Citizens!

[ 2023-03-07 13:20:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

- Levels with battles will now work properly

[ 2023-02-18 12:41:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

- Added V-Sync option - Added Frame Limiter option - Difficulty level is now saved and loaded correctly when continuing game - Fixed bug with invasions spawning at a wrong time when loading a saved game - More optimised battles when high number of archers is present on the battlefield

[ 2023-02-14 21:30:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

Welcome, Citizens! This year we have a special addition for you: A Halloween themed level. A similar level made an appearance last year, in Citizens' demo. That was a long time ago, since it was even before the combat rework (when combat was turn based!) For those of you who did not get to participate last year, you are able to enjoy it now :) What's more is we reworked the lighting, the visuals and the music too. You're able to enjoy it in all new light! Literally! Your task is to build a thriving town and defeat a zombie horde. You'll need to collect some pumpkins and exchange them for weaponry!
We hope you enjoy this year's addition to the game. We added a new achievement to go with it, so make sure to get it!

[ 2022-10-21 19:44:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

- Added a fix for the game crashing in certain languages due to an error in the INI file

[ 2022-09-23 17:09:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi everyone! It's been over a month since the release of the game. We're actively hunting down bugs you guys report and are slowly preparing some future content patches. However, we need your help! We'd love to hear your opinions on what kind of content you'd like to see in the future. If you're interested in helping us out, please consider filling out this short survey. It's a short set of questions about potential future content. Earlier on in the year we've even done some prototyping :)

[ 2022-08-28 10:19:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone! Time has come for a maintenance patch. Here are a couple of fixes and improvements:

• Fixed battlefields which could sometimes cause unexpected behaviour
• Various optimisations for units, resulting in a slight performance boost on some systems
• Increased speed of archer's attack to make them more useful on the battlefield
• Fixed rare duplicate invasion events which could result in enemies attacking themselves

More to come soon!

[ 2022-08-24 12:59:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

- Added more turns in levels 10-22 - Edge scrolling turns off when window is out of focus (alt tabbed) - Fixed a bug in survival mode, when player would leave at turn 100, purchased an item in the store, and returned, causing instant defeat - Survival mode no longer displays max turns in numbers

[ 2022-07-28 19:10:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

- Added edge scrolling as requested by community member - Fixed a potential crash on some systems

[ 2022-07-16 15:56:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Come and have a chat with us, as we play Citizens: Far Lands

[ 2022-07-16 11:11:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

- Improved performance on medium and low settings. - Fixed story achievements - Fixed ignored ini settings

[ 2022-07-15 13:59:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

Welcome friend! We are finally nearing our journey's end... or is it just the beginning of a new adventure? Citizens has been in development for two years. It's been a wonderful time - full of new challenges to overcome and new things to learn. Our small team has grown closer together, and we're even more ambitions than we were at the beginning of this all. Getting to the Popular Upcoming page was a huge milestone, and we have you to thank for! Citizens: Far Lands releases today! We decided to go for a low price of $11.99 USD, but we're also applying a 20% discount during release week. Now is the best time to get it! The demo has been updated with new quality of life features, battle improvements (both visual and AI), improved visuals and a massive performance boost. We've also added a host of new languages and polished the existing translations.
Furthermore, the full game has received a number of additional features that we didn't plan for originally:

• Campaign was expanded to feature additional levels
• Fate of the Gods events were added
• Survival Mode was greatly enhanced
• Popular Community Requests made it into the game, such as renaming buildings, better camera control, and people visually appearing in your village

We hope you will enjoy playing Citizens, as much as we enjoyed making it. It's been an incredible journey and we're honoured you were a part of it. Please keep in touch and reach out with ideas for improvements, polish and perhaps even expansions! Citizens releases at 1:00am PDT (08:00 GMT)

[ 2022-07-15 02:42:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone! I'm Dusty! The 3D artist working on Citizens: Far Lands! As part of our dev diaries, I thought it might be interesting to show you the art side of game development :)
When I first joined the team, I was asked to improve already existing designs of buildings. It wasnt long before my affection for the game has translated into more than just a little rework however.
I had to rework over 50 buildings that were already in the game and it was quite a task. I'm used to creating realistic models which take more time than what Citizens required, and good news was that the buildings were very simple. Because of the sheer quantity however, it took a lot of time anyway. As you can imagine, creating an art asset, even a low poly one, can take anywhere between a few minutes to a few hours. If you want something really satisfying, you might find yourself even working for a few days! To save us time, I created a colour palette which would be applied to all graphical assets in the game. This resulted in easier texturing work and better game performance. I am pretty proud of the results! Here's the palette at this point in production:
Most of the assets in the game use this one texture. We also have one like this, but with gradients to create smooth transitions between one colour and another. At first the houses used to look like something out of ancient Greece. They were heavily inspired by Godus. Worker's House then and now:
Citizens has clearly defined "Civilisations". We meet a few of these in the game, but the inspiration for player's Civ comes from medieval Italy, France, Germany and England.

Townhall

Each building comes in 3 variants. "Standard", "Winter" and "Ruined". You can see an example below:

Tournament Field

Artisan's House

The destroyed variant comes because of the fire that can burn down the buildings or barbarians that can destroy them during raids. At the same time, our game designer, Kiwi, reworked almost all objects such as trees, cliffs and resources. Before and After redesign:
Since Citizens also offers battles, I was tasked with creating unit art. At first, soldiers were very simplistic and without detail, as we weren't certain of how the battles were going to work and look. When things came together, I started detailing them, and ended up doing custom animations (initially all of our animations came from Adobe's Mixamo). The character has a modified version of the HumanIK skeleton from Maya LT. Animations and skeleton are very basic, they don't even have a control rig to be honest but they are working well with everything we have and satisfy our needs.
Each unit has at least one variant to make the soldiers look a little more different from each other
When all this came together, I thought that adding a little bit of life to the village was a good idea... So, I worked on some animations for characters working on buildings like you can see on the worker trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow0etgCbZJw At the end of the day I ended up modelling a lot of unique things which you'll see in Citizens, starting from whole new civilizations like Vikings, to enemy Bosses all the way through to Animals. I feel very proud of my work even if its nothing complex and I feel proud to be contributing to the game by giving it a little bit of fun and pleasant look. :) Remember to Wishlist the game if you like it! Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this little writeup.

[ 2022-05-07 20:44:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone. I figured it might be a nice idea to write a little post about the mechanics of our combat system in Citizens: Far Lands. It has taken a little while to develop, and has gone through a major overhaul, so I think the lessons I've learned on it could be shared with a wider community for the greater good :) For those of you who are not into programming, I tried to keep it light. You might still find it interesting to see how it all works "on the inside". Initially the combat system in Citizens started as a turn based system. From the beginning it was written to be as reusable as possible. Although I'm not a good programmer, I try to make my systems like plugins: something I can just easily drop in and out of the program I'm working on. Initially the basic requirements were:

• A few soldiers (let's call them subunits) should move together as a unit. We will call these "Flags".
• Each Flag has statistics that are always the same, and some that grow or shrink with each subunit in the unit. For example damage should be increased when there are more subunits, and should shrink as they die.
• Each subunit has its own animator, they should be able to move, attack, die and stand idle

I started off with designing the basic component called a "UnitObject". This was a scriptable object that defined what the unit was, what it was called, what statistics it had and so on. Over time it would grow to gain additional parameters, but I started with some simple ones like health and damage.
Here you can see an and result. This is how we define an "Archer". There are some additional optional parameters that are left empty (for example units can have unique banner carriers). If the unit throws missiles, we can specify those too (arrows, axes, giant chickens...). An important list to take not of is "Keywords". Stealing the idea from tabletop strategy games (Kings of War, Warhammer), we define what a unit is by giving it a bunch of strings. "Missile", "Infantry", "Cavalry" and so on. This way we can also add "defence" and "attack" modifiers which are based on said keywords. We'll discuss these later. Scriptable objects are nice because they provide a visual interface for the designer to change the unit stats quickly and easily. If we were trying to make the game moddable (so basically if we were writing it again :) ), I'd probably do something like this, but the end result would be converted to an XML file read from streaming assets. The next part is Sub Unit. Sub Unit is a prefab that defines an individual soldier. It has its mesh, animator and components needed for it to work.
SubUnit component contains mostly data and a few helper methods. A lot of it is populated at runtime by the battle manager (parent flag, troop, anchor and so on). It has some basic controls for animations such as "move", "idle", "die" and "attack". SoldierAnimation component is basically a wrapper for the animator. It provides a slightly more friendly interface.
How SoldierAnimation is useful:
The last and most important component is the "Flag" component. Flag component has all the methods and parameters that the battle manager is constantly interacting with. Because we're lazy, we use Unity's inbuilt Navmesh Agent to move the troops around. Flag detects its own movement and tells all its SubUnits "hey, I'm moving now, play the move animation". Flags can grow and shrink in the number of active subunits, so we need methods for these too. Each subunit we add increases health and damage, but leaves some other statistics such as movement speed or attack speed unchanged. Whenever a subunit dies, these are reduced.
Since we moved away from the turn based system, attacking is done in real time. There's a simple timer that ticks down, to check whether enough time has passed between attacks so that another can be carried out. When the timer is up, unit attempts to attack a selected target. There is some logic in selecting targets, but it would require its own long post.
So, attacks! Remember keywords I mentioned? Damage dealing itself is quite simple. At its core, we simply takeaway the amount of damage from flag's health, but there is damage reduction and amplification. Spearmen unit can have a 50% attack bonus against "Cavalry" keyword. Units that are standing in a forest can have a 50% defence bonus against "Missile" keyword. Terrain modifiers can also contribute a lot! We can effect range, unit speed, damage amplification, damage reduction, attack speed... all sorts of stuff. All in all, the system works quite well. If you have the right animations and meshes, a new, fully functioning unit can be setup by a designer in a few minutes. I hope you enjoyed this little dev diary, and perhaps it gave you some ideas if you're working on your own stuff. The system is no longer turn based, and a demo update is coming in a few days where you'll be able to try it yourself. Our next dev diary will deal with AI and battlefields themselves!

[ 2022-04-28 21:29:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's been quite a while since the demo went live. Thanks to your feedback we identified a number of aspects of the game that could be improved, or that just weren't fun altogether. One of these was the battle system. Currently the battles in Citizens are turn based. They take a long time and aren't really exciting. For this reason we overhauled them completely! We opted in for a real time system. The battles will now be fast paced, taking anywhere between a minute, to three minutes max. You'll be able to place your units on the board, much like you can do currently, and then all hell will be let loose! Although your army has automatic AI command, you'll be able to override individual orders. You can see the teaser of the battle here: [previewyoutube=raBR0h6wErk;full][/previewyoutube] We kept the terrain modifiers, so moving into the woods, or ordering your archers to fire from a hill will provide certain benefits to your units. Another thing we want to show you is the thematic "Worker Trailer". Everything here is recorded in game. You'll see many updated building meshes AND villager animations! That's right - most buildings now feature villagers walking around and doing various tasks. [previewyoutube=Ow0etgCbZJw;full][/previewyoutube] We hope you like these previews, and as always we look forward to your feedback. Remember to wishlist the game if you haven't already done so, and send the links to your friends!

[ 2022-04-24 16:16:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone! To celebrate halloween this year, we have a little treat for you. We're releasing a brand new, themed level! Play it now on our demo - gather pumpkins and exchange them for weapons, and then defend yourself against a brain-eating horde of zombies! It will not be an easy task, so be careful! There are many of them! This update also shows off a new mechanic which you'll see more of in the full game: Enemy Invasions. We hope you enjoy this little event and as always, we really want to hear your feedback! :)

[ 2021-11-01 20:53:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

This Next Fest we're taking an opportunity to show off our work! Come meet the team behind the game, see how we work, and chat with us :) Meet the Game designers, programmers and artists!

[ 2021-10-03 19:23:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

Join the lead dev as he falls into traps set by the level designer. This Next Fest we're taking an opportunity to show off our work! Come meet the team behind the game, see how we work, and chat with us :) Meet the Game designers, programmers and artists!

[ 2021-10-02 21:22:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone, and welcome to our very first dev diary. Well try to post these semi-regularly, although I wont be giving a time frame just yet. There are weeks when a lot happen, there are weeks when were just bugfixing, so Id rather wait until an appropriate moment to give you some juicy content. Today, is one of those moments! So far, 226 of you have played our demo. Weve had a few streamers give our game a go, for which were very grateful! Shoutout here goes to Geesebreath, Chameleon_TBN, Ketobbey and BlueZestTV. Firstly, lets talk about the changes that affect the demo. Weve made a few quality-of-life improvements. Tutorial is a little bit better and explains a few more things for the newcomers and there are more tooltips in several places. More importantly, every resource can now be locked which should help you manage your economy without needing to pause every production building individually. You can also stop the peasants from eating if you so wish. Just dont expect them to pay you! Weve added support for four additional languages: German, Italian, Polish and Russian! Some translations might be missing, and some might have little mistakes, but well fix it ASAP when noticed. If you do spot something, please let us know. You can switch the language in main menu options. Combat is a little prettier, with units walking around rather than just hopping to their destination. Weve also increased attack, defence, and health values since weve added tile modifiers. Enemy camp can now be attacked with archers it just wont take that much damage. Combat AI was also improved a little. Archers use better arrows and no longer shoot at enemy feet. Clicking on buildings in game will play a sound now, which should add a little bit to immersion. We hope you like the sounds and dont find them annoying Talking about annoying sounds, we increased the cooldown of voice notifications (Our supplies are running out!) to two minutes. Talking about buildings, we added a few new icons, especially for animal farms. Weve been very busy at work with new systems for the main game. We added a system for triggering global events, meaning we can now do some cool stuff, like levels where youll be fending off enemy invasions! If you watch the trailer, you might spot a few new features which well talk about in due course. Thats all for tonight, and we hope youll come to our live stream happening on October 2nd, at 1PM PDT | 8pm GMT.
Lastly, here's something cool: [previewyoutube=KFONsBiYsNw;full][/previewyoutube] All best to you all and happy city building!

[ 2021-09-30 23:08:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

This Next Fest we're taking an opportunity to show off our work! Come meet the team behind the game, see how we work, and chat with us :) Meet the Game designers, programmers and artists!

[ 2021-09-21 20:54:11 CET ] [ Original post ]