Version 0.42.3 has been in the works for a long time now, however its still a minor version because it's focused in a small but long requested UI improvement, as well as balancing the start game experience. Theres some ongoing work to add animations for the missing weapons, which you will see probably in the next version.

The biggest UI change is the status effects affecting the expedition members are now displayed as icons with tooltip instead of the text, so it should be much more readable now.

Special and Magical modifiers applied to weapons of enemies are now tied to the danger level of the game, i.e. they will become stronger as days go by. Spanish trailblazers are also now equipped with European armor.

Some improvements to the start game experience: Your first explorer will now start with a cursed charm that will resurrect him once. We added this to prevent early game situations that might doom you. The first battle against two raiders is now much less risky.

Minor UI improvements

• Display a notifications when a expeditionary dies on an accident
  
• Tooltip responsive size tweaks
  

Anxious Perk has been added
- Throw in a couple of raiders at the player at the beginning for fun
- When combat starts, pause after a little bit so that units don't look like statues
- Special and Magical modifiers should now be correctly assigned to armor
- Spanish grammar fixes
- Prevent applying effects to dead units.
- Prevent triggering effect while the combat is paused.
- Balance changes especially vs. Spanish Units

NovaMundi is a procedural exploration game with tactical combat in which you lead a group of indigenous warriors and explorers to traverse the vast and dangerous territories of the Andean mountains seeking to unite the Muisca populations and prepare them to stand against the upcoming invasion efforts from European powers in the XVI century.

NovaMundi is available now on Steam Early Access! GET IT NOW (or wishlist it) if you like what you see!

Version 0.42 focuses in COMBAT, its the result of about two months of work of the team and, while there still some improvements to be done in the balancing, UI and visuals, it already changes a lot of how you much approach the game. Here are some of the most important changes brought by this version:

Combat
As promised in the previous update, you will now be able to change the weapons, armor and accessory equipped on your units; we implemented nor only a bunch of base weapons and armor, but also many magical, special and quality modifiers that affect the stats and special effects associated with each. Shields were also added, adding the possibility of fully blocking attacks in exchange of sacrificing a stat boost. There are also now Cursed items you cannot remove with variations of the magical effects of the uncursed item.

Closely related to this are the concepts of weapon and armor types, for instance blunt weapons are effective against hard armor. This is also reflected now in the floating UI in combat.



Enemies with an equipped ranged weapon will fall back to a stone knife when the enemies are at melee range; they switch back after the combat is over or they are able to put some air between them and their enemies.

The responsiveness of selecting units and changing commands has been improved greatly.

The battle loot calculations have been changed to not include food, and give weapons based on these equipped by the defeated enemies, damaging their quality level randomy.

A new item, the Condors Blessing, is featured as rewards in towns and can be used to level up.

Exploration
You can now be ambushed while camping, and you cannot camp or enter towns if you are being chased by an enemy.

The max number of units in your expedition is now 12.

Trade
Each town will now value items differently, which can be helpful to know where to buy and where to sell.

The inventory of the wandering merchants inventory reduced and randomized.

Perks
A lot of new perks implemented including Kiss of Chia, Follower of Huitaca, Gullible



And thats it for now! I hope you find these changes exciting we continue working towards the full release, keep an eye out!

IT IS TIME!

Time for what you say?

TIME TO BETA TEST!

The combat system is now feature-complete! At least mathematically speaking

Were still missing some models, UI elements, and sound effects. Some adjacent systems are also missing, but hey! You can whack things now in a much more fun way!



Of course, this means the update is not ready for an official release, you deserve a polished and great product! But we cant do this alone.

While weve tested this updates features a lot, we would appreciate your help to cover all situations; since the players skill influences whether a battle is hard or not, an experienced player will have a much easier time playing than a newbie, and we cant balance the whole game as if all players are experts... thats where you come in!

Right now, you can access the open beta by going into your Steam games library, right-clicking on NovaMundi, and following this menu route:

Properties->Betas

On the Betas menu, youll see a Beta participation drop-down menu. Click on it and select openbeta Open Beta Testing. You can opt out of the beta at any time by following the same route and just clicking none on the drop-down menu.

If you decide to participate in the beta, we thank you! And we would love to hear all feedback from you!

To do this, just go to the Steam forums or better yet, to our Discord server at https://discord.gg/u8aZDw9

What can you expect?

• You will now be able to find or acquire weapons and armor, and equip them to your units
  
• There is, of course, a new set of weapons and armor types
  
• The equipment can now be affected with quality and special effect modifiers, as well as Magical blessings and Curses.
  
• The equipment for the enemies is also generated considering these modifiers, and the loot acquired is generated directly from it
  
• Ranged weapon users carry a knife to defend themselves when enemies get too close.
  
• Youll also find that the leveling system has been revamped.
  

• Are the systems fun? Does combat seem fair? Are there weapons that are very OP?
  
• Is the leveling system fun? Is it worth it to protect an experienced unit? Is a level-up an exciting thing? Do you perceive the increase in power from level to level? Is the pace of level-up good?
  
• Are there any bugs? A bug is anything that you perceive shouldnt happen or isnt working as intended!
  

Hello everyone! My name is Stoltverd, and Im one of the developers here at Slashware. Today, Ill be taking Slashies place to tell you about an upcoming update on Novamundis combat. And let me tell you Its big.

Well finally allow characters to change/equip weapons: no more will characters be limited in their weapon selection to what they were carrying at the moment of their recruitment. Archers will use spears and clubs if you need them to do so! That doesnt mean they should but they can. No more will you be screwed if your frontline is destroyed. And talking about ranged weapon users, all of them will now carry a knife to defend themselves when enemies get too close.



In regard to weapons, new types will be included. All are unique in how they work and look and the damage they inflict. Some inflict piercing damage, others slashing or blunt; and all of them interact in different ways with the new armors that are coming.

But thats not all! Equipment pieces can now have many different modifiers. Quality, special effects, and magical blessings, all can modify how a weapon is used and works.

Watch out though Some equipment pieces may very well be cursed!



Equipment and how combat works are not the only things we touched. We transformed every aspect surrounding them too, including how to acquire equipment, how enemies get it assigned, and how they use them, how the leveling system works, how much experience is awarded to characters, how to keep track of units and their effects during combat, consequences of combat outside of the battlefield, and a long ETC

This update is really going to be huge, you can expect a changelog several pages long. It involves reworks of many different systems, UI, and more Its been a true labor of love from all of us here at Slashware, and we cant wait for you to get your hands on it!

This beta will be available for players on the beta testing group of our discord who have already acquired the Early Access version during next week. We hope to see you there!

This patch fixes an issue with ambushes and adds a popup to preview the guards of the encampments.

NovaMundi is a procedural exploration game with tactical combat in which you lead a group of indigenous warriors and explorers to traverse the vast and dangerous territories of the Andean mountains seeking to unite the Muisca populations and prepare them to stand against the upcoming invasion efforts from European powers in the XVI century.

NovaMundi is available now on Steam Early Access! GET IT NOW (or wishlist it) if you like what you see!

Version 0.41 focuses on improving the exploration experience in many ways, read below for full info.



The biggest change for this version is that Muisca towns have been greatly expanded, filled with life, and given each one a unique identity. You will find different craftsmen working on them, merchants populating the markets, and guards defending the fenced areas. This was a long time coming and Im happy we were finally able to include it.

Doing this required some heavy refactors in the procedural generation and in the structure of the game initialization, to make sure all the critical places could be placed adequately without clipping water bodies and steep mountains, and allowing scrapping the process and restarting if needed.



Additionally, the dialogs for all the townspeople have been revised, and some additional sidequests were added to match what they meant since there were some loose chats.

We are already working hard on the improvements over the combat system; as a preview to the next version, you will see the equipment slots for weapons and armor for the party members; note that you will still be unable to change them thats coming up very soon! We are adding different types of weapons and armor, damage types, mystical modifiers, and special effects. You are gonna love it!



As you can see, the morale of each individual member of the Expedition is now displayed on the status screen; we have finally made it so that it affects the proficiency of the units in combat; in addition to having adequate sleep, you will now have to feed you expedition with varied food if you want to keep their spirits up.

Finally, Some changes were made in the economy so that these different kinds of food can be more easily procured in towns (amidst many small tweaks to make it feel more alive and changing)



And thats it for now! I hope you find these changes exciting we continue working towards the full release, keep an eye out!

PS: Bonus sneak peek we are also revamping the intro of the game to better convey the story and the context of the adventure.

v0.40 contains the focus on sidequests which at the same time triggered some engine work. Additionally, out of nowhere, there was work in the zoomed exploration which may be significantly exploited in the future when more caverns are added.

Caverns Exploration
Out of nowhere, I decided to add a minimap to caverns exploration including markers for the units, an indicator for the camera location, clicking on the minimap to warp to that location, and uncovering the minimap as units explore it; it was a lot of work that probably wont be fully exploited in the current version.



Additionally, made it so that the battle music overlay only activates while in combat

Procedural Generated Discoveries
Some of the sidequests we had designed required visiting a kind of place in the world, located nearby another place; to support that I included placing the markers in the world (for paramos and spots in the rivers), and then wiring together these places with the quests after procedural generation was done, so that when you talked with the quest-giver he could give you details on the direction and distance of the place.

Sidequests
We worked on a bunch of sidequests (TI-5, TI-7, MQ-5, MQ-8, MQ-23), as mentioned, some of them were of a new kind, requiring you to visit places



As a new sidequest required a day counter, I added support to allow multiple of such type of quests. Some QA rounds revealed bugs in MQ-0 and MQ-4 that were also fixed.

Economy
Modified the merchant restock routines to include a limited amount of rare goods they can have every day; they also refer to them in their greeting.

Assorted fixes

• Add missing journal fragments for the main quest
  
• Prevent exploration music cooldown from resuming music while town music is being played.
  
• Make the mission briefing text area scrollable
  
• Add a visible Tunjo slot for party members.
  
• Fix issues selecting units in combat (conflict with minimap)
  
• Fix raiders encampment prefab restoring issue.
  
• Land places on terrain when restoring the game
  

v0.39.0 doesn't pack a lot of new features, but comes with some sweet balance changes, stability fixes, and three sidequests.

Balancing

• Units now have 50% HP (both party and enemies); besides the impact in balancing, we hope this will also make the combat feel less dull.
  
• Archers have 50% Attack
  
• Spanish Trailblazers have 2/3 Attack
  
• Spanish Trailblazers are now only spawned on Day 5+ (was 3+)
  
• Spanish Trailblazers Danger Level is now 5 (Fewer units per battle) (was 3)
  

Its been six months since the last Early Access version release. There are still lots of things to Polish but I figured a release was in order for players to know we are still alive. We will continue working to complete the game and improve the players experience.

During these months, I have been discussing the possibility of partnering with a company to help complete the game and market its full release; there were some good developments but ultimately nothing has been decided.

Following are some highlights of the changes of the newly available version: 0.38.2

Audio Wwise and Environmental sounds

We are pretty advanced in the process of migrating the audio implementation to Wwise; QuietGecko had been campaigning for this for months, and I gotta trust him its going to be worth it for the project.

After an initial setup and some smoke tests to make sure it wouldnt cause issues with the game (version 0.38.1 was distributed internally for testing). Gecko then set forth to migrate all the sound effects, ambiance, and music.

This included the environmental bird songs, and the town spot ambiance (including adding variations depending on the size of the town), as some first points where Wwise would provide value. And also, the first real new development with the addition of environmental sound for each biome being explored by the player.



Some UI elements, like the volume sliders in the settings, were also hooked into the new system.

The migration is still not 100% complete, so you may find some sounds off around (especially for the dynamic music). We are working on fixing that.

Caverns

After the release of 0.37.0, I set myself to add a first iteration of zoomed locations, dungeons, dangerous caverns you could explore optionally if you wanted to risk for some good loot. Initially populated with giant animals, the idea is to eventually fill them with mythic creatures from the Muisca culture.

A lot of work went into this so that caverns with random loot could be generated procedurally, with enemies and rewards placed on them. Beyond an initial, simple procedural generator, changes were needed in the commands system to make this zoomed exploration mode work well besides the normal Combat mode (with which it shares many components).

Tweaks were made in the Enemy AI to work inside sprawling close spaces like cavern networks, which work pretty differently compared to open spaces like the overworld combat areas.



Some issues with pathfinding, usability, and required additional content caused me to halt development on it and switch to other stuff; it proved to be too challenging and depleted my energy to work on the project for some weeks. I marked and internal version, 0.38.0, with my progress, but still didnt make these caves readily accessible to the players, exception for a single cavern you need to visit to complete the main game quest, visit it at your own risk!

I am still deciding if this is going to be a priority for the next release, or if we should ditch the work and focus back on the overworld.

Miniquests and Dialogs

It had been almost one year since Stoltverd designed a bunch of side quests to spice up the player experience within the game, so I decided it was about time to implement them. Initially, we implemented four side quests in which you will help tradesmen around, making contacts or neutralizing menaces threatening their business.

Besides all the dialogs related to the mini-quest-related characters, implementing them demanded improvements in the quests and conversation systems, like being able to mark dialog options as hidden based on flags, create groups of mutually exclusive dialog options, or hide quests that are just sub-stages of a quest (or just should not be visible to the player initially).



One of the side quests required reviving infrastructure for Eliminate Enemy type of quests, which introduced a pretty hard-to-track bug since these used to work in the pre-Early Access times (when we didnt have Save/Load game working).

Additionally, the dialog system was improved with the ability to have hidden unlocks, so that options can appear without being explicitly mentioned in the parent dialog fragment, and the layout was changed to support dynamic dialog options (it had been hardcoded to 6 due to a previous redesign); this also required rethinking the layout of the conversation overlay, so I took the chance to make portraits bigger.

New traders were also added to some towns which had too few inhabitants, instead of having the procedural wayfarer do everything

Procedural Terrain and Exploration

There are not a lot of new developments on this aspect, however, I addressed three issues that had been in the backlog for long enough, haunting me,

The first one was fixing the meteor holes that were happening randomly in the high mountains; I finally found this to be caused by accidents when an additional Perlin noise applied to the existing geography pushed too deep. The solution was simply reducing greatly the strength of that additional noise so that it still added variety to the terrain but didnt alter it that much.

Another fix was preventing mountains from blocking rivers, which didnt look very good.

And finally, something that was haunting the game since a long time ago and for which we already had a solution in place at some point in time but deactivated for design reasons: the map borders.

The way I have solved them is by increasing the margin at which the party will hit the invisible wall of exploration, so you will not be able to get that close to the edge of the terrain to see the underlying artifacts. I had hoped we could come across a better solution like adding a procedurally generated mesh that would follow the slopes of the terrain and be painted either in full black or with a cross-section. But due to time constraints with so many other things on the table, I doubt that will ever happen.



In any case, I dont completely dislike the current solution since it still gives the impression the map continues instead of being cut short. Its just you cannot go there because of plot reasons.

User Experience Tweaks

Finally, a couple of tweaks originating from Stolverds playtesting sessions: Allow deselecting units and items by clicking on them in the inventory, and allow adding and removing items freely from barter offer regardless of carry capacity, with a check at the moment of the deal.

Alright, so it's been super quiet lately but that doesn't mean we haven't been working on the project!

We are doing a lot of design work and planning for the last phase of Early Access development of the game. I wanted to share with you a little bit of that plan so you know what's going to be coming up very soon for the game!

• Improvements in the combat system: Adding 3 equipment slots per unit (melee/ranged/armor), damage types based on the weapon, and special effects (poison/sleep).
  
• Improving and completing the existing animal unit types: Puma, Jaguar, Rabid Ocelot, Spectacled Bear, adapting them to changes in the combat system, improving their AI and visuals.
  
• Adding new "fantastical" animal unit types: Giant Spider, Giant Scorpion, Giant Snake, Rabid Bat Swam
  
• Adding "mythical creature" unit types: Blackbirds of Chiminigagua, Envoy of Huitaca, Victim of Tomagata, Mohan, Cucacuy
  
• Adding equipable weapons: Sword, Pike, Lance, Arquebus, Warhammer, Halberd, Club, Blowgun, Spear, Sling, Bow, Stone Axe, Spear Thrower
  
• Adding equipable armor: Hard leather, lamellar, quilted jacket, golden plastron, wooden armor, layered cotton.
  
• Allow making offerings at special places, or to special portable items (tunjos) to obtain advantages or heal the units.
  
• Deeper effects of fatigue
  
• Improved Camping System: Prepare camp based on available resources, Ambushes, Camping activities: Crafting, Cooking, Curing wounds, Telling stories
  
• Improved predesigned first-time experience embedded in the systems of the game with a plot to make the player feel more involved into the game while he learns how to play.
  
• Add sidequests for the player to achieve small victories for the player to keep them motivated through the gameplay, supplement the rewards given elsewhere, and make the game world feel more alive.
  
• Illustrated cutscenes with parallax animations narrated in Muisca language (with subtitles for Spanish and English).
  
• Replace the current outdated voices in Muisca for the commands, with the latest more accurate ones.
  
• Add more roaming small animals
  
• Wandering merchants and caravans
  
• Permanent enemy groups in the overworld
  
• Add activities to the map like chopping wood to sell or craft equipment (like better bows and arrows) and getting gold from the rivers.
  
• Improve the procedural generation and inhabitation of the caverns with the fantastical/mythological animals, and rewards for exploration (these will be the "dungeons" of the game)
  
• Add more discoveries that the player can make (animals, plants, wonders of nature), including drawings of them.
  

We have been hard at work improving cavern exploration! ancient artifacts lie in their depths, but you might also awaken forsaken forces of nature and spirits of the land.



Development is on ! can't wait to put this out and have people lurking in these dark caverns hoping not to meet one of these critters (or worse!) the next corner!

Development has resumed in full! The biggest addition for this version is the Perks system; you can now customize your runs by selecting different bonuses, penalties, or just variations of the universe.



This version ships with the following 4 perks

• Combat Blessing: +2 Bonus to attack for all units
  
• Vagabond Defect: -10 HP for all units
  
• Peaceful Lands: Youll be attacked much less often by raiding parties
  
• Militia Only: Only Guardian units will be available (no Guecha Warriors or Archers)
  
• Known Lands: The location of the main towns will be known in advance.
  

This version contains two critical fixes:

• Cannot load games at all (root cause issues with the MuiscaNameGenerator state)
  
• Exploit: Raiding parties not saved
  

A new version is out, 0.36 Achiote, here are the major changes but as always there were smaller bugs fixed along the way.



Lets start with exploration: based on players feedback I doubled the movement speed in the overworld since players didnt seem to really like to take their time to look at the scenery this of course makes moving between locations much quicker (but the time scale was adjusted accordingly so it all takes the same amount of game time.). Additionally, the time doesnt completely freeze when you are not moving, but instead slows down to 10% of the normal speed, since it felt a bit glitchy with the full stop.

The random dialogs that expedition members used to say while traveling were removed since they were not really adding a lot to the experience and actually were confusing players who thought they might be real hints to the game mission or things to do.

However, the main reason I decided to push this version to the public was the addition of the hints in the minimap; players will no longer need to refer to the journal and textual directions for the nearby towns; instead, they are added as blotches of paint in the map, put in an approximate location.



As the first step on a sequence of improvements for the towns; the game now zooms into them when you enter them. This is just the beginning of an arc of development for the towns, and I am going to incorporate recent research on the Muisca towns as well as usability improvements and tweaks to make them feel bigger and more alive.



The Mac version was finally updated from v0.32.4 (August 16, 2021), so if you are on Mac make sure to update and get a LOT of improvements

We continue working on a list of improvements for the game; its not clear how much longer it will be on Early Access, but I want to make sure of its quality, accessibility, and variety of content while keeping the current base scope. So make sure to keep an eye out for future releases!

• Fix click areas for units in combat
  
• Make Suamox visible on the map
  
• Fix broken onboarding in the "map" step
  
• Allow disabling tips
  

Lets talk about the new version, 0.35 Trailblazer, here are the major changes but as always there were smaller bugs fixed along the way.



A new combat unit, the Spanish Trailblazer, has replaced all other Spanish units (at least momentarily) to fit with the new visual style of the units and our latest research. These lightly armored European warriors are armed with steel spears and appear along with Panche raider groups in the mid to late days of the invasion.

The Muisca units were also improved with knives added to the Explorer unit, and new animations for the Guardians staff attack.



The interaction with towns has been improved with a redesign popup listing the population, including the role of each populator (to make it easier to distinguish the ones related to the quests from the ones that are merely informative).

Deer hunting was also improved with them now having proper run animations, and with some tweaks on their behavior.



The text of the intro was completely remade to reflect on our latest developments of the theme of the game, mainly adjusting the portrayal of the European force as much less of a deadly invasion force while still a dangerous threat.

The texts for the dialogs of the wayfarers where they describe surrounding animals have been localized, as well as the names of the animals and their description when you find one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcBSLpU8fp4

On the media front, the interview with Congreso and Sociedad for the TV channel of the Colombian Congress was finally released on YouTube; some interesting points were discussed.

Finally, just for fun, I mocked up how would Encanto town (from the Disney movie) look inside the Expedition engine, using some assets from the previous incarnation of the project which I dont rule out reviving this year in some way (as a separate game).

Fauna



King vultures (Gallinazo Rey) now fly on the lowland forests and wetlands. Large and predominantly white, the king vulture has gray to black ruff, flight, and tail feathers. The head and neck are bald, with the skin color varying, including yellow, orange, blue, purple, and red. The king vulture has a very noticeable orange fleshy caruncle on its beak. This vulture is a scavenger and it often makes the initial cut into a fresh carcass.



Characters and Quests

We added a complete set of 16 new characters including their dialogs for both Spanish and English. These include the leaders of 6 Muisca territories, and several characters sharing the trades and traditions of the Muisca.



This also included the implementation of a more defined set of quests to unite the Muisca territories, designed based on our research on potential sources of conflict between the Muisca territories, as well as their beliefs and needs. The Quest controller used internally had to be updated to support the new conditions to complete the tasks, as well as to improve its support for chained quests.

New trade and quest items were added, and the caverns system was also reenabled so that these quests could be completed. The Dialog Controller was also improved to support dialog fragment variations based on flags so that the conversations can be a little bit more dynamic and contextual.

Visuals
We took the first step to display the Muisca population center including more huts and a palisade since these are essential elements for their architecture. We still need to work on the definitive unique elements for each town.

Streaming
On October 12, most of the dev team assembled to chat (in Spanish) about the state of the project and our approach to the topic of the European Invasion of these territories which started in October 12, 1492, including how the topic has evolved in the game to its current shape where we focus on the player combating the divisions between the Muisca first and foremost, portraying a scenario where it would be harder for small bands of explorers to gain political advantage in the territory.



We also talked about our plans to transition out of Early Access, and some things we wish we could have time and resources to add to the game. Click here to see the VOD.

It has been five weeks since the last update. A new version, v0.33.0, was published.

Audio
Gecko continues working on improving the audio of the game; the UI effects are almost completely covered, and we began experimenting with spot ambiances with the towns.

New Unit models
We decided to take the leap and remake the appearance of all the units; we are looking forward to abandoning the previous bulky anatomies replacing them with more anatomically correct bodies with more details and higher texture quality.



We still need to add more variety to them, and we are still working in the Spanish units as well as integration of these new units into the game (as well as improving the workflow to integrate new fragments and variations more easily)



The DevTeam at DevCom 2021

We participated in DevCom 2021 (pitching a separate game we are planning for 2022). However, we also did a dev team stream, talking about the (updated) history of NovaMundi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzd-mwVm810

Some of the topics we discussed included:

• The many shifts in the theme for the project and their effect on the ongoing development.
  
• The current work in many facets of the game, as we approach the end of Early Access.
  
• The feedback we have received from the Early Access phase from streamers such as Nookrium and their communities, and how we have integrated it into the game. (including the work we have done to make the game feel more alive)
  
• Classifying NovaMundi as part of a genre. RTS? Survival? Strategy RPG? Roguelike?
  
• WarTales we noticed it.
  
• Playing the current version of the game, some tips from the experts!
  
• New roles for upcoming non-combat units.
  
• Recent changes in exploration and navigation such as time compression.
  

Wandering expeditions

We are now spawning packs of Puma in the overworld (instead of a single one). This involved creating a sort of hivemind coordinated AI for the individual actors.



We went ahead and decouple this from the wildlife controller to make it useable in other parts of the game, including the long-awaited enemy expeditions replacing the random combat on the map. This is available on the public version, and we are looking forward to seeing how the experiment works (so far it seems good).



New Visuals for units (WIP)

We are working on revamping the visuals for the characters and unit models. This will take some time as we generate enough content to replace the current one, but I believe we are on the right track to make our units fit more with the visual style of the rest of the game.




Conversations (WIP)

We are also working on expanding the content of the towns in the game with more and higher-quality characters. We are populating these towns with at least an authority with which you have to negotiate to join the alliance, some of them based on historical accounts of Muisca leaders from around the time of the Spanish incursion. These will be added to the game soon.

New Audio (WIP)

We are working in the environment audio for the pramo (Andes high-mountain tundra) and wetlands, as well as the sound effects for the cavalry units and improvements in the UI feedback.

Interviews

I was interviewed for Congreso y Sociedad, a TV show for Canal del Congreso (the official TV station of the Congress of the Republic of Colombia), where I talked about NovaMundis history, its dynamics with the academy, and non-traditional media as a way to preserve the indigenous cultures, Gamification, VideoGame development in Colombia and Latin America and the role of the state in the growth of the VideoGames sector. Its still not available but Ill put a link here when its up.

We are experimenting with this replacing most of the random combat. Let us know how it works! :D

Characters and Dialogs

The characters on the towns have been renamed to more accurate Muisca names, and the Spanish dialogs for four of them have been improved greatly including embedded Muisca language words. One of them has been translated to English too. I still need to integrate and translate the remaining redesigned dialogs.



Fauna

The Spectacled Bear now dwells in the cold Andes highlands.



Also added the Solitary Eagle, although its not a very common sight in this area of the Andes, and tweaked the logic to spawn all existing fauna (reduced chances and spawn ranges, prevent spawning while expedition resting).



Combat / Misc

• 3X attack bonus on the first attack to Charging units (puma, spectacled bear and Spanish cavalry)
  
• Tweak grass appearance
  
• New visuals for clubs for Guardians
  

For the past two weeks, we produced two versions, v0.31 and v0.32.

Wandering mobs
At long last, I started tackling one big thing that is going to change the player experience greatly: groups of people (or animals) moving around on the map and interacting with the player. We are going to add this to make the world feel more alive as well as to add a factor of seeking / evading targets on the map replacing the current random encounters. See below for the first type of mob to be included.

Fauna



These cats employ a blend of stealth and power, stalking their prey until an opportunity arrives to pounce, then going for the back of the neck with a fatal bite. They will hide large carcasses and feed on them for several days.

The puma now roam the land! they will wander around until you get close to them, then they may flee or assault the expedition.

The puma is spawned around forests and will disappear after a while if you lose sight of it. The White-Tailed Deer were also added back, and will.

You can also now ask for directions to the habitats of animals in the towns.

Combat
I zoomed back in the camera into combat so that its easier to select the units, and also because we were not really making good use of the entire space for combat (which normally happens in 1 to 3 clusters, with short-range units, and under 30 units). We still need to implement the combat areas by biome, procedural, and with relevant obstacle and height bonuses.

Audio
We put some big effort into the audio, including continued tweaks on UI sounds and in general audio responsiveness to in-game events (for example combat start/end), as well as tweaks and fixes for some animal sounds (parrots and condors).

We made some initial work on balancing the volume of the effects, but are still pending completing a mix for all the audio in the project. One big change is we are now properly using an Audio Mixer object to control the volume for the different tracks (music/ambient/sound effects) instead of manually tracking the volume of the Audio Clips. This will facilitate the process in the future to continue building a high-quality audio experience; theres also a slider bar for the ambient sounds (separate from music)

User Interface
I implemented another relayout in the HUD, moving the command buttons to the upper-right corner, making the compass bar smaller, and making the status area more compact including a background for readability.



Procedural Generation

I did a lot of tweaks, lowering the generation time by about two-thirds (!), some routines to place vegetation still relied on my slow Cellular Automata implementation and were replaced by the much quicker one based on queues. Some ultra-heavy things, like the routine to remove trees from the river paths, were no longer needed for our new water-bodies-based generator, and the process to create clearings in the forest for towns was also changed to prevent placing trees there in the first place.

I also disabled the caves, until we can invest a good deal of work on them to make them more interesting.

Dialogs

We are in the process of remaking and fixing the dialogs for the characters you find in the town, to make them feel more alive and integrated into the environment; in the process, we also included the means to display words in Muyscubun (Muisca language), along with their Spanish or English translation, visible when hovering the native word.



For now, we have a single character implementing the new dialogs and translations (and only in Spanish), but well have a bigger coverage in the next weeks.

Media

Two big hits this week, the first one is a ~30 mins playthrough by Nookrium, always a great way for people to get to know about the game (as well as for us to find some spots to focus on). Im happy to see the game is enjoyable already, and well continue working for it to be more fun and interesting. https://www.semana.com/mejor-colombia/articulo/novamundi-el-videojuego-que-busca-acercar-la-cultura-muisca-a-ninos-y-jovenes/202100/



I was also interviewed for Revista Semana (in Spanish), one of the biggest publications in Colombia. I talked about the history of the project, some of the challenges we have met, and our goals with it. https://www.semana.com/mejor-colombia/articulo/novamundi-el-videojuego-que-busca-acercar-la-cultura-muisca-a-ninos-y-jovenes/202100/

The NovaMundi Series

We participated in virtual GDC 2021, pitching the next game in the NovaMundi series of open-world exploration roguelikes. This one will not be set in a historical context like Spear of Chaqun. More info to come soon!

Full info in biweekly Early Access update (see next post!)

UI SFX additions and tweaks
SFX fixes for condor and parrots
Add pumas
Place habitats based on biome map
Spawn puma based on habitats
Don't remove duplicate directions, instead merge smartly.
Add back hints to animal habitats
Tweak combat view
Relayout HUD
Disable caves until they can be better
Improve procgen times

For the past two weeks, we worked on the historical aspects of the game, as well as the fauna along with some improvements in combat and UI. We produced a single version, v0.30.1.

Historical Content

Based on the research done by Manuel (our Muisca history/culture/linguistics advisor), we integrated a list of 221 historical names that would likely have been used by the historical Muisca, obtained from documental sources. We used these to replace the ones we had in place which were generated using Markov chains based on Muisca-like place names (a poor source in the first place).



The component that selects names for units was improved to reduce the number of collisions by rotating through the full list and falling back through the different categories (male/female/unqualified genre) as needed.

I also did a first approach at improving the names of the territories; well eventually have a proper reflection of the hierarchy of cacicazgos the Muisca had, but for now, Im at least assigning names of large historical Muisca territories to the quest towns, instead of just using random names.

Combat

We still need to work on a big iteration for the combat aspect. That was the plan for these two weeks but things went in a different direction. At least we worked some small improvements for usability, making it easier to select units by increasing the size of their click mask, and increasing the zoom overall of the combat scene since we werent making full use of the screen real state anyways (our battles are small skirmishes, max 15 vs 15 units and commonly stuck together real close, so we were wasting a lot of space.) Maybe we should allow the player to zoom in and out in this scene since the zoom level is untied to the exploration range (unlike in the normal overworld mode)



Mysterious New Unit

We finished the visuals (model, animations, and icon) for a new upcoming unit type, which I wont unveil until its gameplay effects are implemented (hopefully soon!).

Fauna



Andean condors are massive birds, among the largest in the world that are able to fly. Because they are so heavy (up to 33 pounds), even their enormous 10-foot wingspan needs some help to keep them aloft. For that reason, these birds prefer to live in windy areas where they can glide on air currents with little effort -- National Geographic website (link)

The imponent Andean Condor is a national symbol of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuelan Andes states. It is distinctive of the Muisca territory so we were long overdue to add it!



We are also in the process of adding the Puma, and some other animals species to make the world feel more alive.

In a semi-related change, I remove European food from the loot you can get from enemies, considering it is too early in the time period for it to be available in these lands.

User Interface

We are experimenting with a new layout for the action buttons (in order to implement it I ended up doing a big internal refactor, organizing the way we had laid out the UI components which had grown out of control). However, I believe we are going to change this again to a more minimalistic, more accessible design, with the buttons placed in a row at the top right corner instead.

I also configured the new set of portrait parts to the female and elder male types.

We are also working on adding sounds to the UI so that it feels more responsive.

Community

We were interviewed (in Spanish) by Outline, a creative community from Mexico. The interview is pretty informative and includes gameplay as well, so please give it a look and share!

• Historical names for towns and people.
  
• Make quest towns bigger
  
• Added Andean Condor
  
• Integrate combat sounds for conquistador
  
• Work in UI sounds
  
• New layout for buttons
  
• Fix issue with minimap label text size
  
• Improve click area for units in battle and zoom camera
  
• Remove European food from loot, too early for it to be available, too late for the initial provisions to survive from Santa Marta
  
• Integrate new portrait parts to female and elder male anatomies
  
• Fix normal scale of high grass
  

For the past two weeks, we continued working on terrain generation and visuals. We produced 3 versions ending up in v0.29.0, update now if you haven't!

Exploration
The biggest change is the addition of the Compress time command; now if you press Shift while exploring, time will happen at 2x so you will move faster. I believe this is a need to prevent long travels from becoming super boring but I am still experimenting with this (may add some +/- commands to lock the time compression rate).



Units
New appearance for the Conquistador Cavalry, more similar to the concept. Kept the old one as mounted pikeman, may use it sometime.

Added some more variation to portraits, disabled the wooden clubs from the guardians portraits since they were looking a bit cartoonish cavemen to me; we will replace them with narrower staffs probably. The next version will feature some more variations still. Also, we reset the framing of the portraits in order to display more of the face even if we miss some details of the equipped weapons.



We are also working on a new non-military unit, we should be ready to unveil it on next update!

Terrain visuals
Implemented some visual fixes in the grass objects, and added a new texture for the rocks so they blend better with the grassy terrain. Rocks are also populated more sparsely.



The paramo (Andes tundra) biome also saw some work with the placement of the mountains there and the removal of the snow peak biome pending yet another planned overhaul of the biome placement that allows us to have more control over bigger areas of terrain instead of relying on the heightmap.



For grass texturing, we discarded some of the textures we were using and tweaked the tiling and normal scale values of some others.

A new particle system for rain was developed, although it hasnt been integrated yet into the main game scene.



Combat
This iteration was meant to focus on combat but art integration and needed tweaks in the exploration just havent let me charge into it. However, I did some small high-impact changes, like increasing the size of the initial enemy sizes so they are less of a joke.

We also did some work in the audio aspect with Mr. QuietGecko, doing a pass over the attack sound effects to make sure all of them were covered, and tweaking the volume for the different combat actions.

Project and Community
We participated in the Steam Summer Sale (along with our other game, Ananias Roguelike).

We were also interviewed for our states TV news, and a couple of other podcasts (more info here)

This week Id like to shout out to Kay Tila, a member of our discord community who has been helping a lot with playtesting. My story with Kay goes back a loong time including the original Expedition project and probably more stuff Ive done along all these years. Thank you for all your valuable feedback!

• Many tweaks in terrain generation
  
• Duplicate size of initial enemy parties