Hi everyone! We’re happy to present the answers of our first Q&A session!

WHAT IS IT?

Every two weeks, we’ll invite our community members to submit us questions about the Castle Story development. It can be everything from game design, animation and sound design to programming, pathfinding, AI or anything related to the game production. Afterwards, we will choose 5 questions and sit down with a developer to answer them!

HOW TO PARTICIPATE:

• Simply write your question in this forum post
• You have until APRIL 16th at midnight EST to submit your question!
• In two weeks, the answers well be posted right here

And now for the answers! Thanks so much for the questions, there were too many for us to answer all of them.

ANSWERS:

Question 1

VeryDarkKnight: Do you plan on adding liquids in the game like water for example ?

FRANCOIS’ (CO-FOUNDER) ANSWER:

Not at the moment. It would be nice visually, but it would not significantly impact the gameplay enough to justify the cost to develop this system. On the technical side fluid simulations are extremely hard to program, and impact the performance significantly. There are ways of reducing this by having simplified fluid dynamics such as what was done in Minecraft, but the result can be very strange and inconsistent. On a design standpoint, it would be very difficult to ensure that water stays inside a floating island. The player could easily cause a leak by digging a trench and end up losing all the water on a level. Without a replenishing source, this makes it so we cannot require a player to have access to water in the game design. We could add infinitely replenishing sources, but then how do we ensure that water doesn’t invade the entire level, causing chaos and tons of lag? We’re not saying we will never add water in any shape or form, rather we’re saying that we’re trying to design the game so that water is not required. Thanks for asking!

Question 2

Stephano: Will there be any new maps introduced in later versions of the game?

FRANCOIS’ (CO-FOUNDER) ANSWER:

Absolutely! Not only that, but we are working on bringing the world editor in the game which will allow players to create their own maps! The few maps we’ve introduced so far we’re not designed for the current Conquest mode. And since the player experience depends a lot on how well the map is designed, you can totally expect a few conquest maps to be introduced as soon as the world editor is up and running.

Question 3

JETS63: Will there be fire in the game? Archers need a new arrow, the flaming arrow.

FRANCOIS’ (CO-FOUNDER) ANSWER:

Totally agree! Flaming arrows are a great idea, and a total no brainer in our game. However, they would need to be depletable, and would have to be crafted somehow. We’re currently working on ways of making that possible :) As for fire, the answer is similar to the water system. It’s difficult to make well, and would have to serve a important purpose in the game design to justify spending so much energy programming. The good news is that fire is probably easier to make than water, and that I can think of many more reasons to have fire in the game design. This means it’s much more likely to happen, but it’s not our priority at the moment.

Question 4

Kljunar: More types of enemies?

FRANCOIS’ (CO-FOUNDER) ANSWER:

Yes! We are currently working on a new type of unit for the Corruptrons named the "Crawler". He’s a 4 legged creature, and navigates the world differently than regular characters. We’ve also started working on an additional character that we can’t confirm yet. The goal is for every new character to add an entire level of depth to the game. For example, the Minitron can be thrown over your walls to disrupt your defenses, and the Corruptron can throw stones at your archers to knock them down. Every new character will come with a set of special abilities, and not just a different set of stats and a new skin.

Question 5

goreu198: When will the world editor be back in the game?

FRANCOIS’ (CO-FOUNDER) ANSWER:

The world editor has become our main focus after the release of 0.6. Before then, our map saving format was changing constantly for many reasons, and maintaining the compatibility with the world editor would have slowed down the development significantly. I can confidently say that the world editor will be back in the next major patch. With much MUCH better user-friendliness, and a lot of flexibility that was not even available in the old version we had available.

[ 2016-03-23 19:35:57 CET ] [ Original post ]