Hi Everyone, Thanks for taking a look at Feudalism! The concept for Feudalism was born during Svilupparty, an event that brings together Italian Indie developers to exchange ideas, experiences, show their projects and... drink beer! The goal was to develop an old-school strategic 4X videogame for the lovers of the genre, set in the European feudal period. The game would be structured like a tabletop game.
The Feudal environment was chosen for two main reasons:

• Within the team that gave birth to the idea of Feudalism are: Feudalism and Freedom, a satirical "political movement and thought”, they’re very funny :-) , the group proposes the return to feudalism, to that society, to the customs of the medieval and Renaissance traditions.
• This period allows some interesting mechanics for the genre, such as the lineage, strategic marriages and clashes for power between different warring families.

Development has taken almost two years by our small team, the most interesting aspects of the development cycle for us were:

1) Procedural Terrain Generation

To have the environment change from game to game along with lighting etc. Height maps are generated with perlin noise, where 0 is below the sea level. Perlin Noise has the great merit of always generating the same result in terms of coordinates and scale. In this way it is not necessary to save the data of the map (which saves space making data transfer more efficient multiplayer for example).

2) Climate

The game employs all 4 seasons to show the transition of time through the years, of the seasons, the most interesting technically is winter. Two shaders were created to simulate snow:

• One shader to handle the lands of the villages, it’s very simple to mix together different textures for different seasons.
• The second, more complex, calculates the amount of snow by the incidence angle of the normal map, densities to be obtained, relative Y to the world of the object to be covered by snow and other black magic calculations :-) The result is much more accurate and beautiful to see.

3) The Management of the Succession, Children and Weddings

No one lives forever. A key element of the game is the management of the player ancestry and their heritage. The Head of House is a mere mortal! If they are unable to ensure a successor through a son, there will be little chance to dominate! Male children, daughters, grandchildren, everyone can contribute to better manage their feud. Every child is born with bonus potential and if assigned to the appropriate role, you can benefit greatly. They can get married and strengthen alliances or even secure the control of the other family! Traits are inherited, the union of two descendants of various families with similar characteristics, improve their effectiveness.

[ 2016-05-18 12:17:39 CET ] [ Original post ]