Disclaimer: Features discussed in this post reflect what is currently under development and not necessarily what will be shipping with the next test. Anything mentioned below may change at any time due to the experimental nature of Pre-Alpha development. Nothing mentioned here should be taken as a promised feature or addition to the eventual game.
Natural Environment Visual Update
We knew at some point we’d need to revisit the look and feel of the natural environment in Anvil Empires to match our atmospheric and thematic goals. While we’ve got a long way to go, here’s a first look at what’s coming.
While we’ve been generally happy with the look and feel of the game during our pre-alpha development, our initial approach came across a bit more Mediterranean in style and feels like a warmer climate. In contrast, we want Calligo to feel dangerous, mysterious, moderate and heavy. A lot of our core references and concept art evoke northern/western Europe: Romania, Britain, Germany. Re-examining our goals, we began development on a prototype to bring the endless valleys and gloomy forests we’d started with back into focus. Calligo hasn’t quite felt like the Calligo we’d imagined; now is the time to take the steps to really build this world we’ve been planning for years.
First, we built on the foundation of the main grass and terrain types that populate much of Calligo. In Anvil Empires, it’s imperative that players have the freedom to build towns nearly anywhere in the world and part of that is the ability to design fortresses that tower over iconic medieval landscapes. This means we need tons of variety without having visual assets that block or impede players’ vision.
The next building block comes in the form of forests—a vital part of Calligo’s atmosphere. When you enter a forest, it should feel as though you’ve entered a forest. Forests should communicate the type of encounters to expect inside, so tree and forest variety have become a huge focus going forward. Expect to see dense, spooky pine woods, young growth forests, and safer deciduous thickets.
We’ve implemented a system that allows us to fill the world with more scattered foliage, rocks and medium-scale details that won’t block players’ ability to build. This is important because, as a top-down game, parallax and layering are very important tools in our visual toolbox. On top of that, more variety across an environment that isn’t packed with landmarks helps with directional anchoring, making the space feel more alive and easy to traverse.
There’s lots of work to do, yet, and the first iteration may not include every feature discussed here in their final form. More large-scale details such as revamped and more prolific cliffs and rock formations are on the horizon as well. This new direction for Anvil Empires’ natural environment is much closer to our vision for Calligo, and we’re excited to welcome you onto its shores once again.
Fort Building System
Another system we've come back around on to refresh before the Early Access release is the Fort building system. The existing building system served as a good platform to test the initial ideas for what we wanted. The goal was a system that maximized creative agency, was visually consistent with the theme, and had a low chance of producing "goofy" looking builds. On that last point, we wanted an outcome where most builds looked like Castles and Keeps, rather than the haphazard designs you see in many survival games.
While we reached some of these goals with the initial system, the visuals were underdeveloped in terms of reflecting the game's theme and the system wasn't durable enough against those "goofy" designs. So the focus of the new system was to address these issues and at the same time make the system overall more robust. Balancing between creative freedom, immersion, and robustness is always challenging and is one of the key factors we had in mind when revamping the system.
This time we've worked on developing the visuals from the ground up starting with the concept phase. The concepts shown above are for the higher tier version of the Forts. In tandem, we started working on a new set of build rules, features, and structure pieces. The new system is slightly more rigid in terms of placement rules, but the benefit is that players will always be able to connect their Fort pieces to form complete structures no matter where each individual piece is built. To achieve this, every piece adapts it's size dynamically depending on it's orientation to "fit" into an existing build.
This new system will serve as a new platform to build on in Early Access and the plan is to add in additional tools and customization options in the future.
Be sure to add Anvil Empires to your wish list on Steam. If you want to join the community, head over the to official Discord server or Subreddit.
