Development News #100 — Centum

Hey, Feudalists!

Again, this week we’ve been focusing on features and tweaks for the upcoming patch. Those include unmovable object claims, battle reconnect, and also, some long-awaited premium features like character transfer and character customization. Among these, we are polishing some things on the Newbie Islands to make them more friendly towards new players. We are also working on fixes for some annoying bugs like alignment issues with the trespassers ability on claim lands, and others. We can’t wait to be able release the patch, but it still needs some work, so stay tuned!

This is our one hundredth devblog, and this time we’ve decided to do something special and try something new. Usually in our devblogs we address you as the whole team, but this time we wanted you to get to know each member of our team personally via small personal segments as they share their experience and thoughts working on Life is Feudal games.
Our first hero is Sergey Horn, 3D Artist and Game Asset Modeler:

‘I’ve always loved the Medieval setting, but there are not so many games where it’s really believable and diverse. So I really want to join the project in this setting, which will be complex and made as large-scale. Now I’m working on architecture’s creation and making small objects for the whole game world.

One of the most interesting tasks on this scale was the creation of objects for the main trailer. I’ve always liked creating scenic decorations with eventson the background — destroyed buildings, polluted interior and so on. It’s great to know that you created something really big for the game.

Creation of the new castle walls was really interesting and labor-intensive. The hardest part was adrawbridge, because we want to create a realistic-functioning mechanism. We used a lot of references of real medieval drawbridges, create models and adjust them, and I personally think the result is very decent. Game engine imposes its limits and you can’t create such things, as high-detailed merlons, decals for various types of one-type objects and so on; but I heard, that our render-magicians will do something with that!

I like that in the game you have a possibility to build your own house, make a picket fence, plant some wheat and live a simple life in the Medieval ages. You can live it, not only be a watchful guardian as it is in the strategy or save the world as you’re playing certain games.
What was really fun? Oh, well, the game engine has provided us with a lot of fun minutes. One particular time, for example, when the door stopped working exactly before the patch release. Or
collision was broken. Or node on the weapon is disappeared. We have aLOT fun when trying to do our best to find the reason, but all for nothing, and then suddenly the simple re-export (5th or even more without any changes at all in files) is finally working. We’re crying with joy and happily hugging (yeah, thanks, dear engine, we don’t have other things to do). :) But I have went too far, that’s not happening very often.

We face obstacles together as a team, with grace and, of course, on a regular basis. Perhaps, you can’t see it, because it has to do with a lot of back-end things like project scaling, engine features, the lack of proper editor, and all that, so sometimes it may seem that the patches we roll out are not such big of a patch and they don’t come out so often. So, how hard can it be? Well, on the onehand it’s on us as a team, on the other hand — I’d like to see who would manage this better than us.

We try to avoid working overtime via time management, planning, and prioritization, but it doesn’t always work out. If there’s something that depends on you and really needs to get to the upcoming patch, but broke down just when the patch’s about to go live, you need to fix this ASAP, no matter what’s the time. The good thing is that you can sleep like a baby once it’s fixed, knowing that everything is okay. Unless the QA find something’s off.

I keep track of all the feedback on my part that I get, I even have a special place for that. Can’t wait when we finally get to redo stone walls (just like we did with fortress walls). We want to make loopholes, merlon more convenient, fix collisions, stuff like that. Oh, and the churches that many of you anticipate, hopefully, we startmodelling them really soon, the concepts are almost ready.
Overall, we get a lot of various feedback, yet sadly we’re no Blizzard, but we’ll pull through.

How is LiF different from other projects? In the majority of medieval set games a player gets to either lead a peaceful life without fighting at war, or, on the contrary, gets to fight, but is never involved in peaceful life, building and all this farming.  LiF has both of thosethings, and many more. Have you ever seen such a vast variety of mechanics and activities? I think that’s what makes this game stand out, and that’s why I like it.’

Tell us if you liked the new tradition of the devblog. Thanks for being with us and supporting us all the time. Have a lovely weekend, but remember, Life is still Feudal.

— The team