In the next wave of updates we decided to make a campaign. We needed something to teach someone new how to play the game, especially since starting with Empire Rising multiplayer is quite daunting. We first put up a written guide but it came out one big wall of text and would be more likely to scare someone away rather than teach them how to play.
In the end we decided to start making the campaign. It was quite a bit of work because we had to implement some new systems and make a lot of new art (only about half the art is done, sorry) which was why we at first were only going to add the campaign later. The campaign gave us a way to make a more interactive learning tutorial with a proper learning curve. Hopefully this will make Empire Rising available to more people.
For starters we've made the prologue, which follows the story of Prince Lorian. He was sent by his father, with questionable motives, to conquer a nearby land. The story is fairly straight forward with a bit of foreshadowing whats to come. Plays will need an account to do missions after the prologue so that it can track what level you're on.
The prologue is a fully functional tutorial. The first mission starts with teaching movement and basic controls up till the fifth and last mission where the player should know everything he needs to play. We've done very limited play testing on the difficulty curve (even though it's good in theory) so we'll appreciate feedback.
Some of the systems we made while doing the campaign are: a shroud system, the black clouds over unexplored areas. They disappear when your hero gets close and helps creates a nice feel to missions. A county you take over or control is automatically explored. multiplayer games start with the map explored.
We redid the grass texture for all the seasons.
We made interactive objects to the worlds.
As well as smooth out some bugs and round off some edges. We are thinking of adding patch note from this point further.
