v0.0.5.2 news - Dirge of Sorrows: A Nation Reborn

Our new game, Dirge of Sorrows: A Nation Reborn, has been under steady development since its announcement, and it's come along far enough to release an extremely early alpha for testing. In other words, this is just a prototype and does not contain any of the story, unique characters, advanced features, etc that you'll find in the finished product. It probably has bugs and could crash during testing.



Features Implemented:
- Tiled (hexagonal wasn't working as well as I hoped) procedural map generation with 3 possible biome types (Temperate, Northern and Desert)

- 2 armor types (Cloth and Leather)
- 2 melee weapons (Wooden Club and Copper Sword)
- Icons for various types of armor, weapons and shields
- An "Inventory" menu to view equipment that nobody has equipped

- A starting army with 14 units in reserve (equipment and unit gender is random at the moment) and a "Hero" unit (also random gender)
- Squads of up to 5 units on 3x3 grids
- A "Management" menu to manage your army, which displays squads that are currently not deployed (left-side of screen) and units in reserve (right-side of screen)
- Creating a new squad in Management by dragging a unit to somewhere that's not on an existing squad (empty space) on the left-side of the menu (the squad area)
- Modifying the formation of squads by dragging/dropping units (either within the same squad or to another squad)

- Random enemy army generation
- Enemy AI
- Very poor path-finding (doesn't take terrain into account)

- Left-clicking one of your squads on the map to give them orders (destination is a green square for movement or a red square for targeting an enemy to chase)
- Right-clicking to cancel giving an order
- Viewing the path of a squad by hovering the mouse over them (includes enemy squads)
- A prompt to undeploy a squad when sending them back to your stronghold (the blue castle)
- Speed of movement dependent on terrain/roads
- Combat when squads 'collide' on the map with an option to retreat
- Capturing towns (currently just changes the graphic)
- Winning the map by capturing the enemy's stronghold (the red castle)
- Losing the map via death of your Hero or an enemy capturing your stronghold

- Dynamic weather and day/night cycle
- Zooming the map in/out with the mouse wheel
- Dragging the map around by holding down left-click
- A couple animations (idle and attack)
- A couple sound effects
- A few music tracks
- Moddable graphics (feel free to make something better, because I suck as a graphic artist lol)



Features Planned:
- A menu to change the equipment of a unit
- Creating runes to slot into equipment (better equipment has more slots), which can work together to achieve various results
- Offensive rune types (elemental damage, increasing weapon damage)
- Defensive rune types (healing a certain amount, elemental defense, increasing armor defense)
- Support rune types (targeting a number of units at once, more actions per turn)
- Animations for being hit, blocking and casting (when using elemental damage instead of physical damage)
- Graphic effects for elemental damage (maybe particle based?)
- A menu for changing the runes slotted onto a piece of equipment
- Earning gold to spend on purchasing equipment and creating runes (better rune effects = more gold needed)
- Story/Dialogue bits when capturing towns
- A world map where you can save/load the game
- An intro scene to select the Hero gender



Notes:
- The current map generation is intentionally small (20x20) for quick testing... when the game is a bit further along you'll see bigger maps
- As stated above, there's currently no way of changing the equipment of a unit
- The Inventory menu serves no real purpose at the moment