Welcome to our forty-third blog post!

Its been a little while- after a short hiatus, we’re back to begin discussing major gameplay and programming advancements in our Open World RTS, Fragment’s Moonrise!

We’d also like to announce we’ve been working on a Kickstarter, and we’re hoping to launch it soon! More details to come.

The state of the project as it stands- we’re gearing up for a Beta release coming in a few months (give or take). We’re working on content and major programming necessary for said release.

With that being said, the game is sitting firmly at a state we’re happy with: open world (our most difficult coding hurdle) is finally in the game, and alongside that, features such as Saving, and a considerable amount of gameplay related content, is set and ready. Art is also coming along, with new unit animations coming soon!

Now, into the heart of this update-

The most complicated part of designing the Open World is ensuring the coding works; we’ve been having to mix a lot of different subjects of the game together to get it to work fluently.

This includes augmenting our Saving system so that each Map is saved individually (so as you explore more, and uncover more maps, their all individually maintained and can be called accordingly), alongside our gameplay system to ensure important aspects (like retaining a Unit’s health, or progress in terms of what boss was slain) are kept.

This all needs to be stored in a central “main menu” you could call it, so that we have the primary application running and interchanging Maps in the background as their called.

The main coding is done- right now we’re at a phase of bug testing and implementing further features such as our Home Base system.

As we move into new content, we first need to state that we feel the majority of our early-game content is done. We have a small linear progression system as the player begins to advance their units and get used to the game’s combat, and that quickly extends into a massive and various class-based system, with each class having multitudes of uses.

Now that we’re getting into the middle-game content, we can begin to design the heart of the game.

A major part of the game is about weaknesses versus strengths. Given our diverse Element system, a main aspect of the strongest player units feature various Resistances to various Elements, alongside a specific weakness.

The Element/Resistance system is one to one: spells utilize an Element, and as a Unit is hit by that spell, the Element is compared against the Unit’s Resistances. From there, the damage is raised or lowered based on their Resistance stat. For instance, negative Resistances incur raising damage, whereas positive incur lowering damage.

We wanted to start off our high-tier Player Units under this premise- a versatile set of Resistances juxtaposed with some sort of weakness. So the Player will need to be aware that their Unit is particularly weak against specific types, and plan their strategy accordingly.

This then leads into versatility- spellcasting versatility, to be specific.

We want high-tier Player Units to not be limited to their explicit elemental path. With the base Units in the game, each Unit pertains to a particular Element: the Apprentice of Fire can only cast spells relating to Fire. The Apprentice of Air can only cast spells relating to Air. And so forth; there are no cross-elements allowed.

Our desire instead is to partially do away with this: Units have their Element as their “main type”, that their the best with. However, they now have a few extra spells to be used as a substitute for the real thing. We wanted to keep substitutes just as that- not a replacement.

What this means is that high-tier Player Units have some extra Elemental type coverage that they can use as they see necessary. These extra spells in no way replace the primary Unit that can cast that Element, their merely meant as a substitute when that particular Unit is not available. This, in turn, allows us to expand our combat system quite a bit further. And allow the Player to utilize even more options.

With all that being said, that should end this blog entry.

As we work more on the game, we’ll be pushing our Open World system further, and establishing even more content. These changes to our high-tier Player Units are just the beginning of a swathe of changes we wish to implement.

Before we conclude, we’d like to remind you: we’ll be pushing a Kickstarter soon, so please look forward to it!

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Thank you for viewing our post! Support and interest for the project has been rapidly growing ever since we began posting here, and we're incredibly grateful for all the wonderful feedback so far! We hope this project interests you as much as we love developing for it, and please look forward to more updates coming in the very near future!

If you’re brand new, consider checking out our trailer and overall description of the game here.