The Situation Is Excellent
A boy’s first vertex shader
We have title
Chaos Under Heaven is the what we will call this! Moving away from the grimdark fear-only dieties/entities façade, we can have supernatural/supradimensional factions of any stripe, struggling for supremacy in the brief twilight of one local god. Works for me.
Above we see a 1st pass at the upper-left-hand unit view and the lower-right-hand double-hemispherical mini map. Goodness gracious the pushback I have gotten on both the globe map and the hemi-spherical minimap. I have researched as much feedback/negativity as I can on existing uses (Black & White, Planetary Annihilation, &c.) and the vast majority of criticism was pre-release FUD. maybe the final player base was self-selecting on this criteria, but those who stuck with products with this feature never ragged on it again. I’m still open to this getting destroyed in open testing, but even then, I feel like we have some tools at our disposal (polar/equatorial terrain biomes and/or equatorial bulging, pole-locking, &c). We don’t hate problems! We just conquer them.
That nasty-looking lower-left-hand rectangle is the “trainer view”; some sort of featureless limbo where units explore a nascent UI and are thrown into eternal battle to test and refine concepts. It doesn’t hate ya, it’s just ugly by nature.
Nico is building up “concept trees,” looking to building paths for strategies and tactics through unit purchases and upgrades, focusing on pairs and groups of units that support and expand each other. Units will be useful on their own but can be given greater general and much more specific utility in concert with fellow units. This will be the meat of it! Players working towards strategies piece-by-piece, reacting and adapting along the way.
What’s next? Iteration and refinement of these concept trees, and a core unit library of 12-18 units that exemplify some broad strokes. That’ll be the next update, hopefully more than just a screen shot of a spreadsheet but with Xmas and NYE looming, who knows how productive we can be. Hella, prolly, but no guarantees.