As part of the development of Sovereign Tea, we want to open about how the game's development is shaping up. Our milestones for November 2019 have been set and we have been actively working on them. Here's a little breakdown of what we have cooking up.

Camera Controller
Systems design and implementation

As you may have noticed in the initial v0.1 release, there is no way to manipulate the camera by user input. This obviously is not ideal for a full-fledged game, so it is among our utmost priorities to deliver a system that feels intuitive to the player while simultaneously being crafted to meet the specific needs of our game. As this game is to be played with a keyboard and a mouse, we can take advantage of the scroll wheel for zooming, but we have other, more nuanced design problems to solve for our camera. Our goal is a scalable system that can handle everything from user input to cutscene panning and more.

Character Design
Finalization of all Tea Princesses and Coffee Regents

Game development isn't just code. We have a narrative we wish to craft and the decision for who our twelve Tea Princesses are is not something we take lightly. Each character must make sense as a valid choice for their Alliance (Herbal, White, Green, Black), but they also must make sense for gameplay. Our gameplay at its core is about gathering resources and using that to brew new units. This limits us in some of our choices for characters on both the tea and coffee side as we must ensure our decisions will work well within that paradigm.

Brewing Gameplay Mechanics
Iteration on resource gathering and brewing mechanics

As stated above, resource gathering and brewing is the critical to the game's essence. In the v0.1 release, we showed only a very basic stand-in for how brewing will work. While we're glad that this got the overall idea in place, we weren't happy with how it felt as it failed to do something very important: capture the essence of brewing tea. Brewing unique blends of tea is more than just clicking a button, and the gameplay that covers brewing needs to feel more impactful than that. Contrary to that, we also must tread carefully so as not to bog down strategic decisions with unnecessary menuing. It's a fine line to walk, and we're excited to showcase the results of our design discussions on this topic in particular.

Enemy A.I. Design
First pass on enabling enemies to make strategic decisions

The enemies in v0.1 were very simple: a few of them would move and they would always target Bai Mudan if possible. This isn't going to scale for the full game. We need our enemies not just to operate on individual per-unit logic, but at collective levels to make the entire enemy army feel like they are genuinely challenging you and your decisions. We expect this to be a constant process up until the game's release, as we will always iterate on this design, but it is important to start making design decisions early in order to facilitate this.

That's it for this update! As always, you can keep up with the development of Sovereign Tea by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and Discord. Cheers!