Dead Monarchy - Medieval | Turn-Based | Mass-Tactics | Survival-Simulator | RPG

Hi guys, I've been stalking RPGWatch for over a decade and it was pleasant to wake up this morning and see my own game in the news feed. I decided I might as well make a post on the forums now.

Dead Monarchy has been inspired by XCOM, Jagged Alliance, Battle Brothers, Banner Saga and the list goes on, with some survival elements thrown in as well.

The video that your seeing is the first dev blog and a lot has changed since then. I should hopefully be able to get a new dev blog up somewhat soon but because a lot of the framework has changed, it may take some time.

I'm a one man indie team, so I do use Unity asset store assets, however as of recent I have hired a modeler to create exclusive and original models.

Website is up too, but it's still under construction: https://dead-monarchy.com/

Whenever the mods get the time, it would be nice to get a developer tag on here as well

https://dead-monarchy.com/images/#jp-carousel-574

https://dead-monarchy.com/images/#jp-carousel-575

A couple of my links got marked as spam I believe. Whenever the mods get time, if those could be cleared that would be great.

Welcome to the watch! I'm sure your game will find an audience here abouts.

Silver said:

Welcome to the watch! I'm sure your game will find an audience here abouts.

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Thanks for the warm welcome!

Been working with my modeler over the past week designing the armor in Dead Monarchy. I've decided to go with a grounded approach to armor, meaning more historical less high fantasy.

I've also got a few questions since I'm new here.

1. For some reason images that I insert won't show up, do I need to be approved by moderators?
2. Is there a way to change the thread title?

Another update on the armor progress. Armor is still WIP, materials haven't been properly configured yet and the lighting is flat. Nevertheless, I wanted to show how progress is coming. So far in this build, there are 7 equipment parts. Head, body, legs, feet, shoulders, hands and under-layer. Whether or not I will keep it, is not confirmed as I'm sure other issues will arise. Nevertheless, things are looking quite promising.

Couple more screenshots of the armor in game this time. Metal is looking less matte. You might also have noticed a difference in the grid, I'm testing out tiles for terrains as opposed to my old method of laying a grid overlay on top of a predefined terrain. The reason for this is I am more or less experimenting with map/tile generation. By using tiles, it'll be easier for me to implement terrain and elevation as well. I'm hoping to put that in but we'll see, nothing confirmed as of yet.

For those with +10 perception, you might have noticed that the majority of my screenshots have no shadows. Unity's take on shadows isn't that great honestly, it is more or less a brute force algorithm that at the minimum, doubles the amount of tris/faces you need to draw. Today I wept tears of joy as I got my shadow proxy method to work in Unity. Before shadows were pretty taxing but I've gained quite a bit of performance by essentially projecting a low poly model in place of the actual model. Given that the camera is drawn out as well you can't really see the difference.

I'm a little bit more confident now with shadows in Unity and will use them a bit more liberally, I did a lot of model optimization as well and so far I'm pretty happy with the performance of running 50 skinned meshes (models) + shadows. These are still stress tests and nothing is 100% concrete but if I was a player, I'd be salivating at the mouth for being able to field 25 units in a battle. If I do decide to go with this many units, these field/line battles definitely won't come by easily.

The picture below shows 40 units, will post some more pictures later.

Did you want padded armor or a padded guy? The character system that I'm working with allows body morphing which means I can create different body shapes. I think it adds a little bit more realism as opposed to everyone having a body sculpted by the gods.

I'm quite interested in this concept, both as a player and a fellow designer/developer.

FabMariani said:

I'm quite interested in this concept, both as a player and a fellow designer/developer.

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It definitely is time consuming, but I think it's worth it. Whether or not I fully utilize the body morphing or not only time will tell. But nevertheless, it is something I'd like to use in some capacity or another.

The latest set is on the left, this will be the last armor progress pic for a while as I am now turning full attention to tidying up the combat demo. You can see how existing pieces from the first set trickle down into other sets of armor. There will no doubt, be plenty of customization options in Dead Monarchy

To round everything off, an example of armor progression for the first 3 sets in Dead Monarchy. Quite happy with the variety I got from only 3 sets

That armor looks good keep it up.

Hastar said:

That armor looks good keep it up.

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Thanks for the vote of confidence!

I have 500 hours in Battle Brothers so I will keep an eye on your game

Hastar said:

I have 500 hours in Battle Brothers so I will keep an eye on your game

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I'm happy to hear that you're interested. BB is definitely one of my influences after putting 200+ hours into it

Hey guys, I have an update on the interface today. This is the equipment/stats/item inventory. I've decided to merge the two together to make use of screen-space but to also give the player quicker access to a global overview of the units under his/her command. For starters, the menu is split in half, you can more or less operate in one half then the other half as everything is sorted into equipment | stats.

Everything is still WIP and some icons are still placeholders. Going from left to right, top to bottom excluding the obvious model view on the left and right.

1. Unit name and stat/skill points.
2. Unit selection.
3. Unit status effects or buffs/debuffs. You can hover over the icon to bring up a tooltip.
4. Unit acquired abilities. This box will display what abilities the unit has learnt.
5. Unit stats, tooltips on hover.
6. Unit equipment screen. There are 6 slots in total. Head, chest, arms, legs and weapons. Icons are not completed.
7. Inventory screen, displaying all the items. Items will be stacked to prevent clutter, but I just wanted to fill out the screen.
8. Unit skill trees. Here all abilities are split into their weapon category.
9. Skill tree abilities. Here you can view all the abilities in the skill tree. Abilities are color coded, green is valid, red is invalid, orange is acquired. Tooltips on hover.

Let me know what you guys think, any feedback is welcome