Entry 54 - Base Management Panel

Let’s take a closer look at how the changes described in the previous post have impacted the overall gameplay experience.

The new fog of war mechanic hasn’t made much of a noticeable difference yet, but that’s not a big concern at this stage. Its primary purpose is to make interactions between builders and enemy champions more engaging, and so far, we’ve mainly been testing builders in 1v1 scenarios.

Now, regarding the new system of purchasing minions with souls: While this system was designed to prevent a snowball effect in terms of development disparity, it didn’t fully address the issue. As you can see in the video, for the entire second half of the game, enemy minions were relentlessly attacking my base, and I couldn’t turn the tide in my favor.

The main problem is that the new soul-based system demands too much attention. Players now need to constantly monitor the lane, keeping track of which minions the enemy builder is sending and ensuring they have enough souls to send out the next wave of minions. At the same time, they have to develop their base and gather resources. As a result, something would inevitably slip through the cracks. I would either lose control of the lane or fall behind in base development. Both situations led to the enemy minions gaining the upper hand, ultimately resulting in a total defeat. It became clear that both of these elements – lane control and base development – needed to be made more intuitive and manageable.

Lane Control

To simplify lane control, we added a panel that can be accessed by pressing the Tab key. This panel displays the last two waves deployed by both teams. Additionally, you can view the minion upgrades each team has researched.

This allows you to quickly check which minions your opponent is focusing on and deploying without having to divert all your attention to the lane.

Base Development

During testing, we identified several aspects of playing as the builder that require the player's attention but offer little to no enjoyment:

1. The builder wastes a significant amount of time running back and forth between the base and the forest. The journey from the base to the forest is time-consuming, even with the addition of a speed-boosting ability. During this time, the player cannot engage in anything productive.
2. The builder must manually place each structure they intend to build. However, in practice, the location of these structures has minimal impact, as enemies neither attack nor interact with them. At the same time, placing them randomly isn't an option either, as it could block important paths. This results in the placement of each new structure becoming a time-consuming task that shifts the player's focus to something trivial.
3. It's challenging to keep track of all the building recipes and ensure there are enough resources for each construction. To address this, we borrowed a feature from Force of Nature 2 that allows players to pin a recipe to the screen. However, this window only displays one recipe at a time, which often proved insufficient.
4. On the base, the builder constantly has to run between different structures, clicking on each one to interact. These unnecessary mouse clicks tend to confuse and frustrate the player.

To address all these issues at once, we introduced a single solution: the Base Management Panel.

With this panel, the builder can view all available structures in the game, including those they already have and those yet to be built. For structures that haven’t been built yet, the panel shows the required resources – how much is needed and how much is already available. Additionally, the builder can access any existing structure directly from this panel to interact with it – for example, crafting a new pickaxe, sending ore for smelting, or researching a minion upgrade. The player can open this panel at any time, even when they’re not at the base, eliminating the need to constantly run back and forth between the forest and the base for minor tasks.

Moreover, the panel removes the need to manually place each structure. The base comes with several pre-designated construction sites, and when a structure is selected in the management panel, it automatically begins building on the first available site.

Undead Minions and Testing

In addition to the quality-of-life improvements, we decided to introduce a new lair – the Undead Lair. When the builder constructs this lair, and they lack enough souls to send out the next wave of minions, a wave of demons is sent instead of zombies. These demons are significantly stronger than zombies, but building this lair requires obsidian – a resource that, as you know, is quite difficult to obtain.

Here are the recording from our tests:

At first we were still getting used to the new controls and often forgot that we no longer needed to approach a structure directly. However, everyone immediately loved the new base management system, and it made the gameplay much more enjoyable. I’ll share more about further improvements in the next update.