Good day all. Today's a fairly brief Dev Diary, even by recent standards, as two of the five previous workdays were swallowed whole by Sweden's love for public holidays. To that end, I hope a good Easter day was had by all.
Last week I went over some Quality of Life suggestions that came up internally, and today I want to touch on one in particular detail. Again, these are not iron-clad promises of things to come. They are certainly improvements that we desire to make for the game, but or not that translates to being in our upcoming European Expansion and its accompanying update is for reality to dictate.
I mentioned at the end-of-year dev diary before that improving Custom Nation options was something we would like to achieve in said European release. Now a question that may come to mind is why this would be on the radar for our European expansion. Well Custom Nations remain one of the most popular choice for players. It has spent plenty of time as the number one choice in the past, although in the past months it has been playing second fiddle to France, see our handy nations chart:
No huge surprises here, except perhaps that England have fallen from grace, as they used to consistently be near the very top. These are most fun to observe when a release is done for a certain area, such as Rule Britannia, where England spiked like crazy.
What we see is that custom nations (D00 here) continue to stand the test of time, despite being added to the game with El Dorado back in February 2015. We have updated the designer with features as they have appeared, such as Consorts and ruler personalities, and updated the custom National Ideas as new modifiers have been added, but we feel there is still more that we can do.
In particular, myself and @Groogy have been looking at what we can do to boost the functionality of the custom nations feature, and something we both find lacking is that, while we have hundreds of sweet-looking unit models, there is no way to specify which ones your custom nation uses, leading to a fairly generic visual experience in battles. We may be dipping a bit into the HoI4 inspiration well with their way of previewing units for this.
In addition to a way to customize your unit models for your nation, I'd say we're due another pass of the available National Ideas for said custom nations. To the custom nation players out there, what would you really like to be able to tweak in your customized experience?
For those champing at the bit to see us move forward with development of the upcoming expansion, know that we are wrapping up this long period of tech debt. We have a couple more aspirations dev diaries to come, before we're likely going to return to our more regular dev diaries of showing off ongoing development.
Last week I went over some Quality of Life suggestions that came up internally, and today I want to touch on one in particular detail. Again, these are not iron-clad promises of things to come. They are certainly improvements that we desire to make for the game, but or not that translates to being in our upcoming European Expansion and its accompanying update is for reality to dictate.
I mentioned at the end-of-year dev diary before that improving Custom Nation options was something we would like to achieve in said European release. Now a question that may come to mind is why this would be on the radar for our European expansion. Well Custom Nations remain one of the most popular choice for players. It has spent plenty of time as the number one choice in the past, although in the past months it has been playing second fiddle to France, see our handy nations chart:
No huge surprises here, except perhaps that England have fallen from grace, as they used to consistently be near the very top. These are most fun to observe when a release is done for a certain area, such as Rule Britannia, where England spiked like crazy.
What we see is that custom nations (D00 here) continue to stand the test of time, despite being added to the game with El Dorado back in February 2015. We have updated the designer with features as they have appeared, such as Consorts and ruler personalities, and updated the custom National Ideas as new modifiers have been added, but we feel there is still more that we can do.
In particular, myself and @Groogy have been looking at what we can do to boost the functionality of the custom nations feature, and something we both find lacking is that, while we have hundreds of sweet-looking unit models, there is no way to specify which ones your custom nation uses, leading to a fairly generic visual experience in battles. We may be dipping a bit into the HoI4 inspiration well with their way of previewing units for this.
In addition to a way to customize your unit models for your nation, I'd say we're due another pass of the available National Ideas for said custom nations. To the custom nation players out there, what would you really like to be able to tweak in your customized experience?
For those champing at the bit to see us move forward with development of the upcoming expansion, know that we are wrapping up this long period of tech debt. We have a couple more aspirations dev diaries to come, before we're likely going to return to our more regular dev diaries of showing off ongoing development.
