Devlog Oct 24 - Steam and drawing the town

  Welcome to the second October devlog

First off, let's celebrate that the game now has a page on the Steam platform.

Creating the Steam page took a bit more time than we anticipated. Most of the work was spent on drawing the new artwork which we use on the page. It turns out the game needs quite a lot of artwork for icons and buttons etc.
Even though we re-used the art, we still had to make ten images in different sizes and height/width ratios.

Each image is used in a different place on the Steam store

Then we had to write a little blurb about the game and add some screenshots. Obviously the page is very bare-bones at the moment.

It's our plan to keep adding screenshots and eventually a trailer as we draw additional characters and environments. It's likely that we'll have completely replaced the current screenshots by the time of the release.

Drawing the town

We also spent a good deal of work on drawing the Town. Although, the player actually can't access the whole town - there's a lot of soldiers marching on the main road, so at the beginning of the game, only the western part of the town is accessible

Perhaps the locals can explain what's going on.

The grafitti on the wall is inspired by a reproduction of a real-world piece of grafitti from Pompeii. Even though it's a mythological (and not historical) game, it's fun to insert little pieces of real historical flavour, and it also helps making the world feel more believable.

The tax office is the grandest building in our little town, almost a little manor

The Tax building has the letters LLC on it, which stands for Licinius, Licinius and Crassus, the three owners. They don't play a role in the game, but it's just a reference to the real-world Marcus Licinius Crassus, an famous roman who was extremely wealthy. It's also a little joke because LLC is a type of company and the roman tax farming system could be considered one of the first types of companies.

The minotaur laborer is standing in front of a pile of dirt or sand. It doesn't look quite right, so that's something we might adjust in the future

Update on the grant

Unfortunately we were not granted any money this time. The fund wants to give a written response to every project with their reasons. They told us that they received a ton of applications and therefore it will probably take a while before they can write all these responses, so we will have patience.

Once we receive the response, we'll try to use it as feedback to improve the game.

That's about all we have to show this time. Thanks for reading!

The town ended up looking quite good I think, but it also took us quite long to draw. Because of that and because of the work we did on the Steam page, we didn't have time to write all the dialogue. There's a lot of characters in the town and many will talk with you and some might even be in conversation with each other as well.

So when we have our next update, we'll write the dialogue for all these characters and we'll design some tasks and quests you can do in and around the town. The next update is on November 14th, which is in three weeks.

Talk to you then!