The UI upgrade is progressing well, I'm able to play the game on my mobile now ... and finally seemed to have learnt the lesson about showing my working ;p

Now that I'm feeling like I'm very much in a race for the prize, I'm looking back at the first level and the iterative changes there.

Rose Manor is your country retreat, General. A place to take refuge from the intrigues in the Catabearian Senate.

It was was my intent to create a prosaic, barebones introduction ... somewhere nice, in the country ;)

Of course you, General, don't have a fully equipped army, just soldiers and archers.

This one level is where I have easily spent 60% of my total develoopment time. It's not where the soldiers first came to life, but it's where they first found a home. It embodies all of my fears around level design, basic art ability, tutorials and onboarding techniques. So it's kind of a big deal for me. 

I look at the first image and it still brings me joy. I loved putting the cars in ... of hinting that the world is at an early 19th century level of technology. Sadly, this style didn't scale. I couldn't replicate the feeling in Cuenia, I couldn't make it work across every nation. 

The next image shows the move to a hex style I had originally created for the world map .... 10 years ago. Or was it a 1000. Anyways, it was for another game entirely, a vision of a card-based strategy game. Using this ancient and very dustry world map as the style base now meant a consistency across the nations. Harmony. But something went missing. I was missing the joy.

And then finally there is this. The compromise. A style I can replicate across nations cohesively. Something I feel for when I look into it. It's not the best, but it how could it be?

There are 12 other levels I want to show you, General, not the tutorial level ;p

I am very much on my race to the prize now.