Progress #12: A Rose Manor Retrospective


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.

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