🚀 Road to Launch #3 - Campaign & Difficulty Settings 🚀

Greetings, heroes of Songs of Silence! ⚔️

We continue our Road to Launch series... (finally! 🥳)

This week, we give you an insight on TWO key parts of ✨Songs of Silence✨!

• ⚔️ The Campaign

• ⚖️ The Difficulty Settings

Early Access and player feedback (you!) enabled us to improve and even rehaul certain chapters! 🛠️

This also fueled development for the rest of the campaign.

As for Difficulty Settings, both provided us with precious balancing inputs! 💡

⚔️ The Campaign ⚔️

📖 Chapter 2

When we released into Early Access, chapter 2 was strongly criticized. 😤

It suffered from several issues, which led us to the following changes:

• We shortened and rehauled the first section for a faster, simpler navigation 🗺️

• We improved the movement meter to indicate when a player may hide or not 📏

• We reworked the forests and armies placed in the middle section to be more intuitive 🌲

• We fine-tuned the AI to be less punitive 🩹

Here's some before and after pictures below! 👇👇👇

⛰️ Terrain & Decorations

Between Early Access and 1.0 release, every campaign map (as well as skirmish) underwent a beautification pass. 💅

In practice, this meant adding...

• 3D decorations 🗿

• Improved terrain textures ⛰️

• Unique shaders and VFX 🌪️

Before and after pictures below! 👇👇👇

🎁 Secrets...

A video game isn't really one without some secrets... 🤫

We sparkled them throughout the campaign to incentivise exploration.

We don't want to spoil you, so here's a hint of what to look out for... 😏

⚖️ Difficulty Settings ⚖️

Its main objective: cater to multiple strategy playstyles - from hardcore to casual.

Below is an overview - straight out of our Game Design documents - how Difficulty Settings work.

Armies

Adjusting difficulties revolves around neutral and AI army compositions. 👹

• Adjust Hero levels / maximum army sizes

• Adjust army compositions for existing armies (neutral & AI)

• Adjust AI hero revive pools (max respawn with weaker / stronger armies)

• Adjust AI hero respawn timers

• Add additional neutral or AI armies to maps

• Add cards to AI Hero pools

Locations

• Adjust location balancing

• Adjust location starting state per difficulty (Prosperity level or ruined)

Objectives

• Adjust objectives dynamically between difficulty levels

In a Campaign chapter, it would show like this! 👇👇👇

And that's all for today folks! 🫡

As usual - have fun, and do leave us a review if you like the game! ✨

⚔️ See you on the battlefield! ⚔️

Cheers, The Chimera Team