Age of Decadence - May Update

[RPGWatch]

Vince has kicked up the May update for The Age of Decadence - I'll post the entire update here:

February, March, and April were all about the demo. May was about Maadoran - our largest city. While Oscar's porting all Maadoran locations, I'm tweaking and expanding dialogues, adding everything we've learned from the beta test and the overall feedback.

More specifically:

1. Porting.

Brian wanted T3D for Dead State. T3D introduced significant visual improvements - better lighting, shadows, better transparency handling, glow, HDR, SSAO and other shaders, plus better tools, editors, and mission objects (ground cover and textures, forests, roads, wind, teleporter, sound space, physical zone, time of day, etc). Since it's the same engine family, Nick was able to tweak it and transfer all systems fairly quickly. Once we had a nearly identical (the scripting engine remained the same, which means we didn't have to touch quests) but graphically superior engine, porting AoD was an easy decision.

So, all we have to do now is to finish porting the locations, which wouldn't take much time.

2. Maadoran

Unlike Teron, it's a large and ancient city. There is a lot of history there, a lot to discover and explore, from the Abyss to more obscure locations.

Overall, Teron introduces the world, lore, and factions, without getting too much into it. Everyone's too busy to give a damn about what happened in the past. Maadoran's different in this regard. House Aurelian has spent a lot of time and effort securing relics and sealing what they couldn't secure (like the tower of Zamedi, for example), so you can learn quite a lot there.

Also, Maadoran has more characters to interact with, bigger ambitions and grander plots. If you liked Teron, you'll love Maadoran. You will feel like a provincial girl in a big city (and will probably end up dead).

Now, if you recall, it was very easy to end up dead in Teron, which really wasn't such a good idea in hindsight. We tweaked it in R2 and now we have to tweak it elsewhere, while preserving the "life is cheap" atmosphere.

We're also adding more dialogue options, quest solutions (like the poisoned wine options in R2), and various encounters (like the preacher, storyteller, refugees, etc in Teron). We did quite a lot in a month, which brings us to the next topic:

3. What should we show you?

What would you like to see and learn about in the next updates (telling you "hey guys we're working on stuff, honest!" month after month is kinda boring)? Over the years we've shown quite a lot, but it was mostly Teron's content, as we didn't want to spoil the rest of the game. Should we continue or not? Suggestions are welcome.