[Demo on Steam] Heart of Muriet (Wizard Tower) - voxel RTS

Community Showcases
1

The game is now called “Heart of Muriet” and has a playable demo on Steam.

This is the current game play trailer:

Here is the latest story trailer:

This part is from 2017:

I am working on Wizard Towers for about 6 months now. I am developing the game on my own in Unity, full-time.

The gameplay is similar to node-based strategy games like Auralux, Mushroom Wars, and NeoWars, which I developed last year. My outdated devlog describes a little bit better what I want to achieve.

Imagine a simplified RTS game where you can only build on certain power nodes on the map. The main building is a tower that helps to defend bases.

Each player additionally controls one powerful wizard, which can only teleport from Tower to Tower. From the top of the tower hey can cast devastating spells to kill or buff allies etc.

This is the prototype I had after 4 weeks:

Tested also some bigger battles at this time:

After I had done the basic gameplay features I started creating some art in Magica Voxel:

After 10 weeks I came up with ideas on how to upgrade towers, tested effects, some simple postprocessing, etc.

I made the tough decision to start an in-game editor for faster iterations on creating levels, as it is a key element to make the game fun. This took me 2 months to get to the point where the editor was really useable.
I can now create small test levels in a very short time. Almost 5 months passed at this point.
Looking back now, I feel that my time was well invested, I might still be wrong though.

I added spreading fire as I wanted the wizard to be really powerful and burn down forests to change the landscape around them.

Worked on the UI, added more spell effects for the wizard, fixed a lot of bugs, improved the level editor, and working towards a pre-alpha release on itch.io in the next weeks. The look improved a lot in the last days as I added ambient occlusion, screenspace shadows, and played around with Unity’s post-processing stack.

The following video was recorded yesterday. Six months have passed since I started working on the game. Please note that the music was not created by me.

Would be really interested in your feedback, especially what you think about the colors and the overall look of the game. Does the concept sound interesting? Would you like to test the game when looking at the video?
Let me know your thoughts!

3 Likes
2

OMG, I have abandoned this thread more than 3 years ago. Embarrassing to say the least.
Actually I never stopped working on the game, I was just too lazy to update this thread. It seems I am really bad at marketing my game.

Though, I still have a few gifs to show the progress of the last years. :roll_eyes:

2017

I had no idea what I was getting into when I started that project. The original idea was to make a more complex version of Neo Wars, a mobile game that I had developed in 2016. Over time the project grew bigger and I realized step by step that this endeavor will probably take a few years to bring to life.

This gif is from August 2017 while I worked on the map editor.

This is how fights looked in late 2017. I had no idea how to make them look good. Also, my understanding of the Unity Navmesh was very limited at that point. I had no squads or formation in place yet. The detection for enemies was also still very rudimentary at this point.

2018

In 2018 I bought an old house from 1880 which I then renovated to meet today’s energy standards. I had no idea how to do that, but it somehow worked out quite nicely. Unfortunately, the project didn’t progress much in 2018, due to the massive workload. Nonetheless, I still have a few gifs to show from that time.

I started fiddling with shaders to have better-looking vegetation.

I also started working on squads and formations. If you look closely you see that the movement is still very skewed. If I would have guessed how much work formations and squads still had left, I would have probably canned that idea.

I started playing around with new terrain ideas and biomes, but tbh. that was far too early. I still had so much work left on the base game. The below floating island tiles never made it into a playable build.

This was from late October 2018. The house was almost done and I had a little bit more time on my hands to continue working on my project. I mainly worked on particle effects, building models, colors, animations, etc.

2019 was much more productive compared to 2018, so I will start a new post here.