Boomzap Entertainment

The real Olivia, who is now a precocious 5 years old, was born with a congenital hand issue (which has since been largely fixed), so Chris thought it might be fun to put her in the game as a hero with a special hand replacement. With that of course, comes a discussion about whether the color of one’s skin actually means anything in the world of Last Regiment. So, in the end, we decided that black folk in our world come from the southern parts of the island chain of Portella, which is a massive archipelago in the Old World. But in a world that has goblins, orcs, elves, and goodness knows what other sorts of folk, we decided that the people of Portella weren’t really chuffed about human skin color.

As we said last week, we think the game is now pretty solid and we’re ready to start making the campaigns. With the closed beta (“Earlier Access”) for Last Regiment coming up next week, everyone’s working hard on getting everything ready. This is something we need to do now, because if we make adjustments later on, we might face sudden changes in the campaign’s difficulty. What we could do is to pre-build some regiments (like a card deck) and assign it to the different AI themes: super aggressive, super defensive, or conqueror (something in between).

This week we’ve been playing around with Last Regiment‘s editor, and looking at the process in which we add new tiles. Take note, there are different types of tiles: walkable tiles, impassable tiles, and structures, and it takes regular playtesting to make sure the maps are fun to play. Part of creating the map editor is trying duplicate real world things in the game. At this point, we have made sure that the basic game make sense, decided what features we need, designed the different characters, and built the environment it is set in.

We’ve been doing our week of focused playtest sessions for Last Regiment, going through every unit, power, trait, and terrain one by one. After testing the powers and traits, we decided to remove powers that we felt would cause more trouble for us in the long run, such as powers that had aura effects. We’ve also added passive traits to summoned units on terrains, and  restored the walker traits to make use of the changes we made to the terrains. We also tested the new factions that we added last week – Tinkersteel and Khazan.