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A new foundation
New renderer We have been cooking on a new estate building renderer that eventually will replace the existing one and i wanted to take some time to write about the system and what it will enable us to do in the future. Perspective Current …
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Swedish Games Conference and the Steward update
What's been going on? This has been the longest wait between blog posts since we started writing this devlog. So what have we been doing? Well in addition to the continual updates to the game, we have also been out traveling. Specifically w…
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The first community event
The cleansing of Fårö Since the start of Imperia Borealis, Fårö players have not been able to settle on the island of Fårö, north of the main island. The real reason for this has been technical. We simply didn't have a system for how to g…
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Improving roads
One issue that has been on our radar for a while now is the current system for inter-parish travel. As you can see in the image above, the current system generates a tangle of smaller roads, making it hard to see what's going on. The goal o…
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One week in to Season 2 - 52 million resources
We are just about one week into season 2 and I wanted to share some statistics and also share a bit of information about an upcoming patch this weekend. Some stats The game gathers statistic about every resource in the game and aggregates i…
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New season launch
A few days ago we launched the latest season of Imperia Borealis and in this post i want to talk a bit about how it went for us. Before the launch Our overall run book for launching a new season was first created back in S1, but we've sinc…
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Resource management
For the upcoming new season not only have we done major visual and game mechanical updates, we have also spent a lot of time looking at the balance and pacing of the game. The heart and core of the game is all about resources, it is what dr…
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Improving on-boarding
The issue Imperia Borealis is quite a complex game, with a lot of integrated systems. It is therefore important for the game to explain these systems in a clear and intuitive way. To guide the player along. At the same time, Imperia is desi…
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Checks and balances
Iterating the flow For the next upcoming content patch we have spent a lot of development time on the estate management, economy and resource chains. I have always envisioned a game where city building actually matters and is not just reduc…
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A big shift
In this post i wanted to talk about one of the major shifts that we are currently working on, why we are doing it and a bit about our development philosophy. The shift The big shift we are working on is that we are moving from the web-page…
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Performance issuses
We recently had a performance issue specifically on chrome that essentially made the Gotland map unusable. In this post I'll go over what happened. So What happened? After we added forests (and support for hills and mountains) to the game w…
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Gotlands first forest
In this post we wanted to share a quick preview of some of the mid season updates that we are working on and that will hit live servers in a not to distant future. Gotland now has forests As part of our ongoing effort to make Imperia Bore…
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Testing stress
We are currently in the process of performing capacity / stress tests in front of our upcoming ad. campaign. Over time we hope to increase our player base significantly and, while we are fairly certain our architecture can handle it load, …
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Designing with style
A big update that we didn't have time to ship with the last release (the Hanseatic League) was an overhaul to the game's UI. Long-time players will know that, while the UI has gone through many changes, the interface is still very lightweig…
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The power of fractions
A rounding error Imagine that you have a city defended by a strong army: a hundred spearmen, thirty templars in good armor, twenty knights. Then out of nowhere an attacker rides up with three militia. The cheapest unit in the game, the kin…
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What goes into a launch?
Our first launch We recently did a soft launch of the new season system along with our first batch of seasonal content, the Hanseatic League. A soft launch means we opened the doors quietly with a working season running live so we could wat…
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Seasonality
Why Imperia Borealis Has Seasons Every now and then, after a player has reached the end-game they ask the question "What's next for me?" That question is the reason Imperia Borealis now has Seasons. If you've played Path of Exile, you alre…
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Designing systems
In this second installment i want to dive into some of the core philosophies that guides the design of Imperia Borealis. The Five Pillars Every game is built on a handful of beliefs about what makes play worthwhile. Ours is no different an…
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The very first step
Welcome Welcome to the first post on the Imperia Borealis devlog. I'm Christoffer Södergren. I'm building this game together with my wife Camilla, from our home on Gotland, a small island in the baltic sea in Sweden. I grew up walking the m…
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