What’s up Gamers? 2020 is finally over, and 2021 came out the gate swinging. On our end, we’re trying not to dwell on all that, so it’s time for some updates.
We are happy to announce that you’ll be able to play Sons of Ra in the Steam Festival: February 2021! For us, the most exciting news of all is that this demo will feature our brand new Online Multiplayer!
We had another test this past weekend, and we think that things are just about ready for you to try. We have a few larger problems to tackle before then, but one more test oughta do it! …Hopefully.
Once again, thank you to all of our Testers! Every one of you has really helped us with your time, your bug reports, and for humoring us by trying out weird situations so we can take notes. Thank you so much for helping us bring Sons of Ra to a larger audience.
Sekhmet has full functionality, and we are getting all the artwork done for her blessings right now. Her Ultimate, the Huntress, looks suuuuper cool. Check it out below:
Ignore the weirdness with the unit. That’ll be fixed soon.
Happy Huntress 🙂
Sad Huntress 😥
CHANGELOG
Art
Animations for The Huntress
New Blessing art for Sekhmet’s Battle Hardened and Isis’ Immunity
New Sun Tower finalized
New dust particles for collapsing keep, destroyed towers
Online
Massive performance upgrades
Numerous fixes with blessings and units
Betrayal was a paaaiiiinnn. But it’s good now.
Improved matchmaking and support for “quick join”
Music
Final Mixes on all level and menu tracks
Updated Ra track
Final Victory track updates
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Our main online tasks to work on are client/host desyncs and what we’re calling “ghost lobbies.” There’s still smaller bugs that will need our time eventually, but those are the main focus right now.
As for gameplay, Sekhmet is on the home stretch, and we’re excited to show you her full power soon!
The Steam Festival starts up on February 3rd. We cannot wait for you to play our game and tell us what you think!
Hello! As we reach the final stretch of development, we wanted to share what we’re working on, what’s to come, and what you can expect from Sons of Ra.
To kick off our brand new developer logs, we’re announcing the identity of our newest God, Sekhmet! Sekhmet is the warrior goddess who smashes everything and everyone who stands in her way.
Extremely aggressive, she has abilities that focus on offensive unit play, even sending her own avatar of destruction onto the battlefield to dish out damage.
We also redesigned our existing keeps (still in progress) and they now have pillars! Our old keeps were designed over two years ago (!!!) so this change was a long time coming.
See?! Pillars!
Slide between the new keep on the right, and the old keep on the left!
Changelog
New Keep
Colors!
Heads!
Pillars!
New God Sketches
Sekhmet is revealed!
Seh has sords an doesn’t afraid of anything
Sekhmet gameplay design discussion
New blessings coming to you soon!
UI updates
Tutorial has updated assets
Text boxes allow for different sized text (for localization)
Conquest Elimination Mechanics
You can lose now
Behind the scenes boring legal garbage
We’ll be posting again at the end of the month, where we will have more updates to Conquest, get our online mode in a fully testable state, and getting Sekhmet’s ultimate blessing ready for action!
We are incredibly excited to formally announce Set as the fourth god in the roster of Sons of Ra. He has been in the works for a few months at this point, as after the popularity of Anubis, we wanted to make sure that he would be similarly interesting to play and thematically accurate. We spent time doing research on different gods in the Egyptian pantheon, and found a few that we thought could bring interesting mechanics into Sons of Ra. Of these, Set was the one we believed to be most well known, and who had the most distinct identity – two characteristics that made Anubis successful. With this in mind, we delved into the mythos of Set and began the design process.
Who is set?
In Egyptian myth, Set is associated with a number of concepts, but most prominently Chaos, the Deserts, and Storms. He is also well known for his rivalry with the god Horus. After all, Set’s most famous story is that of his rivalry with Horus, and the events that caused it, culminating in Set’s stealing of Horus’ eye. Specifically, he is known as the one to murder his own brother, Osiris, to take his place as king.
Visual Design
There was one major challenge when it came to how we were going to visually depict Set. Like many Egyptian gods, he is pictured with the head of an animal. However, unlike the others, it is uncertain exactly what the “Set animal” is. Everything from donkey to aardvark, anteater to fennec fox has been suggested to have contributed to the depiction of Set. We decided to take influence from a few of these animals, namely the donkey and aardvark, and put our own spin on them to arrive at Set’s appearance in Sons of Ra.
For his weapons and clothing, we reached more into the myth of Set and what he represented in the ancient Egyptian religion. Being seen as a trickster, usurper, and assassin, we thought Set should appear vicious and sly, so we gave him a dagger to represent this underhanded nature he is portrayed with. As god of the Deserts, his clothing is reminiscent of clothing worn by North African and Egyptian desert travelers, with a hood partially covering his eyes to again reinforce his dishonesty and trickery.
Lastly, we chose to depict him with two items that hearken back to his myths. The eye of Horus which he stole hangs on a chain around his neck, and on his forearms are golden snake ornaments that reference his association with snakes, as well as his duty protecting Ra from the snake Apophis to ensure that the sun would always rise.
Set looks like he had once held the dignity and majesty of a god, but has since become ragged during his exile in the desert. Now, he comes to offer the warring kings of Egypt power, in the hopes that their devotion will bring him back to equal or even surpass his fellow gods and enable him to claim his rightful place once more.
Play Design
When we create gods, we try to distill their style down to a simple phrase or concept to guide us in development. As the God of Chaos, Set’s blessings would naturally be somewhat aggressive, and designed to cause disorder on the battlefield, so the general theme that we chose to focus on with Set was “Disruption”. His abilities would therefor revolve around thwarting the plans that the opposition has enacted, and obstructing them from establishing a foothold when used properly. Set’s four blessings are as follows:
What better way to create chaos than by turning allies against each other? When you cast Betrayal, units from within the targeted area are randomly selected to temporarily change sides and fight for the opposing team. That said, it also has the potential to affect the user’s units, so placement is important. There is also no limit to the number of affected units, so using it in a large battle has the potential to cause mass confusion. When units switch sides, they will stop to fight units of the opposing team. In other words, their former allies! This will obviously deal damage to the affected units as they fight each other, but it comes with the added bonus of stopping the fighting units in lane. This allows towers extra time to work on them, or gives you the opportunity to mount your own attack in return.
Sandstorm is the first of what we are referring to as Lane-Select Blessings. As the name suggests, upon use, Lane-Select Blessings place an effect on an entire lane, either all at once or for a period of time. Sandstorm is of the latter variety. For as long as it lasts, Sandstorm gives the user’s units in the chosen lane a boost of speed, as its winds are at their backs, while dealing damage over time to any opposing units in that lane. Fitting with Set’s theme of disruption, Sandstorm is a form of lane denial, which you can use to twist your opponent’s plans to your whim by hampering an incoming assault or forcing their hand to a desperate and immediate defense against your own attack.
Basic Blessing: Ignite
Cost: 25 Favor Cooldown: 10 seconds
Set’s first basic blessing is the familiar Ignite. Select any tower controlled by the opponent and wipe it off the face of the earth with a fiery blast. Use it to help break through to the opponent’s keep or force a further gold advantage by removing defenses as they struggle to set them up.
Cyclone has returned! Originally named Sandstorm, Cyclone was removed when Montu was reworked into Ra, but it is now back as a blessing granted by Set. Call down a vortex of sand and wind to batter enemy units in a targeted area on the battlefield.
Wrap-Up
So concludes our detailed breakdown of Set, God of Chaos, the newest patron deity to come to Sons of Ra. We had a lot of fun designing him, and spent a lot of time creating his unique look and playstyle. We feel like he has set a new bar for us in terms of quality, one that has inspired us to revisit our old work to bring it up to a similar level – especially the effects of our blessings, one of the most dynamic and intense aspects of our game.
We are excited to announce that Set will be playable in ONE WEEK at DreamHack Atlanta, from November 15-17. Please, come by, check us out, and try Set for yourselves! We look forward to seeing you there.
Man, we only just realized it’s been more than two months since we did one of these. At the time of last writing, things were moving pretty slowly, so we figured continuing to try to get devlogs out weekly would over-saturate our market, so to speak. As a result, we decided to hold off for a little while. Then March and April hit, and the exact opposite happened. The past month or so have been nonstop action, both in and out of the game. We’ve put in new major features, updated others, and driven up and down the Eastern Seaboard to various events. But now, we are finally (temporarily) free of hard deadlines and actually have some time to tell those of you who haven’t seen our game firsthand some of what’s changed. So, here we go. Let’s start with the big one. The elephant, or dog, if you will, in the room.
Anubis – God of the Dead
Montu and Isis had been in Sons of Ra alone and unchanged for more than 6 months. We for a long time wished to add more deities from which players could choose to bring with them into battle. Well, we finally had the time to devote to bringing in a third, and we decided to go big.
Anubis is prominent in Ancient Egyptian myth, and we wanted to make the abilities he grants the player fun, engaging, and respectful to his depiction in history. As such, we start with his ultimate blessing, Embalming. This was the big new thing we wanted to try with Anubis. Up to this point, we have had 3 kinds of blessings in Sons of Ra – active blessings, ones that the player casts at a location for some effect (i.e. Solar Flare and Tower Lock), buff blessings, which give all the player’s units some temporary effect (like Immunity or Recovery), and global blessings, those that apply an effect to every unit across the map (Earthquake).
Embalming is the first Unit Blessing. It lets the player pay favor for a special unit with a unique effect. In this case, it lets you spawn an Embalming Priest, a ranged unit that applies a debuff called Embalm to units whose attacks it hits, and units who hit it with melee attacks, for a couple of seconds. If Embalm is active on a unit when the unit dies, it spawns a mummy to fight on the team of the other player. This blessing has the ability to, when played correctly, turn the tide of battle as you turn a player’s own forces against them. Since we introduced Anubis just before East Coast Games Conference, players there and at RPI Gamefest really seemed to enjoy this ability.
Fun dev fact regarding this ability – Anubis was initially heavy in development back in January, but the behind-the-scenes complexity of spawning mummies at arbitrary spots in lane was taking far too long to solve, and Jeff had to drop Anubis in lieu of other major outstanding tasks. As you can see though, he finally figured it out. And didn’t let the rest of the team hear the end of it.
Anubis’ second unique blessing is Decay. It is an active blessing that allows a player to place a long-lasting damaging aura on the battlefield, that does damage over time to all units inside of it. It’s pretty simple in effect, but requires smart placement as it is at its strongest when you are able to keep your opponents inside of the effect for an extended time.
Lastly, Anubis’ two basic blessings are Haste and Recovery, which you have already seen on Montu and Isis. Together, these abilities create a very unit-centric gameplay style for Anubis, which is a much more specific strategy than those employed by Isis and Montu, who are a bit more all-purpose in terms of gameplay. We hope you’re really excited to try him out!
Back to the Drawing… Wall….
Remember wayyyyy back when when we upgraded patron deity select to be styled like wall carvings or paintings of the chosen gods? Well, we went through a major second iteration on that menu in the interest of information communication and better showing off Mark’s art of the deities… which has also been redone since our initial design of the wall to be more iconic:
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But onto the wall itself. Like we mentioned, we wanted to feature the art of the deities more than the art of the wall, so we greatly simplified the wall itself and re-positioned a lot of information on the UI. Here it is to see.
As you can see, the deity art is much more prominent now, and blessing icons are displayed more centrally in the screen. We also added a little bit of game feel as far as looking at blessing detail goes.
Jeff is a little too proud of this
Overall, we’re really happy with how the new wall feels, and think that it adds a lot to the game.
But Wait, There’s More!
These were some of our biggest updates since last speaking, but we’ve still got a couple more things. First is a more in-theme pause menu.
As a fun added bonus, those images of the gods on the left and right will correspond to who the players have selected for the game! Our loading screens also got a small thematic overhaul in terms of text and color.
We also made some small gameplay changes, like a refinement of the tower placement system so that area of influence can no longer be shared between the two players if their areas overlap. It’s first come first serve now (until you take out the other player’s towers).
We also have new particle effects for Immunity to make it feel a bit more “ultimate”…
… and a shiny new splash screen!
In Closing
Whew, that was a lot to type out. There’s still more coming behind the scenes that we’re excited to share, but the stuff we’re working on these days take a bit longer to perfect, so we won’t be trying to get devlogs out on a determined schedule. Instead, we’ll do like we did with this one, where we’ll wait until we have something really cool and complete to show (though maybe a little more frequently, so we don’t have gigantic info dumps like this). Hope you enjoyed it, and see you next time.
Following the polish seen last week in the sound, particles, and UI, we returned to developing new major features, namely a new playable map. Since the beginning, we always wanted to give each map unique environments and we finally started. We knew we wanted a desert environment to sell the ancient Egyptian theme but couldn’t think of a good context for playing this type of strategy game in the sand. One person suggested simply putting the map on a sandstone slab; however, our advisor pointed out that one of the first recorded board games is from ancient Egypt: Senat. The team loved the idea and Mark quickly went into creating designs and mockup for a senat-inspired version of our board. After that, the board was finalized with the new path design and more detailed textures. The environment followed quickly, using the stone slab suggested as a base and creating sandy hills and rocks as background pieces.
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The map design itself deviates from the other maps in some key ways. It is another two lane map, limiting the tactical options of each player but making defense much simpler. The switchbacks give the defensive advantage to one player in one lane and the other player in the second lane, forcing players to balance both lanes carefully. Finally, the map is significantly smaller than previous maps. So far, maps have been 36 x 24 grid squares in size. This map is only 30 x 18 squares. This decreased size will allow games to be faster and make good tower placement crucial for a strong defense. It will also allow the camera to be closer to the map, showing the units and towers in more detail.
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WE GOT A TRAILER
We now have an official gameplay trailer on our YouTube channel (https://youtu.be/sMRLvYJgSj4)! We’ve been working on it for a couple of weeks, initially for internal use but later polished for a marketing release. We plan to release more marketing and work-in-progress videos on our channel over the course of development. So make sure you subscribe!
IN CLOSING
There are plenty of features currently in development that we’d love to talk about now, but they need some additional work before being shown off. Our current goal is tackling the larger features needing to be tackled between now and release. Hopefully in the next few weeks we should be talking about new gameplay modes and/or features while continuing to polish and improve the quality of what’s currently here. See you all next week.
For the past couple of weeks especially, we here at Pharaoh Hound Games have been hard at work pushing forward a lot of new features and polish, from our shiny new radial UI to the flashier, more impactful game opening. This week though, we thought it was important to take some time to reexamine some aspects of the game that had been somewhat forgotten on the wayside as we ventured forth.
First and foremost, did you guys know that Sons of Ra had sound? Well it in fact does, and until just a few days ago, that sound had been the same since last summer. Most of it was actually implemented back in May. For those who have had a chance to play our game at any expos, events, or playtests, even you probably didn’t know this. After being neglected in favor of other features for months, we finally took our first steps towards making our game sound as interesting as it looks, courtesy of Joe. The game has new music now, as well as a greater variety of effects for unit combat, tower attacks, and other events such as building towers and units entering and damaging the keeps. We aren’t done on this front, as we are still going to be revisiting blessings and other more minor events to make sure everything is unique and stands out.
Next on the list was another UI improvement. Though we had upgraded to a radial menu, the icons representing the different units and towers remained unchanged, and the transparency on them created an unappealing effect when used with the radial menu. So, we gave all the icons the same treatment as the unit icons used in the queue, which can be seen here:
Though still just a first pass, this change gives us a more unified style for our iconography in-game and helps to make things stand out more distinctly for the players.
The last significant item we wanted to mention this week was a small effect added to units. When a unit is defeated, it grants Favor to the players to be spent on blessings. That said, we felt that this was not communicated well enough in-game, so Mark put together a nice looking effect that is meant to help get across the idea that something additional happens when a unit is killed in battle:
While small, the team felt that this added nicely to our gameplay.
In Closing
There was not a whole lot of flashy progress to be shown to you guys this week, but that certainly doesn’t mean that progress isn’t being made. We’ve been having some important conversations behind the scenes about what’s coming, and are continuing to work on things that we think you will find really cool. You might even see some of that in the next few days, so stay tuned. See you all next week.
Was last week’s gigantic shift in UI not enough for you guys? No? Well it wasn’t enough for us either! This week at Pharaoh Hound, we did a first pass redesign of the secondary UI elements in Sons of Ra, being things like the keeps’ health bars, resource counters, and a personal favorite of Jeff’s, we also added a unit spawn queue visual showing upcoming units for each lane. Here she is in action:
While it might be boring that I only spawned Catapults in this example, their longer build time shows the function of the display better. Should you queue up multiple types of units, their respective images will show up in the order that you queue them, with a maximum of 6 (one actively building, and another 5 “waiting) being shown at a time. Should there be more than 6 units in the queue, when a unit is built, the un-shown unit will appear at the end of the line. Your information will not be lost!
In this gif you can also see our new health bar and redone visuals for gold and favor cost and available to the players. Like I said, this is a first pass, and we will be coming back to give these new elements a nice shine, in addition to the radial menu we showed you last week.
Starting Strong
While Jeff and Joe were hard at work on the UI, Michael was having some fun giving matches an exciting introduction. Now, rather than the game starting immediately after patron deity selection, the players will be greeted by this awesome new visual:
We felt that this gives matches a greater sense of gravity as well as a smoother start so that players are not thrust into the fray with no time to prepare. Like the new interface elements, we will be coming back around to this and making it even more awesome as time goes on.
In Closing
The name of the game for the immediate future is juice – camera shake, shiny new particle effects, and the like that will help make every action and event in the game feel even more interesting and impactful. Also, don’t tell anyone, but for the first time in about 6 months we are going to see some new scenery here in Sons of Ra. Stay posted, we’ll be back next week!
There have been a number of times in the development of Sons of Ra where we have realized that design decisions we had made previously should be reviewed and possibly changed. That said, none have been as significant as what we have done the past couple of weeks.
The original control scheme for Sons of Ra was, like the rest of the game, developed with console play in mind. It was intended so that players could quickly engage with the game without having to worry about a myriad of keyboard mappings for different units or abilities. So, we arrived at the 4-button menu:
The top layer of the menu had options for Units, Towers, and Blessings (and later Keep Expansions, though that is not pictured here). Pressing the corresponding face button would take the player into a submenu containing options of different units they could create, towers they could build, or blessings they could use. After selecting a unit they would also be prompted to select a lane to build in, as shown, and at any time the player could choose to go back up a layer in the menu. In this early version, this was done by pressing RS, though that was later changed to be done through the triggers.
Though the menu was functional and relatively quick to use once understood, we found through playtesting that the process of understanding it was less than easy, to say the least. Additionally, being located in the corner of the screen brought the players’ attention away from where the action was happening. We knew something had to change, but weren’t sure what or how.
A few suggestions were made, such as moving the existing menu to be located above the keep, but we eventually decided on an idea that we kept coming back to – the radial menu. Though unliked by some, a radial menu seemed to solve all of our problems at once. It would allow us to keep much more information on one level of the menu rather than having multiple submenus, and it would allow a large number of options with only a few buttons to use. Though its appearance is still in the works, it is a clean enough state that we felt it was reasonable to show, especially because of how excited we are about it.
The menu is divided into 3 sectors, each containing all the players’ options for spawning units, building towers, and using blessings. To use it, the player simply holds the left stick to activate the menu, points it in the direction of what they want to use, and presses A to choose the selected option. In cases that do involve secondary menus or choices, returning to the main level is as simple as pressing B. Building towers and using blessings is simple as well:
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Even though they still employ submenus to a degree, spawning units and building keep upgrades is still easy to understand and do. After selecting a unit, the menu immediately brings the player to lane select and they can simply point the stick in the direction they want to send the units and press A to create them. Keep upgrades are the only item still wholely within a secondary menu, which we did because of the infrequency with which they are used. That said, they are accessibly just by pressing Y, and pressing B while there will bring the player right back to where they were before.
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All-in-all, we feel that we were able to cut an enormous amount of complexity from our game and increase ease of understanding for new players, and preliminary hands-on testing has said the same. We’re incredibly excited for the prospect of more people getting their hands on the new system and seeing how it feels, and we’re going to keep improving the feel and especially the visuals of it as we go.
In Closing
This was just one of the big changes that we promised last week, and we certainly don’t plan to start chasing our tails now that we’ve shown this to you. We still have more that we’re working on and improving, and we’re excited about what’s in the future. We hope you are too, and that we’ll see you back here next time. Have a great weekend guys!
Happy Friday everyone! This week at Pharaoh Hound Games, we spent some time looking back at some smaller aspects of Sons of Ra to see how we could make them feel more interesting and, well, “magical”. After all, this is a game where the players invoke the powers of gods to assist them in battle. So, why not lend a bit more of that supernatural feel to the game?
For starters, our new Archers shoot powerful arrows that overpenetrate and deal damage to multiple units. What kind of arrows fired by a normal bow do that? Magical arrows, of course!
We added some effects to make the arrows themselves feel mystical and etherial, giving them a glow and a fade out, as well as some particles to make it feel as though the arrow is dissipating away into the air as it runs out of energy. We think that this enhances the feel of the unit, and makes games feel a bit more spectacular.
Leaving a Footprint
On the technical side of things, we for a while have been working to adapt our tower system to accommodate towers with even widths or heights. Specifically, we wanted to adjust the Obelisk to have a 2×2 footprint to give us a bit more flexibility in its power. With it taking up the same area as an Archer Tower, the average damage output of the two towers had to be very similar for balance, but this made the game less interesting.
Due to the grid-based system we use, making this adjustment was a little difficult, because the system would automatically center towers around the location they were to be placed at. With some work, we were able to get our system to adapt its functionality depending on a classification we would assign towers of different footprints. Just this week, we adjusted the art of the Obelisk to better visually show this change.
As you can see, not only did this change better communicate the space taken up by the tower, but it also gave us the leeway to make some more visual features to show its charge-up process. Even more than that, we also created a “spark” effect that will play when the tower is at full charge, occasionally emitting sparks so long as the tower holds full charge and is ready to fire. This can be seen at the end of the above gif. This was just another instance of the small bits of magic we have been trying to add.
Growing Up
One other small feature we added was to give unit spawns a bit of a better feel. Up until now, units simply appeared at the keep entrances on spawn. While functional, this doesn’t look particularly polished. So, we gave the guys a short scale animation to make it seem like they don’t just come from nowhere.
In Closing
While we are continuing with our efforts to make sure every element of the game feels good and polished, there are a number of huge changes, additions, and improvements coming down the line that we’ve been working doggedly on, some of them we hope to even have in come next week. Hope you guys will come around to check them out!
Happy 2019 everyone! Over the holiday break, many of us took some time to relax and recharge; however, we still made progress. Some changes are behind-the-scenes code tweaks or prototypes not yet ready to be shown, but we do have a few things to show.
First, we have a new victory screen at the end of a game. The camera zooms in to see the loser’s keep crumble into a cloud of dust and a banner appears to declare victory. The colors and crown on the banner change to match the winning player. It is a purely visual change, but helps make the match feel properly concluded.
(Top: Old Textures; Bottom: New Textures)
We also did a second pass at the textures on the base expansions. While not bad, many were more detailed than the flatter stylized textures of other models. These new textures have the level of detail reduced but still avoid looking flat and empty. The mine is the best example of the change. There is so much detail in the rocks on the ground that stylized mine and rocks look out of place. The second mine is much more consistent in comparison.
In Closing
There will be much more to talk about in the next devlog. As I said, some features are not quite ready to be shown and others have just started production. We are hoping to continue making visual improvements to the game, making it look and feel better. Perhaps not in the next update, but soon, we will overhaul the sound to give attacks and actions the impact they deserve. If you have any feedback, don’t hesitate to leave a comment on this post or use our contact page to reach out. See you all next week.
Pharaoh Hound Games 