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Warlord: Awaji - Lead a samurai invasion
Asid:
Next Fest Update
Mon, 14 October 2024
Support Warlord: Awaji in Steam Next Fest!
Warlords,
Steam Next Fest has officially begun. To kick off this event, I have prepared a final update for the Warlord: Awaji’s Demo! As of now the Playtest is deactivated. If you were using the Playtest app, please switch to the Demo, your data will automatically carry over!
To make the new-user experience even more smooth, I have added unit highlights to help distinguish friend from foe. The level XP and damage scaling has also been adjusted to make early levels more forgiving, but still provide a good sense of accomplishment at the end of the Demo’s progression. In addition, there is now an extra level, with a cool new armor color.
Full changelog:
• Added level 13 with a new oyoroi armor color
• Added character highlights with option to disable
• Added option to disable radar
• Added chance for spears and naginata to break instead of drop when out of stamina
• Added ability to break props down when hit, showcased on the shields
• Added assist half XP if an enemy the player had hit dies within 3 seconds
• Lowered XP requirements to level up
• Removed XP from killing injured or surrendered allies or taking their heads
• Changed damage scaling to logarithmic, so early levels provide a faster damage boost
• Increased drop chance of yari and naginata when out of stamina
• Increased stamina cost to block with spear
• Increased damage and hit force of naginata and odachi
• Polished wood particle
• Improved positioning of wounded characters to reduce physics glitches
• Fixed kaishaku XP not triggering if gore option is disabled
• Fixed permanent corpses not displacing grass
• Fixed bug where allied corpses could not be hit
I hope this will be a nice “definitive” edition of the Demo. Should there be bugs or imbalances, I will work on those in the coming week. However, I am calling the Demo officially finished so I can pivot back to developing the main game!
Later this month I will have another exciting announcement, so please look forward to that.
Enjoy the Demo!
Darkmatter
Asid:
Demo Update 2.0
Tue, 17 June 2025
A Warrior is Only as Strong as His Bow
Warlord: Awaji - Demo Update Trailer
Warlords,
First off, thank you all for your extreme patience. I try my best to reduce the wait between announcements, but this time was a special case. Shortly following the release of the demo last fall, I traveled throughout Japan for almost 3 months over the holidays. It was an enlightening trip, and I was even able to visit the eponymous (and mysterious) island of Awaji! I will share more about this expedition via Discord shortly.
(Central Awaji... looks like a fun place for a Warlord game)
While in Japan, I was able to research and plan out much of the remainder of the game. So immediately upon returning to the States in January, I got back to work developing. Although I was debating on whether I should release another demo, or save everything for the full game, I decided it would be more fun for all of us to have something exciting to try out while waiting.
Almost every file in the game was changed over the past few months, so while a complete list of changes is impossible to generate, here are the "big ticket" items new in this demo!
Update Log
- Horses, horseback riding, and mounted AI
- Bows and ranged AI
- 5 arrow types and ammunition switching
- Advanced arrow ballistics including penetration depth, ricochets, bounces, and shatters
- Massive physics optimizations, especially noticeable in large battles
- New instant action map
- Updated and expanded foliage including bamboo
- Warrior's mansion environment (The smallest possible example, just a taste of what is to come. Also note it is missing interior props for now)
- Yabusame (traditional horseback archery) track, go WSW from the spawn point to find it
- Dynamic interior lighting
- Interactable and destructible doors and shutters
- Shield deploying AI
- Blood fidelity improvements
- Melee animation follow-through and hit lags
- Unique melee sounds for each weapon
- Outdoor sound reverb
- Improvements to AI movement and fluidity
- General improvements
Please enjoy this new demo, and let me know either on Steam or Discord if you come across any bugs. Following this release I will be hard at work on the campaign portion of the game!
Also, I am thinking about hosting a Yabusame competition using the new track, so if you are interested in that, join the Discord to stay up to date!
Until next time,
Darkmatter
Updated Demo available Now! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3123060/Warlord_Awaji/ Jump back into the exciting world of ancient Japan in this new demo!
Asid:
Development News
Wed, 20 August 2025
Warlords,
Thank you all for your patience. I wanted to provide a brief update regarding Warlord: Awaji's development. I plan on releasing some news like this once every 2 months, so everyone knows I am still alive and kicking. I would love to provide a dev log in a more entertaining and digestible format, like a video, but I am a game developer first and foremost, not a content creator, so please understand this is the best I can do! Anyways, let's get to the news.
The last demo update went very well. I feel like the combat ecosystem of the game is in a decent place, and it is fun to play, but you have not seen everything yet in terms of weapons. I have noted some suggestions regarding the melee combat, things like adding a basic parry/perfect block system. This could be interesting should time allow, but overall I feel like the combat is already a quantum leap above Warlord: Britannia, and will play out nicely in the open-world campaign.
After the demo update released I pivoted to implementing the actual Warlord elements of the game. Namely, the camp, army, and open world mechanics like settlements and convoys. So far things are coming along very nicely and I have no doubts WLA will live up to and exceed it's predecessor. Having created a Warlord game once before, setting out to build features from scratch in WLA has been satisfying and efficient. Now that I know all of the pitfalls and gotchas that came with implementing these systems in WLB, I can write maintainable code from the get-go, which keeps my technical debt low (although not zero, but we are only human).
Even after only a short time implementing Warlord elements into the new game, some big differences have arisen from WLB. I would say the biggest paradigm shift is with the save system. In the previous game, you could only save your progress when at camp and not under attack. This was reasonable and by no means prevented people from enjoying the game, but I felt like it was adding friction. For example, if I want to assault a nearby village, I need to make sure I actually have 10 or 15 minutes to do it. If I have to go to a doctor's appointment in 20 minutes, this would result in me calling it quits. The lack of a true pause when opening the escape menu contributed to this issue. Now I am glad to say both saving and pause features have been made universally accessible during gameplay.
Another big change in Warlord: Awaji has been a simplification of harvesting, building, and storage. I found that while satisfying to watch your troops build structures and harvest resources in WLB, more often than not it became a source of frustration when things didn't go right with their AI, or when the player was unsure if they were experiencing bugged behavior. The interaction between these three elements: the building of structures, harvesting of resources, and storage space created a long list of edge cases and odd behavior. Storage space did not feel like a value-added feature, more like a chore you had to keep up with. AI building and harvesting was cool but became cumbersome and slow, and often frustrating. So for WLA, I have decided to forgo AI building (instead, the player's builds are automatically completed with a timer), harvesting, and storage space entirely. That being said, there should still be tools to allow for clearing of trees and foliage, and decorative storage builds. Plus the extra free time given to your troops around camp will be used for other immersive purposes, so no worries there.
What the removal of harvesting does is cut out the bottomless supply of resources from nature, and instead makes their procurement part of the overall progression ecosystem, which is something I really want to lock in for this game. Another reason why I decided to go this route is due to the samurai setting itself. Samurai field camps were not nearly as complex and well defended as Roman marching forts, so extracting massive quantities of wood from nearby forests simply doesn't compute. So I think these changes will be both historically authentic, and beneficial to the player's experience.
In other news, I have experimented with the base terrain for Awaji island, including the surrounding seas and landmasses of mainland Japan and Shikoku. I am still unsettled on the overall size of the map (determined by the scale factor to real life), but so far a roughly 1/3 or 1/4 scale is seeming appropriate. For comparison, Britannia (actually the real life island of Jersey), was in 1/2 scale and ended up being roughly 10km long. Awaji could be rendered between 1/3 and 1/4 scale and end up roughly 15km long, which may be too large for Warlord gameplay (some would argue WLB was already too big). So I will be tweaking and testing the map to ensure a vast open-world that feels adequately filled with content, is easily traversable, and retains recognizable valleys, mountains, and beaches from real life.
Let me know what you think about this. I look forward to reading your comments here and on Discord. Until the next news update I will be hard at work on the remainder of the campaign mechanics, then hopefully start to fleshing out the open world itself. Still no official release date yet, but it definitely will not be this year, so we still have a little ways to go. I hope it will be worth the wait! Thank you all for the support.
Until next time,
Darkmatter
(Greetings from somewhere on the Northern tip of a barren Awaji)
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