When I stopped yesterday, everything was in place to claim new villages. The only thing that was missing was actually claiming them. And so that is the first thing I did this morning: when you click a demon camp on the world map, its sets a marker that you're going to attack that camp at the end of the turn. When you pass the turn, a huge battle happens! If your army is stronger than 1.1 times the camp's army, you win the fight, clean that tile from the demon minions, and receive a fresh new village. However, this time you're attacking, and your goal is to wipe the demons out: doing that takes a bigger toll on your army than regular defending. Thus, you will almost always take losses during those battles. The closer your army is to the demon's, the higher the casualties. You can lose up to close to 50% of your soldiers, so make sure to attack only when your army is vastly superior to that of the camp!

You'll notice that I also made some UI improvements (or so I hope! ). And I made sure that you could only attack demon camps that are adjacent to one of your human villages.

From there, the next step was to make camps different, and have one "boss" camp that would need to be defeated in order to win the game. And I of course added a victory screen! But I'm not going to show it here, I want you all to go get it by yourselves. I'm not that nice.

Aaaaand… That was about the end of the key features of the game! It has all the important things it needs to be challenging, to be lost, and to be won. It's not "good" by any means, there are still a ton of thing to do, but those are not core features. It was a pretty important milestone for me to reach, and I'm glad I did so with another day and a half left.

The first "comfort" feature I added was an army screen, to view the strength, food intake, and composition of your army. I'm not sure it's really that important, but it's a cool feature to have. It gives more depth to your army than just a number.

After that, I was on to doing some smaller changes, easy refactoring here and there, and fixing some low-hanging issues. The next big visible work I made was to change the background to some dark gray, and adapt the UI colors to that new tone. I also added new icons, removing text wherever I could. Hopefully those images are clear and won't confuse players. I hope the new colors will reflect more the mood that I want the game to have — it's a war game after all. Let me know what you think:

I know I said balancing was for Friday, but I wanted to give you a game that was a least a bit playable. Yesterday's build had only one possible sequence in the early turns that would allow you to go beyond turn 20. At a least a few of my crazy friends figured it out (after a lot of tries), but I don't want that to be what this game is about. It should give you choices, and make those choices valid, otherwise it's not really fun. Anyway, all that to say that I spent some time at the end of my day to balance the game a bit. I've added some more units, and more levels to buildings — they all go up to level 10 now. I also made them produce more resources, and I hope that will make the whole game more enjoyable.

And that's Day 4! I managed to work a bit less today, approximately 8 hours. I'm very happy about where I'm at with this game! Tomorrow is going to be an intense day of play-testing, tweaking, balancing, and adding a bunch of details that should make the game a lot better.

As usual, the code is up on my GitHub repository, adngdb/village-builder, and you give today's build a try here: Play Village Builder - Day 4 Build. The game is in a much more playable state, so please let me know what you think about it! Your feedback will be valuable for my work tomorrow.

/me goes dark mode.