Development
Progress
You can play Messalith from the first recruit to the end of a campaign. Most of what's left is polish and balance, and long hours of real people playing it.
Built
- Squad combat: cover, high ground, overwatch, fog of war, panic, downed and bleeding out, ironman.
- Four disciplines: Shaper, Mender, Seer and Voice, every power paid for in Will.
- Power evolution: five ranks, branch choices, nearly forty forms, and a powers tree at camp.
- The exiles: generated recruits with a past, dossiers, bonds and rivalries, fully modelled and animated in the field.
- The campaign: fifty regions of a dried-out Europe, two rival factions at war, sieges, refuges and story missions.
- Two enemy peoples: the Glass Court and the Brine Choir, each with its own line of fighters and its own way of war.
- Camp management: home camp and outposts, works and stores, a research tree, training, a crown forge and defences that stand in battle.
- Battlefields: a dozen natural landscapes, period-accurate plants, real-elevation horizons.
- Weather and time of day: rain, dust storms, salt haze and snow, dawn to night, wind, ambient sound.
- Battle map editor: hand-built missions in the 3D view, with a library of objects to place.
- Crystal interface: a glass-and-paper look across every screen, with readable and reduced-motion modes.
Working on now
- New looks for the Glass Court: heavier, more ornate stained-glass armour.
- Interface polish: another pass on the camp, dossier, debrief and settings screens.
- The painted look: matching the battlefields' colour and light to the game's paintings, biome by biome.
- Balance: the pace of ranks and crowns, how hard the Choir hits, how long a campaign runs.
- Better props: replacing stand-in camp objects with finished models.
Next
- Playtesting: long sessions with real players, then tuning hit chances and enemy numbers.
- Weapons for the enemy: blades in their hands.
- Living scenery: birds and animals of the period, sourced from the fossil record.
- Sound and music: action sounds and a score.
- More story missions, built in the editor.
- Graphics presets for lower-end PCs.
Want to hear when there's more to show? Get in touch. For how it all plays, see The Game.