What is Augury?

Augury is a medieval real-time strategy game set in a 2D, procedurally generated world. It incorporates many RPG elements to create a unique blend of both genres. In Augury, the player is tasked with creating a settlement in a foreign unknown land with only the cryptic messages from a seemingly celestial being as their guide.

The player will be collecting resources, building new structures, fighting enemies, and exploring.

In Augury, every unit is unique, with their own equipment, skills, and traits. My goal is that whatever a unit can be assigned to doing, they will get better at it.

Development So Far

Augury is being developed in GameMaker. Unfortunately, development has not always went so well, and I am actually pretty embarrassed to even say the year that I started project that would later become Augury.

It has been almost 9 years…

But to be fair, the design of the game has changed significantly since then, originally being a local coop gamepad based game.

The game didn’t stay like that very long though. I quickly fell into the common pitfall of dreaming up more and more features until the scope of the game was way out of hand.

Brief history of Augury

Through a combination of incompetence and procrastination, development stagnated. Working a full-time job and trying to create a game is hard. It’s even harder when you are a terrible programmer who is terrible at time management.

Even after my friend Dustin decided to join in on the project, nothing really got done, because he faces the same issues as I do.

So why haven’t I given up?

Most people would have thrown in the towel by now, and I have definitely thought about it. But Augury is my dream game and I want to see it through to the end no matter what.

Having to rewrite basically everything

Over several years, me and Dustin have worked hard improving our programming skills, as well as significantly improving our ability to manage complexity as the project grows in size. Around 2020 I reached a point where I felt we could actually do it, we could actually made the game we want to make. We are started sharing the game publicly for the first time and the reception was generally good. But I knew if the game was ever going to release, all the old code had to go. So I started to rewrite everything one system at a time, and over the last 3 years that’s where I’ve been at.

What I’ve done in the past year?

So now that the whining part of the post is done, let’s move onto the development for the last year. I’m happy to say that 2022 was the most productive year I’ve ever had, so what was the first thing I did?

First Commit To GitHub in a Year

Oh yeah, looks like I made the first update to the game in OVER A YEAR. I got married in 2021, so let’s just blame it on that. Or maybe it was me having covid early 2022 ummm

Quest System and First Quest

In Augury there will be a main quest, and side quests that may pop up randomly or after a player makes certain discoveries. I knew I wanted to make a really modular, scalable system for handling quests in the game and one day at work whilst slinging boxes in the back of a semi-trailer, I thought of a way to make that system. On break I quickly jotted the idea down on Trello, programming the system on my next set of days off.

Being stuck in a metal trailer for 12 hours a day definitely gives you time to think, for better or for worse.

Now that I had a quest system, I need to make a quest to test whether or not the system will actually work well enough. I created a placeholder UI so you can see the name of the quest and what objectives are still left to be completed, and then the other programmer Dustin volunteered to try out the system and create a much needed tutorial for the game.

Quests are made up of pages of objectives. once the objectives on the current page are complete, the quest will procede to the next page. Once all the pages are completed, the quest will be finished.

New Music Style

Along with the programming, I also create the music for Augury. When I first started the project, I wanted to create a realistic orchestral score, HEAVILY inspired by the soundtracks of the later Elder Scrolls games and Game Of Thrones. Overall, I still like the early music of the game, but I also felt as if it was a little bit generic.

Here is all the old music compiled together.

One day while browsing YouTube, I came across a genre of music I honestly didn’t know existed; Dungeon Synth. Dungeon Synth harkens back to RPG games of old, using a combination of synths, old soundfonts, and some modern samples. It’s really nostalgic and I thought it would be a perfect fit for Augury. here is a sample:

Notification System

Next up, we have the notification system. Augury takes place in a very large procedurally generated world, and the player may have units anywhere; so there needed to be a way of informing the player about important events that may be happening so they can quickly move there and respond to them.

I decided that the notifications should go at the bottom left of the screen and that a player should be able to click the notifications to move the camera to the location that the event is taking place.

What I have is really barebones, but it gets the job done and I plan on expanding it in the future.

Skeletons

Sadly, up until this point, the only enemies present in Augury have been wolves. About a year and a half prior I had implemented a prototype day and night cycle into the game and we wanted some test enemies that would only come out at night. Neither me or Dustin are artists but we didn’t want to add anymore work onto the freelancer that we were working with at the time. Dustin tried his hand at creating and animating a skeleton that we could use for testing and I did some rough sound design and now Augury has another enemy, wow!

Now I just have to get around to implementing the bear we’ve had laying around for a while now and there will be another

Pack Oxen

One of the ways that I wanted to set Augury apart from similar games is to have a focus on logistics. In most other RTS games, when units collect resources, they seem to go into this imaginary bank in the sky; where they can then be accessed and used anywhere. In Augury the location of resources is important, if I have 500 wood in a particular warehouse and I want to use it to build, workers will have to retrieve the wood from that particular warehouse. So the transfer of resources from one part of the world to another is going to be a huge part of the gameplay. My first idea was that the first level of the warehouse structure would be moveable, but we could never make that look quite right.

I eventually came up with the idea to have pack animals, specifically the pack ox. These guys will do all the heavy lifting around a settlement and will be crucial for moving resources around. Pack oxen are created from the warehouse, and currently just cost food. Eventually the player will have to breed the cows themselves in pastures, and will be something I’ll hopefully be working on soon. Players can set up tethers where to the oxen will wait for their inventory to fill up, at which point they will go drop the resources off in a specified storage of the players choice. This may be a farm or a warehouse.

Oh and each ox spawns with a random name.

Steam Page and First Play-test

Up until this point we realized that we have yet to actually let people play the game. So I wanted to have a small scale play-test just to gauge what people think of this “early” version of the game.

I went ahead and set up a steam page and made some placeholder banners. I realized then that steam has its own play-testing feature, so I went and set that up, although it wouldn’t be reviewed and ready until after I wanted to do the play-test, so we did it the old fashioned way. Me and Dustin felt there needed to be some kind of special quest for the play-test, so Dustin threw together a quest where the player discovers a strange ruin which guides them to an ancient grave, and after looting it, must survive the night while being attacked by hordes of skeletons.

Overall the play-test went well, even if a bit underwhelming. I was definitely excited to continue development though.

Item system and Big Brain Bullshit

Moving forward, and like I mentioned earlier, a lot of old code had to go. The way a lot of the older systems were coded was completely unscalable, and now that I have progressed a lot as I programmer I felt it was time to get these systems updated and set in stone.

The system I’ve been working on lately is the item system. Since each unit in Augury has their own set of equipment, I wanted to make a item system that can easily accommodate lots of different item effects.

During the process of this, I discovered a library called Dynamo, which allows you do dynamically reload data from outside the game. I had a sort of epiphany and realized that I could just have all the item data stored outside of the project in json files and then could change and test their properties on the fly without having to reload the game. So that’s exactly have I did.

Mod Support

While implementing this I realized how easily this could translate to mod support, which is something I had wanted to do anyways. After some refactoring and the implementation of a proper modular parsing system, I had basic mod support for items up and running. Shoutout to Tabular Elf for their library collage, which allows me to efficiently load artwork from outside the project into the game!

Here is an example mod I have created to show how easy it can be to create an item mod.

• Each mod must have a .mod file that configures what assets the mod will use
• Then each asset the mod will use must be set up, here is an example of an item mod.
• The result:

What is going to happen in 2023?

So that is basically everything that we’ve done with Augury over the last year. There is still so much left to be done, but I’m confident I’ll get most of everything done this year in 2023.

Some the things I’ll be working on next will be:

• Completely replacing old item code with the new system
• Creating a proper UI framework
• Rewriting Augury’s state machine to make it more modular and allow for more unique enemies
• Finally prototyping the underground cave system that much of the game will take place in. Here is a preview of one of the enemies that you will fight down there!

Thanks

If anyone has actually made it this far, I want to thank you so much for taking interest in the game!

I am going to try and do a devlog once a month if possible so if you are interested in that stay tuned and follow us on our socials.

See you all next time!