Dev Journal #7 – Buildings upgrades, Assassins’ guild & Closed Beta preparations

So, the cat’s out of the bag: you must have seen by now the news about Lakeburg Legacies’ first closed beta. It’s something we’ve been working on for a while, especially since we have recently reworked the entire early game experience. But don’t worry if you missed the news or if you haven’t been selected to take part in this closed beta: we’re definitely going to launch more beta sessions in the future!

In the meantime, let’s have a look at what we’ve been working on lately.

In addition to buying new worker slots, players can now also buy upgrades with varied effects. Manon, our Art Director, is currently spending her time revamping the interface of the production buildings in order to replace our old placeholders.

For now, thanks to Simon’s programming magic, two different upgrades are available: thanks to them, the player will be able to increase resource production, and reduce the amount of materials needed to produce some resources. Moreover, we’re definitely planning on improving this feature and adding more upgrades in the foreseeable future!

As usual, Justine has created gorgeous backgrounds to illustrate the many buildings you can build in the city of Lakeburg. One of them is the Assassins’ Guild, which is the last of the Illicit buildings to appear, when the number of villagers becomes high enough.

Indeed, the appearance of Illicit buildings depends on the population’s size. They can have highly negative effect on the village, unless their worker slots are filled.

The Assassins’ Guild might be the most terrible of them, since it has the potential to greatly diminish the villagers’ life expectancy… 💀

As you perhaps already know, the entire team working on Lakeburg Legacies is located in the gorgeous cities of Lille 🍺 and Bordeaux 🍷, in France.

In order to translate the game from the baguette 🥖 language to English without losing the medieval and light-hearted style our Narrative Designer Ambrune adopted, we called on a professional translation agency. After preparing the localization kit, Ambrune has been going back and forth with their linguists for the past few weeks in order to ensure they had every information they needed.

When the game is released in 2023, the game will be playable in French, English and German!

Another background Justine has recently worked on is the Painter’s workshop, where workers produce paintings for the most distinguished people of Lakeburg.

Fun fact: in order to gather enough references, she had to dive deep into the “weird medieval paintings” side of the Internet, and has obligingly shared her funniest finds with the team…to our great delight!

Since we are organizing our very first Closed Beta for Lakeburg Legacies, the past few weeks have been filled with playtesting the game and checking for bugs.

Thus, there are still many features we have yet to polish and properly explain through in-game tooltips, signs and feedbacks. In order to make the game more comprehensible for our beta testers, our Game Designer Chloé has prepared tutorials which Frédéric has then implemented.

Aaaaannd that’s all for today! We can’t wait to have players outside of the Ishtar Games team test the game and give us their feedback! We’re planning on dedicating a special blogpost to the Closed Beta in July, so stay tuned! 👀