Blog - Page 3

Guards, Wine, and Archery

First post on the new site! It’s a bumper edition too since a lot’s been done on tourney since the last one...

Guards and Thieves

A nefarious character that has been completed is a robber. Here they are, clearly up to no good.

There is something you can do about burglars, and that is to employ a new member of staff: the guard. They keep the peace at your tournaments. When you employ one of these characters they come with a guard post, and that consists of a set of medieval stocks - where the guard can take their prisoners, like the thieves.

You can tell the guard to go and arrest any old visitor to your tourney if you feel like it, though. When someone is locked away in them then other visitors that are not watching events will lob mouldy fruit at them! 

Wine Vendor

There is a range of food and drinks that can be provided at tournaments: ale, hog roast & pies. Now this vendor model has been added to the list, selling goblets of wine! This is intended for the noble visitors, who have a little bit of a more refined palette than peasants.

Archery

Tournaments and tourneys in medieval times are probably most famous for the jousting. But there were a lot of other tests of skill that a knight might have faced as well. I have talked before about another event type that I’ve added: the melee. Now I have included a third: the archery contest.

First was a range model that I finished recently. I ran a stream for the kickstarter backers which was fun to chat and share what I’m working on in real time! 

All of the events have a mini game that you can play if you want to - where you can influence how your knights perform. The mini game for archery is going to be the most skill based of the three, where you will actually have to aim at the target.

Medieval galley

And finally a big modelling project that I finished off is a new ship model for the new environment of Atlantis: 

See you next time tourney fans!

Site Redesign and Release!

It's been a fair few moons since the last update, however I have been very busy with a big ol' site redesign! Check it out!

It's taken a fair while and I'm very proud of it. The home page now looks like I actually know what I'm doing - instead of what I had before which was a shoddy looking free blog!! The blog section is still there though, with nice urls, categories and other typical bloggy sorts of things. There are also some very cool bits and bobs under the hood which are going to allow for some of the kickstarter fulfillment but alas can't really share those.

Anyway I realised in the process that I have not provided a release date on the tourney page - so I'll make it official... November 2021

THAT'S THIS YEAR, FOLKS! 

Exciting stuff.

Just a quick update for now - I'll be posting a more in depth one soon!

Kickstarter! New Equipment and Nobles

 It’s been a while since the last update here. I have excuses though! It’s down to the busy end to last year caused by the kickstarter I talked about in the last post. Well the good news is [drumroll]

It was successful!

I have to say a massive thankyou to everyone that was able to support in whatever way you were able. Be it through a pledge or a share. I think it all made the difference because it was SO close! It’s good to be able to say that Tourney can proceed as planned. 

Following the campaign, and the festive turkey-a-thon I’m back into dev mode, and the freelancers that the kickstarter was for are now underway as well.

My work has mostly entailed working on creating the final set of equipment available, that which is the “best” set. Here is sir Gybard sporting the top level medieval armour, a sword (borrowed from some fantasy game, it seems), a shield, bow and lance (I have unofficially dubbed this the big punchy lance)

 

The above picture shows the top level stuff, but here are the others. 

 

 

 

The simple version is the lowest level, and meant to resemble a medieval squire, like that knight has only just managed to ascend above the level of the lowly squire. Then tier 2 called “crusader” is more like a knight from the crusades. Paladin is then a heavier, rivet heavy version of the others.

 

Nobles

 

Something else that I’ve been working on is the addition of an additional class: nobility (previously there were only peasants in what I had done on tourney). 

 

When adding the nobles I decided that they would have their own snooty requirements. For example I’ve already added the medieval style ale wagon - which is much loved by the peasants… but the nobles will turn up their noses at such sim swill. For them they would much rather buy wine from a wine merchant. Or, rather than buy tacky wooden swords from a carpenter like the peasants they would rather get fine jewelry from a medieval jewelry merchant wagon like this one!

 

 

The dropoff vehicles now come in two flavours for each type, and the amount of people that get off to attend the tournament depends on how many different staff, outlets and stands that you built to cater to each!

 

Next up:

 

Guards and robbers

 

I had a bit of trouble thinking about how to balance doing a public dev log and at the same time fulfil the “backers only” kickstarter updates, so I’ve decided that there will be public updates like this one, that cover the basics of what’s been completed for the simulator, then a more detailed one only available to backers.