Welcome to the first iteration of a new segment we are calling Dinolords Monthly! This is meant as a place where we can talk more in-depth about some of the technical and design related aspects of Dinolords and check in with you on a regular basis to give you the latest progress on the game.

As always, everything we share in these devlogs are subject to change.

But before we get into what we've been up to this past month, we have a brand new instalment of our behind-the-scenes video series, Unscaled, where we talk about the first milestone builds, UI & Networking.

We also joined our Publisher, Ghost Ship, on their Stream 'On The Horizon' to talk about the incredible reception we've gotten on our new Trailer and a bit about what we're currently working on. Always a pleasure. We've uploaded our conversation here.

All your base are belong to us 

April has been a month of getting the foundation right for how building a settlement works in the game. We have been continuously designing and tweaking different elements of the systems as we are working hard on making base building interesting and engaging. We consider these intertwining systems one of the main pillars of gameplay in Dinolords, as this will be the supporting backbone of your army and is what will allow your reign to grow and ultimately defeat the danes and add those spicy dinosaurs to your command!

All of this is still subject to change, but as it looks right now your base has different areas of focus, and these can be balanced and skewed to cater towards the playstyle you want to play; e.g. do you want to build a strongly fortified castle with powerful defenses that can stand against even the mightiest dinosaur army, or do you want to go full glass cannon and beeline towards training powerful offensive units to rush your opponent.

The different systems in your base can all affect how you progress through a level, and readjusting focus can be key to champion the pesky invading danes. Let’s have a look at some of the different aspects of base building and how they work.

Food

Sometimes the Danish Vikings have a point: “Uden mad og drikke, duer helten ikke” (translates to: “without food and drink, the hero is useless”). Keeping your base supplied with nourishment is paramount for expansion and keeping the morale up. There are a variety of ways to do this, each with their own benefits and potential drawbacks.

	The simplest way to keep the calories flowing is by foraging, the Foragers Hut have villagers scour the ground for mushrooms - simple and delicious. This is slow work, but provides a steady, predictable supply of simple food for your village.
The Fisherman’s Shack can be seen as the more calorie dense variant of foraging. The fish arrive in a steady stream (ba dum tss), and definitely offer a moment of tranquility to the villager tasked with catching the fish.
	Next is the Hunters Lodge. Tracking down dynamic herds of deer across the land, this is more volatile than the others, but provides greater yields on a successful hunt, a deer provides a lot of food (ask any hunter how full their freezer is) at the cost of potential risk of it not being as stable as the alternatives.

And finally is a combination of farms, mills and bakeries. Growing crops, wheat being milled into flour, flour being baked to make bread, bread being delicious and hard to beat in terms of consistency and amount, but comes with an increased cost of more materials needed for the buildings and more workers are occupied along the chain.

Resources

Wood, stone, iron and others are crucial to both construction for expansion and production. Lumber Camp workers chop trees to create logs, Quarry workers hack away at the rocks to create stone, Mine workers extract iron ore from the ground.

These materials are both used to build new buildings, and also used in production of weapons where a smelter refines the iron ore to create iron ingots which are then forged by the Blacksmith to create powerful weapons for late game units.

This is where it would probably be really neat to have a giant flowchart or diagram to show what goes where, but details are still not completely set in stone (pun intended), so I promise we will rendezvous to this at a later date.

Military

Being in war with an invading army is no good if you don’t have units to help you fight said enemy! Military is one of the major outlets for resources, and depending on how big a priority your army is, this can come with big requirements for a supporting base to supply weapons and training for units.

A couple of supply chain examples are:

Trees are being chopped down for logs at the Lumber Camp > Logs are being used to create bows at the Fletcher > Bows are used at the Archery Range to create archers.

Iron Ore is being mined at the Mine > Iron Ore is used to make swords at the Blacksmith > Swords are being used to train soldiers at the Barracks.

Fortifications

A second outlet for resources is fortifications, walls made of either wood or stone, towers to provide a vantage point for your ranged units, and armaments that can be installed to give your defenses an edge - whew it’s nice to have a ballista when a Tyrannosaurus Rex comes charging at your gates!

One of the primary defenses are walls made from different materials from wood palisades to reinforced stone walls. Wood being an abundant early game resource and stone requiring more work at later game but offering much stronger defenses.

A lot of details are still in flux about specific details of wall building, but we are aiming to make a system that affords both ease of use and speed for building quickly in a pickle, but also allows for more detail-oriented work in regards to layout and addition of elements such as crenelations, bartizans, gates, traps, pikes and the like.

Back to basics

Thank you for checking out the first instalment of Dinolords Monthly! This first version was a little design-heavy but we hope to continue giving you monthly insights into the progress we're making on the game.

Have something you'd love for us to talk more in-depth about? You're welcome to leave comments here, on the forums or join our Discord.

We hope you have a great May!