How I’m making Pilgrimage sound alive

The fifth devlog for Pilgrimage starts with sound, because before this the sound design was awful (0:23).

Every kind of character has its own selection voice now, speaking Old English that I generated with ElevenLabs, with a little translation that shows for a second (0:46). The monks say "Deo gratias" (1:32). There are birds, water, waterfalls and wind in the trees, sounds for the animals, and footsteps that play every time a sprite takes a step (1:53). Sounds fade as you zoom out and come back as you zoom in (3:01). The crowd murmur isn't good yet, and the music is still a YouTube loop of medieval songs I don't have a license for, which I'm going to replace (2:39).

The interface

I redid the whole UI (4:50). Everything's in Geist now, with UnifrakturCook for titles, a green theme, new resource icons, and light and dark mode, because I'm a UI designer and I couldn't live with myself otherwise (5:20). The build menu is a layered list of buildings with details when you hover, and that's my bread and butter, the same kind of thing I do for product work (6:55). Buildings that aren't yours are missing your color, the way they are in RTS games (7:42).

Buildings that grow

The sheep and goat pen took me a long time. Shepherds herd the animals in, milk the goats and leave food in the corner for other people to carry around the map (8:28). I went overboard with buildings at first and I'm cutting them back to what the game needs (9:13).

The church is meant to grow: a hovel chapel, then a church, a cathedral and a basilica, with buildings you can add onto it (9:35). Once it's a church, there are two rails at the relic so people get through twice as fast (10:48), and a monks' residence placed against it opens a door that only the monks use, so they can rest (11:05).

Where's the game?

Pathfinding is still really hard, and I still don't have the core gameplay loop (11:49). It looks good, and I'm so happy with the visual direction, but right now it's a visual demo. I'm not saying that critically. I just need to figure out how you play it (13:19). So I built a top-down debugging tool where I can place buildings, change how far people are willing to walk, and how much each visit adds to the relic's renown, and see how a town would grow over a long time before any of it goes into the game (13:44).

My target is 60 FPS with 1,500 characters, which I seem to be hitting, and 30 FPS with 10,000 (18:15). There's more on that in the performance devlog.