Hello everyone!

We have been silent for a long time and decided to fix it.

Development is moving slower than we would like, but it is still ongoing. Every now and then life throws delays and interruptions, but Sovereign's Will is a dream project and we will keep working no matter what happens.

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We’ve been working on several new game mechanics to make the game experience more complex and diverse.

📜 The first is the mechanic of activities. From time to time, you will get the Free Time event with several options to spend time. Do you want to sit in the library poring over ancient volumes or maybe you could visit the ancestral chapel or walk around your capital? Will you order a hunt and a noisy feast for your feudal friends?

Each choice not only affects the resources, but also gives special events: an accident could happen on a hunt, an ancient treasure might be hidden in the chapel, and in the city you can hear bards singing praise or cursing you for cruelty.

Currently in the demo version the player only reacts to the events that the game offers him. The activities will introduce an element of direct control into the gameplay.

📜 The second mechanic we're working on is the Council mechanic. The game has 15 characters with written biographies and personalities and for now these are just portraits on the map, but soon you will be able to interact with them directly.

Seats on the Council are limited, you will have to decide which characters are most useful at this stage of the game. Each of them has unique properties, both positive and negative. For example, the scholar feudal lord Balduin von Rassum will give a bonus to the economy and construction, but prestigious noble dynasties will be unhappy that you have given a position to someone from such a humble family. By accepting Olivia Hanström into the Council, you will be able to improve relations with the indigenous people of the Ikdari, but this will scandalize the clergy and Olivia herself may have more expectations from you.

The Council will react to your actions. The peace-loving characters like Balduin or Reverend Albert are disgusted by cruelty and resent the focus on the military while others will eagerly reproach you for showing weakness and pandering to the crowd. Member of the Church will expect you to follow the traditions and won’t support something they would think a heresy. A character dissatisfied with you may even want to leave the Council and you would have to negotiate.

Moreover, it will be necessary to take into account how the characters in the Council fit together. The unbridled Olivia and the prim abbess Augusta hate each other, and this may result in an event for their confrontation. On the other hand feudal lords Gottfried and Gerhard get along pretty well, however that might threaten you with an excessive strengthening of the feudal faction.

⚒ Along with the mechanics, we are gradually improving the audiovisual component. We’ve improved the Codex, redesigned the event window, and added sounds for interacting with various parts of the UI, for example the sounds of turning pages.

📝 We have also more than doubled the pool of random events so that the game grows not only in depth, but also in breadth. Expect new short stories about different aspects of life in your lands from political intrigues to amusing peasant superstitions.

Many thanks to everyone who follows the game. Your support and interest give us the strength to continue! We will try to be more active and publish development news more often.

Long live the Sovereign!

Hello to all of you who are waiting and hoping!

We're happy to announce that we're still alive and continuing to make the game despite all the hardships of indie development.

In parallel with the development of the main version of the game we decided to update the demo as well. We would like to report on the latest changes.

• We completely rethought the first exposition events. Now you can learn more about the politics and religion of the game world from a special event, neatly woven into the overall story. However, if you want to go straight into the main events and gameplay, this particular event can be skipped freely. We'll be disappointed, but we understand.
  
• The Codex has been updated with new articles on the political structure, history and religion of the Demesne — right down to the commandments and architectural features of the temples. Yes, we're really getting into it.
  
• We developed an innovative system that allows you to freeze the state of the game world at any chosen point in time to randomly reproduce it at the player's command. Simply put, we now have a save and load.
  
• A lot of small interface fixes: colors, borders, interposition of elements. The Fallen One is in the details.
  
• Made a few improvements under the hood, which will allow more efficient creation of localizations (including fanmade).
  
• Created pages on Facebook[www.facebook.com], Twitter and VKontakte[vk.com]. They can now be accessed via social links in the main menu.
  
• Other little things that we ourselves have already forgotten.

Thank you very much for your support!

Hello!

We would like to make the development process more transparent, that's why we will try to regularly tell you what we are doing.

In New Year post we said, that we would participate in Steam Game Festival in February. After closely examining our abilities, pros and cons we decided to skip February and take part in Summer Festival. Steam's rules forbid to take part in more than one Festival per year, so we decided to take more time to prepare. It won't affect our update schedule: demo will be updated on time.

And here are our plans on February:

1. Codex overhaul: new articles on politics, history and religion. It is unnecessary to read them all, but if you want to know more about the world of the game, you'll definitely need them.

2. Mechanic of character visits: margrave doesn't have much time to deal with the conspiracy, so you will have to choose people to turn to for help. Powerful merchant, wise keeper of the archives, furious mercenary - everyone of them is your potential ally, but they all want something in return. Every time you hit the road you may gain the upper hand over the conspirators, but also you may lose everything with every wrong move.

In the end the friends you choose will define your ability to cope with the plot and will shape your reign. This is a new part of the story and it all will be available in demo!

3. Save&Load system: due to new additions to the available storyline these functions are vital. How do you think, should the player be given an opportunity to load the game after bad decisions? Share your thoughts in the comments!

4: New random events: about conflicts of peasants and landlords, day-to-day life of native peoples and margrave's personal life. Your reign will become more diversified.

5. And, of course, we will continue polishing and improving the UI, bug fixing and balancing. Please, continue sending us your ideas and reports! We read closely every one of them and take them into consideration when thinking of what to do next.

Dear friends!

To all of you who await the update and even those who have lost faith. On these holidays we want to share some words with you.

First of all, despite the lack of news we continue to work on the game. We work on it all the time: when we write new texts, optimize the code, add ideas to the Trello board, when we read books, watch movies and play other games. The more time we devote to the game, the more polished the text and graphics, the clearer becomes our vision.

In 2020 we diligently worked on the game setting, creating and reworking details of the game world, religion, locations and character backgrounds. The result is a large Codex that will serve as the foundation for the further story. We also added new gameplay features: modifiers that change the world and characters that can appear or disappear based on player actions; the ability of factions to fight the player character or support him; and the mechanics of Decrees and Domain management.

During the Steam Festival we have released a demo version and gathered a lot of feedback and wishlists. We saw the visible results of our work for the first time and verified our assumptions concerning the story and game design. The first gameplay videos from random players are invaluable to us.

We still plan to release the engaging feudal simulator and still intend to provide the true narrative variety without false choices. This demands a lot of time to consider, test and polish new additions, but we believe the efforts will be worth it resulting in a gameplay with a freedom of choice and a deeper immersion. In February, the next Steam Festival will begin, and we will present a major update to the demo version - with new mechanics, events, choices, and a significantly redesigned storyline.

Thank you very much for your support! Thank you for believing in self-taught indie developers on their way to the dream game! Your feedback, suggestions, and comments that you leave in our Discord[discord.gg] and Steam communities help us determine and correct the way we're going.

Stay healthy, be happy!
More to follow.

Literal Team.

Hello! Today, from 5 pm UTC+0 we will be answering your questions about the game and the development process in Discord Channel[discord.gg] of the development team.

We will be glad to tell you about the game world, gameplay mechanics and plans for further development. We have a lot of ideas on what to do next, and your feedback will help us to make a decision.

In case you don't know what game we are talking about, you can check out our quick pitch, first DevBlog or, best of all, try playing the demo on the game page. You’re all welcome to our server!

For several years we were developing our game about feudal intrigues in the silence of the Discord-server[discord.gg], and now it's time to come out. You can already play the demo now. You will get to know the world of the Demesne and take your first steps as young Margrave Konrad.

In Sovereign's Will we have moved away from the usual "medieval" gameplay, focused on war, and offer something that often falls out of the attention of players and developers: intrigue, lobbying and political struggle.

We described a dozen and a half influential characters: a pacifist priest, a warlord feudal lord, a bureaucrat trying to build an utopia. A large part of the gameplay is about bribing, blackmailing, persuading them; provoking conflicts, lobbying or blocking the enactment of laws.

The player's decisions unfold a non-linear story. The player receives information about the event and several options for action, which change the game parameters and affect the subsequent events. We place great emphasis on non-linearity and try to maintain a balance between logical and controllable consequences and a healthy share of unpredictability.

We also have management elements that reflect the daily concerns of the feudal lord: you can set taxes, hold one-off actions like fairs, maintain the capital - build statues in honor of yourself, drain the swamps, pass your leisure time in every way. This affects the fate and image of the entire domain: our demo has several endings, which depend directly on how you managed the resources and what decisions were made in the story.

We've come a long way from the first prototypes to the demo version, but the game is still growing with new parts and whole mechanics. The setting is detailed enough, and we are still deciding which way to take the global story. Your feedback can help us with the solution.

Hello! This is our first post about features and design process of Sovereign’s Will. We shall endeavour to post biweekly in the future.

In short, Sovereign’s Will is a turn-based strategy game, in which the player takes the role of medieval lord to participate in political intrigues, manage his lands and make choices that would influence both his own fate and fate of the realm. Game takes place in a massive empire that engulfs whole of known world and is ruled by the immortal Sovereign.

Right now we’re going to cover essential game elements, and in following posts we’re going to look at them more closely.

Protagonist is a young monarch, who has returned to his lands after long education in the distant capital and immediately got involved in the world of politics and court intrigues.

You’ll need to find approaches to powerful people: feudals, church officials, merchants, who may become both loyal allies and dangerous enemies. Each of them has goals and character traits which must be taken into account for one to not become a victim of intrigues - political struggles often are no less cruel than open battles.

These men and women aren’t unified, though: they’re organised into factions, which struggle among themselves for power and wealth. You can use bribes, persuasion, spies and lobby for beneficial decisions to undermine some factions and to empower the others; However, you can crush all of them and establish uncontested rule of your own, if you fancy such an outcome - it isn’t easy, but very much possible.

Life abounds in your lands: in a remote village peasants got accustomed to blood sacrifices, two nobles are unable to divide contested lands, and citizens are rebelling against increased taxes. You are a ruler of these lands, therefore they’re going to come to you with all their grievances, pleas and demands. You shouldn't forget about private matters either: your old friend from university asks you to accompany him on a pub crawl “just like old times”, a rich magnate asks for the hand of your sister, servants need supervision as well…

You have to make decisions, and then accept the consequences. If you’re not going to invite a friend to the coronation, he would feel snubbed, yet who knows what he could pull off during the ceremony?

Besides, both factions and individual characters take note of your actions. Decisions that you feel to be right could be harshly rebuked by others. Thus you have to keep in mind not only correctness and expedience of your actions, but also how they’re going to be seen by your vassals, trade partners, nobles and the people. Maybe you’re sure that the arrested peasant is innocent, but is he worthy of squabbling with Inquisition? And which of the vassals should you support - one who’s in the right by law, or one who can offer you a better deal?

The whole march is under your purview, and it’s up to you what it will become in the future. A small part of these lands - your Domain - is under your direct control. Indeed it lost luster during last decades, but should enough effort be applied, Demesne’s capital could find a worthy competitor in these lands.

Your influence is not constrained by your Domain, though; as a margrave, you can issue edicts to be followed by everyone in the march. Through these edicts reform could be carried out - or your rule, strengthened. According to traditions, though, edicts have to be ratified by factions… Not a problem if you’re strong enough - then nobody would dare cross you, even if their opinions are different.

The ways in which you solve disputes and deal with factions influence developments of the march, expressed in parameters such as significance in trade, power of religion, popularity of local traditions and others (we will cover them in more details in later posts). Ports will accumulate wealth and the march will become a trade hub hosting traders from all over Demesne, if you support trade guilds; On the other hand, it would empower these same guilds and traders controlling them, to the point of threatening traditional nobility or even your own rule.

Protagonist’s father has disappeared, having launched a mysterious expedition. It certainly was important to him if he left ancestral lands before his son could return. Or, maybe, it’s a result of conspiracy? Either way, his disappearance should be investigated - even if just for you to avoid the same fate.

You will have to investigate particulars of that disappearance, and to get information from people of interests themselves - or from spies assigned to them. Not everyone is going to help voluntarily - many of them have their own secrets: Someone supports heretics, another runs from their past… Through learning these secrets you could get a lot of power - and dangerous enemies.

Maybe current events are connected to countless rumours that another Dark Decade is awaiting Demesne: There are talks that in the east for every suppressed rebellion two more take its place, entire towns disappear without trace in sandstorms of the south, and that even capital is no longer safe. You should pay attention to talks of your own march, though - barbarian tribes to the north, long thought toothless, are uniting under the banners of unknown leader…

Storyline is divided into several acts. In each of them you will have to make decisions that would influence its resolution and conditions in which the next is going to start. We’re striving to create a non-linear plot, thus many choices would significantly alter it as opposed to altering small details of the story.

We’ve tried to describe basics of the game in this post, and we’ll cover them in more detail in later posts. Stay tuned!