With the advent of the Afterschool forums to track ongoing work and mods around Cantata as well as the development and engagement around REDACTED, we bid the old Cantata forums adieu!
Before we totally close the book on them I wanted to maintain a small list of old topics that are worth revisiting for history’s sake and for anyone who wants to see how far we’ve come!
Here’s a great thread that tracked the first Big UI update we did after the Alpha version of Cantata. We’ve changed the UI since then (and again and again) but this was one of the first moments where I felt like I knew enough about Cantata to understand how to actually interact with it. Also can you believe you used to set resource amounts manually through supply lines??
Speaking of the old supply line system — we used to have all sorts of weird “states” the supply lines could get into, and had to develop iconography for each of them. We (thankfully) got rid of all of this, but it’s interesting nonetheless to see the thought process around how we went about thinking of them:
Ah, now here’s a classic. This post goes into the underpinnings of how we do Cantata’s map rendering, which is more complicated than you might think! The rendering has changed a small bit since this point, but the theory is all the same. Useful for anyone looking to make something similar to Cantata!
Another classic! I used to post small little peeks into development of the game. Don’t know why I stopped but it’s fun to see the game come into focus:
It’s no secret that supply lines changed a lot throughout early access. It was probably the most contentious feature both internally and externally and the thing we did at least three major iterations on. One of the first big leaps was to move from Unit-to-unit lines to Region-to-region lines. This post talks about some of the theory behind that:
This system gets the award for the feature I spent the most time on that had the shortest shelf life in the actual game. After doing it all, I decided it was bad like two weeks after shipping and reconfigured the whole game to support the new solution:
The post above is maybe the most important post of all of them because that patch really represented “we really know what Cantata is now”. Everything sort of fell into place based on the work we had done and the feedback from the community to help us get to that point. A great read for anyone interested in some Cantata design history!