During Gamescom a first Fata Deum demo was available for testing and feedback purposes. Thanks again for the feedback! This is great support! There have been two (to be improved ) major aspects, which have been highlighted by many gamers:

• Clunky controls
• Additional actions during daytime / more interactions with the environment would be great!

Directly after the demo period was over we deeply analyzed the feedback and started to improve the game! And now a new Alpha build release is available (for Kickstarter Alpha backers)! Besides many smaller fixes we have mainly focused on improving the controls ( + time control) and add a collecting system, which allows you to harvest resources in the world. [b]New Controls[/b] We have mostly redone main parts of the camera controls. The old control system was more inspired by common RTS-games: the camera was focused on a specific point on the terrain, loking at it from above. We have replaced this approach by a much more FPS approach, so that you can fly through the world as you like. As the graphics have improved a lot during the last year of the development, it is ok to get closer, too ???? Besides this major change, we did a lot of smaller improvements:

• Dynamic speed adjustment based on distance to terrain.
• Zoom in at mouse pointer
• Adaptive zoom based on distance
• Right mouse click to move to mouse pointer directly
• Fixed bad behavior due to lag.
• Improved panning (don’t hassle with selcting building while panning anymore)
• Hotkey to deactivate panning
• Control is more direct (less damping)
• ESC to cancel current ingame menu and to get back from main menu to game directly
• Hold STRG to move up and down instead of forward and backward
• Separate control for ambient and effect audio volume
• …and many more

This sounds a bit theoretically (so hard to show a screenshot or video here..) but it really improved the overall immersive feeling a lot, too. [previewyoutube=-KGKmpxfdbw;full][/previewyoutube] And all Fata Deum Alpha backers can try out the new control system right now, a new version is released! We will also provide access to a new demo version in the future.. stay tuned! All this changes have been done based on your feedback! So we are quite confident, that you will like it ???? [b]Time Control[/b] We also added a feature requested by the community for a long time: time control! You can now pause and continue the game by clicking on the world clock icon in the upper right corner! If you hold the left mouse button you can also speed up time! [previewyoutube=H0qvy_5S9n4;full][/previewyoutube] [b]Collecting System[/b] A god can get bored once in a while when he is waiting for new mana to perform awesome wonders! What will he do in the meantime? He can now manipulate time itself to get new mana faster.. but that should not be a core game mechanism ???? Instead we added the collecting system, which allows you to harvest resources from the world to support your followers! You can also move resources from one settlement to another, of course. Or you can sacrifice resources on your altar to get extra mana! But beware! Resources are not endless! Your followers won’t like it if you take their resources! [b]Further Improvements[/b] We have fixed a lot of smaller bugs or issues which did occur just on some specific systems and we want to say thank you to each gamer who has to struggle with such very specific bugs and helped us to identify the underlying reason! Thanks a lot! In addition, we improved tutorial logic and added a part to introduce the collecting system. And of course: performance.. as always we did some improvements here! [b]Next Steps[/b] We will now focus on AI (again) and localization! Again, development has taken more time as expected, but we are very happy with the result (and regret nothing ????) and the list of “features to be done before EA release” is getting smaller and smaller ???? We will try to provide a new update before Christmas and provide you with a release update, too. Thanks again for the feedback! That is helping a lot to make this game better and better (even before EA release) Stay tuned!