Hey Anno Community,

As you might have seen from our social post last Friday, we announced a couple of things happening in the upcoming weeks.

Back in February, during our IGN Fan Fest segment, we mentioned we would show more of the game in April… well, we got the months mixed up. The full gameplay reveal will happen during the week of 19th May.

In the meantime, what about a developer livestream next week? During this livestream, we will be talking about changes to the Needs and Attributes system with Creative Director Manuel and Game Director Jan. So, if you’re curious to more about these topics, don’t miss out our livestream on Twitch, 15th April at 5:00 PM CEST / 9:00 AM PT.

We’ll see you there!

Der Beitrag Union Update: April developer livestream erschien zuerst auf Anno Union.

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Salvete, Anno community!

My name is Björn Frechenhäuser and I am a Senior Level Artist working on Anno 117: Pax Romana. I have been at Ubisoft Mainz for 12 years and after Anno 2205 and Anno 1800, this is the third Anno game I have the pleasure of working on. If you’d like to see some of my work on previous installments, you can check out my Artstation profile.

Level Art can mean a lot of different things, very dependent on which company, which studio and which project you work for. It can be more centric around the creation of 3D assets and textures or the visual development and dressing of levels or storytelling in the world and its locations. So, what does it mean for Anno? In short: all of the above (and more). But either way, at the heart of Level Art is always – you guessed it – the level. For Anno the level consists of the game world and its islands, which serve as canvas for players to build their cities on.

In today’s DevBlog I want to give you an insight ...

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Not long ago we gave you a first look at how we’re handling roads in Anno 117: Pax Romana and how we improved the grid with additional functionality by allowing for diagonal building of roads and buildings. If you missed it, catch up by following this link.

In today’s blog, we’ll be looking at the challenges the team faced when making the game work with these new options and how they resolved them.

We’ll also cover a few further implications of these changes, since roads aren’t the only thing you’ll build in Anno 117: Pax Romana, of course.

A quick recap

For Anno 117: Pax Romana, we upgraded the building grid with additional functionality to allow for diagonal roads and buildings. For this, we sub-divided each grid tile into 4-subtiles, which allows us to still calculate and place objects precisely into the grid even at a 45° angle.

Building diagonally does help making both streets and anything connected to them look significant...

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Hello Anno Community,

As you might have guessed from the title, today’s DevBlog will focus on modular ships in Anno 117: Pax Romana. If you watched our segment at IGN FanFest, you have probably heard Manuel Reinher, Creative Director, talk about this new feature; therefore, let’s have a closer look at modular ships!

Anno & ships: a 27 yearlong cruise (and counting)

Since 1998, ships have always played a key role in Anno games: whether you were transporting tools after desperately buying the whole stock from the travelling merchants in Anno 1602 or efficiently coordinating trade routes in Anno 1800, you certainly have sailed the high seas in some shape or form while playing Anno.

It should not be a surprise to you all, then, to see ships play a key role in Anno 117: Pax Romana. However, unlike earlier Anno games, Anno 117: Pax Romana will change things up a bit with a new feature: ships will be modular, and you will be able to se...

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