At the end of the week:
I watched a video last week on adding Pizzazz to your game early. It's not polish, it's not juice its just.. stuff to make the game look and feel better than wherever it is in development. It's used to rally morale for the team or to make it easier to show the game off to publishers earlier.
I'd also said for the past three weeks that next week I'll try to work on some graphical stuff but.. that next week never came. So I set aside some time this week to do it and by george it's nice.
I kicked off the week working on the trait systems for units. The stuff that allows them to have latent abilities (including eventually, upgrades and equipment) It's the kind of thing you'd expect from something like Magic The Gathering's keyword system, or more familiarly, the special rules system in Kings of War. Anyway, it's functional.. more or less, but not very extensible, also... poorly written.
I think I'm going to have to come back to a lot of these systems before the public alpha or beta milestones. Probably have to do a whole rewrite of how I'm building units to follow something more like the system described by Brian Bucklew in his talk on entity component systems. But for now, my crappy Frankenstein system does the job for now.
As for the rest of the week, well... they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here's an essay.
At the start of the week:
At the end of the week:
It's nowhere even remotely close to being ready, but it's looking and feeling more like a real game now.
I also spent a lot of time this week just making things a little more responsive, and adding a little affordance wherever I could. For instance, today, I added a little function to the camera to auto move to the current selected unit. Nothing groundbreaking, just little bits and bobs that add up over time to make a game feel more like a real game
I can't tell you how much doing stuff like this really makes the game feel more positive in my mind.
At this rate I should be on track for a good set of more public splashy posts in the next month or so, and honestly, I can't wait.
(24/03/2023)
(23/03/2023)
(22/03/2023)
(21/03/2023)
(20/03/2023)