Charge And Polish

Interloper was more or less at this stage when I decided to launch it, all the pieces were in place, but it could've used a lot more love. None of the remaining bugs are totally game breaking, and none of the rough edges would turn away a dedicated fan of the genre, but they'll add up for prospective new fans, so I'm determined to make sure this release is as polished and clean as possible, even if it takes me another couple months to launch the game.

Forty two bugs down in this sprint, only counting the one's I'd added to my task list. Some of these range from simple UI issues to frustrating game breaking problems. Some as recently introduced as last week, others have been around since I first launched the game in early beta. Those older ones in particular are nice to wave goodbye to.

And in the meantime I'm still polishing up edges, adding new animations, updating sound effects, clearing up jankiness wherever possible. It all leads to the game feeling less like a tech demo and more like something that's worthy of shipping!

The new animations for switching units are so much fun

At my count there's another forty more bugs to clear out, and another twenty odd features to modify, extend or upgrade to go with the game. I'm at the tail end of developing it, and am really starting to look forward to playtesting it with a wider audience.

In other news though, I came across a recently released title: SOVL. It's a singleplayer and multiplayer turn based rank and flank game, and it plays so much like Charge . The dev has achieved everything I wanted to do with Charge, and in many ways has done a way better job than I could've mustered. I've been playing the absolute heck out of it over the past few days and I'm super impressed. The addition of a rougelite campaign structure really makes the rank and flank format shine, and is even a nice throwback to the mechanics of old GW gems like Shadow of the Horned Rat!

Seriously, its free, its excellent, if you even remotely liked the concepts I talked about in Charge, go give them some of your time (or even better, buy some DLC!) (the ratkin, you want to buy the ratkin yes yes!)

Exoloper Tasks completed: