We get closer to the release date, today we released a new official dev diary at Steam, as well as a short
First thing I did today was to tie together the serialization/hydration flow with proper Save and Load functions in the game. It’s working great! I only had to do one further addition to include the map position (i.e. where the player had panned the map to).
Next up is the battle progression: We had 5 fixed battles with fixed cards and stats, that wasn’t gonna cut it from the replayability side, so we need to procedurally generate both the battles ladder and the hands they play on each debate, based on their difficulty index.
Step by step, the first thing to do is generate “hands”. I removed a lot of the code we had on place for the test matches which was based on a custom format for the games… we no longer need that, so I rewired everything to calculate the attributes of the cards, with increasing odds for card ranks and special effects.
Next up was randomizing the ladder and extending it to 10 senators, including shuffling the portraits to use, assigning them random names, and scaling the difficulty factor and their stats.
So far it’s working fine but it’s not yet complete; we need to:
- Include the generated ladder in the serialized game data.
- Change the progression so that the player only increases rank every 3 battles won.
After this I’ll attempt to show the card drop preview.
I also noticed something we need to improve: there’s very little feedback of the effect of special cards on the enemy or the player character, we should probably reuse the particle effects for increasing or decreasing stats.
Slashie's Gamedev Adventures 