Today was a productive Saturday amidst family things; with the help of the newly available testing tools I was able to catch a couple of bugs in the “end of game” flow: it was impossible to reach the Consul rank due to an error in the validation of the cap of available games, but then when I removed it there was an error when entering the curia after having beaten the last senator.
It all come to a design choice on whether the player could continue playing indefinitely after beating the last senator: I decided we are going to let them, with the match changing every time you win, and the senator growing more powerful every time.
I’m thinking we should give this final boss senator an unique, fixed identity. We’ll see if time and resources permit that.
As I was testing, I found out we needed better feedback for when you use a special card in a debate. The plan was just to reuse the particle effect we use whenever you gain stats in the exploration mode, but I ended up having to make big changes on how we represent the simulated events in the “Server”, to include not only conflicts but other kind of outcomes (so that we could sequence the particles animations in the middle of all the conflicts).
I also implemented a prioritized request design to preview the reach of the card when hovering the board including combos. I got some good help from Codex there, of course after splitting the problem into smaller steps (detecting the hover, highlighting the immediate reach, and then the full combo reach).
I also decided we needed to improve the indicator of target color in the debate screen (because it was just a small gem over the senator’s portrait. We needed a bigger indicator with a tooltip, so I added (reusing the same one from the ladder).
There was a bug in the events data with special card types tagged as “applause”, which should actually be “speech”. I still gotta check if there’s a bug in Senatus Studio – I think I’ll fix a new version of that one as well in anticipation for the final content fill.
Another important thing I noticed while testing the full game flow was the lack of feedback when the player achieved a new rank (or when they “win” the game); you do get a Steam achievement, but other than that, there was little flair. I added a popup celebrating your new rank attained.
Another one, as we are closing into the full release and we are getting rid of small details that have haunted forever, was making it so that the tutorial only displayed once; this one is controlled in the player preferences instead of the persistent storage as is the case with the saved games. I also included a toggle in the character creation screen in case the player wants to see it some other time.
I’m running out of things to do which is great; right now we are missing fixing the bug in Senatus Studio, and integrating pending sound effects (which are yet to be created). Other than than it’s also going to be integrating any last minute art (hopefully for the “new rank” events).
Slashie's Gamedev Adventures 