Day 18 – IT’S ALIVE. Added a move counter and a goal (clear level 3 without running out of moves or units), and presto-change-o it’s an honest-to-goodness capital “G” Game. Even managed to get some light difficulty scaling between the three levels in there.
Remains to be seen how deep it is but it is certainly satisfying to play I think. Hoping to have a public/demo build up in the near future, so I can get some more direct feedback on what works and doesn’t.
Day 17 – Added monster spawners. At the start of each enemy turn, these will spawn additional enemies if they are unoccupied.
Day 16 – Added new enemy type: the Imp! Basically like the Orc but diagonal. Seems a little too samey, but we’ll see. Might give him 2 possible spaces of distance (but still diagonal).
Highest priority TODOs:
Enemy spawners
Goal level + turn counter/ (win+loss states)
Enemy variety
Ladder/ranking system (holy cow this works so well in Auro by the way)
Day 15 – Bunch of subtle and large changes to unit movement and abilities. Added meta-game where once you beat the level, it will give you a new unit for each new floor, to encourage players to preserve their units.
Going to expand on the meta-game more later, but for now its enough to test units with. I want to hook up a counter that will tell me the average number of enemies each unit kills on a turn. (Will be a bit tricky for wizard refreshes but still possible).
At this point the game is pretty easy when you know what you’re doing, because it was important to me that the player units feel powerful and have the potential to make a lot of combos, so I’m going to need to add more enemy variety/enemy spawners next to ratchet the difficulty back up.
Day 14 – Pretty big change today. Added captains (marked with a yellow star). The objective is to kill all enemy captains to win the level, while preserving your units for future levels (If you lose all of your units you die). Haven’t hooked the level counter yet though. Perhaps tomorrow!
Day 13 – Added the wizard! First unit with a non-attack ability; the wizard swaps two units that are on reflected spaces on the board. Had a neat bug emerge when coding it that the unit that was swapped was refreshed when swapped, and so you could use them again. THIS WAS AWESOME SO IT STAYS.
Starting to get a sense of a couple bits of emergent complexity/combos/tactics available with the current units. Probably won’t add any more player units for a while, so next up is:
1) Win condition
2) Enemy variety (either archer or a diagonal type orc or something)
Day 12 – Added the jumpy-stabby cavalry!
Day 11 – Added attack highlights. Also had a cool idea for a “swapper” type unit, while playing Micheal Brough’s “Game Title” (yes that’s the actual name). Now whether to implement that, or the new archer enemy, or the cavalry next…hm…
Day 10. Added the Mage! The Mage can either move OR attack on his turn. When he attacks he hits units in an X shape 3 range away. Also had my first moment of crunchyness happen as I was testing (I was able to play/strategize a bit even given the simple setup I have so far, very encouraging). Feels like maybe the goal should have something to do with a limited number of turns perhaps/keeping your units alive?
Day 9 – Another simple, (but important) update. Warriors now can target any of the 4 directions to cleave. To make them attack without moving, you now have to click on their same space. this seems to open a lot more flexibility in how you can use them, and incidentally makes it so you must attack with them each turn, giving a bit of a berserker feel.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll finally get to the Mage…
