Saturday 28 December 2019

small progress update

The Imbroglio expansion is coming together well, it's become my main work focus for now.
Draft mode (maybe I need a cooler name for it) is working great, it's more "roguelike" than the other modes in that you're trying to make the best of what you find rather than execute a perfectly planned combo. Using similar ideas to what I've been developing in 868-HACK, Cinco Paus, P1 SELECT to make every game count, moving away from this way of playing by restarting a dozen times to try to get a good start. It's fun, I'm just enjoying playing it for fun again which is quite neat after what, five years? I hope others will find it to be a big enough new thing.
One of the new heroes is an absolute mess to program, requires a whole bunch of special cases, but in a way there's something nice about having built up all this complexity and then just being free to trample all over it because it's not important anymore to keep it organised. Anyway you'll see.
New weapons are coming together well. Thought about doing a "new mechanic" like charging to theme several weapons around but it's turned out more individual weird things. There's a lot can be done just by recombining what's already there, the basic framework of event triggers "when X occurs, do Y" is so flexible, most combinations aren't interesting or fun to play with but it's easy to try out lots of them. But some ideas still require quite a bit of code and I'm finding it harder to throw them away when I've spent more time on them, something can be clever and take work but not actually be good. Limiting myself to 16 weapons in the set is good practice for throwing away the ideas that aren't good.
I'm also revising some previous weapons that were less useful, I had hoped to "fix" them by adding things that combined well with them, but that hasn't happened so here we go. Not sure exactly how far I want to go with this, it's good to apply what I've learnt from having more time and having it out there but also maybe some things are just part of the game's texture now and should just be left to be.

Cinco Paus update comes slower. Playing with new artifacts I decided most of them weren't good, I think I have two good ones, that's probably a nice number to not overcomplexify anyway (of course I was aiming for five for numerological reasons). Trying also some weirder ideas, probably won't stick but you never know.

Quinzena, I haven't found a good version of the new idea I was trying out so maybe I drop it. Working on testing some changes to the deck but baby has become very mobile and is no longer content to quietly watch, gone are the days of playtesting while breastfeeding, so it will take time.