Week Four: Almost Alpha

It's really starting to look like a real game!

Somehow, between the beginning and end of the week, I always manage to forget just how much progress I've made. But looking at the screenshots, and reviewing last week's todo list, it's clear that the game is way more complete than it was just one week ago.

Unfortunately, despite all the progress, the game is not ready for alpha.

Highlights

Player Sprites & Art

As you can see above, all our players have sprites now! Each character has a distinct look, replicated between their in-battle sprite, their equip sheet, and the top overview bar.

The Necromewncer

I have a whole new character in the game now! The Necromewncer is the first mana based character, and focuses on Summoning creatures to aide in battle. Summoned creatures are cards that remain in your hand between turns, and even after being played.

Summons come in two varieties: Cooldown (can be played once per turn) and Uses (can be played a set number of times).

Animation & UX

I also spent a lot of time fixing UX painpoints over the past week.

You can now hover over a ton more things to get extra info.
There's now a simple animation when characters attack, which makes it way easier to keep track of what's going on.
You can view your deck, draw, and discard.
You can view character and enemy stat blocks.

Events

I did have a really helpful epiphany with regards to events.

I was finding it really hard to come up with flavor text for all the various situations players could run into, and it was blocking basic balance testing. (Ex: you need to get a stat boost event so your cards get stronger, but what exactly happens to you?)

Then I realized, that actually, writing flavor text shouldn't block me at all? I never blocked making card because the art wasn't ready, so why would I block a Fighter gains 1 str event because the flavor text wasn't ready?

So now there are a bunch of placeholder events in the game, and I can test their effects without being blocked on writing.

Alpha Delay

Now the bad news: As I mentioned at the top, the game isn't ready for alpha. Part of this is probably that I just didn't allot enough time. But I think most of this is just that as I started playing, a lot of things just aren't fun yet.

A great example of this is probably all the enemy movement cards, such as Moon Dance.
This card's effect is really dependent on an enemy status Guard: Enemies behind this enemy cannot be targeted. But that status hasn't actually made it into the game yet. So this card is mainly useless. (And there's like 10 more cards that are also guard dependent.)

So really what needs to happen now is that I need to play the game a bunch, find all the things that are obviously not fun, and fix them.

I did start doing this (which is why the Act 1 boss isn't ready), but it's become obvious that its going to need at least a few more days of work.

Progress

From Last Week

Player sprites
Allow reordering party (some cards effects depend on party order)
Enemy move/stat hover info
View deck/draw/discard
Show party overview in a top bar: characters, gold, plot coupon progress, deck count, etc.
Some placeholder attack animations (nothing fancy, just enough to track what's happening)
Necromewncer character
1/2 Done: Redo health bar display (did a first pass, still needs more work)
33/60 Events (mainly missing battle and negative events)

Unstarted:

Lifecycle: player death, defeat, victory!
1 boss (& boss quest)

Cut:

1 more Character (Artificer), with 30 total cards
Shops
Town Events (a special advanced event type)

Next Week

Finish the lifecycle steps (main quest, death, defeat, victory)
Make the Act 1 Boss
Do a lot of testing until the game feels fun. Probably entails:
- Add more enemy types
- Give enemies passive effects (ie Guard)
- Balance/replace unpickable cards
- Tune damage numbers
- Ensure there are interesting cross-character synergies
Stretch:
- Town Events
- Shops
- Artificer