This weekend I sent out some closed beta tests of the first 12 stages for the game with some content not completely built out. I hope I get some solid feedback but I’m not going to hold my breath. If you want to be in the closed beta then message me and I’ll see what I can do. There’s a lot of information included in the package like a Non-disclosure agreement. This past week I did a lot of work putting that together for the game. I found a major bug that I’m working on fixing, but it might stay in with some proper gating it could actually be a good thing. I had some of my testers that want to play on mac and so I’ve been trying to get that working as well. So far it’s been a bit difficult and I’m attempting to change the version of Unity to compensate.

The exciting pieces of content that I’ll be working on this week will be adding a variety of enemies and skills to the game as content. We already have a fireball attack, a healing effect, and some really interesting Area of Effect spells. We have Area of Effect that can hit the whole team randomly, disperse the damage evenly, hit specific rows or columns etc… This should make the creation of units a lot more interesting in the future.\

I finally listened to Vlambeer’s talk on YouTube titled “The Art of Screen Shake.” It was interesting and it did make me think. It’s primarily how our background and culture effect the choices in games that we make. It’s not at all about “screen shake” which was disappointing for about 30 seconds. As a challenge to myself I think that I want my next game to have no killing or destruction in it. It seems like in general that’s what most games are about. It’s an enjoyable mechanic but I feel that there’s probably more I could be exploring.

I’m hoping that I can get some sort of community that comes together to send me suggestions on the types of things that they would like to see in the game. I’m a little worried about writing the text for the towns. I’ll probably end up doing something pretty uninspired, but that’s ok because I’m pretty focused on making good game play. The narrative will be mostly focused on world building over character development anyway.