Game Update
Last week we finished a system to accelerate our ability to build new spells for our troops to use in the game. I don’t think I was ready for the speed improvement that I experienced when we had everything running. We almost finished 3 new skills in an hour last week. The last time we had built skills for the game it would take maybe 1.5 - 3 hours. That’s a massive improvement and so I would say it was definitely worth doing.
The other thing that improved was my motivation to work on the skills. Making them easier to build made me more willing to work on them. I found myself trying to figure out some of the interesting things I can do with skills in future iterations.
One other thing I had thought about that we may have to work on and iterate later would be to build skills that have no damage component or minimal damage due to a secondary effect. I had thought it would be amazing to shift troops during combat. The issue might be the animations when that happens however along with the fact that 3 round combat means it won’t effect enemies until rounds 2 and 3. I’m thinking about introducing an initial first strike round for status effects that will run before combat starts to make things like shifting rows more effective. Some troops only have one round of attacks after all.
I had some other thoughts about things I might be able to implement in the future. Possibly building some sort of random stage spawning mode eventually along with some items that will change the way the player approaches play. Maybe an artifact that improves all the players fire damage but reduces all ice damage as those elements are opposed to each other on the Aspect Wheel. I’m not sure I should call it that.
After showing some of the game to my girlfriend she mentioned that it should be “Elements” or called “Six Elements”. This is the same critique I’ve gotten from my good friend. The thing is the word “elements” is used all over fantasy games and that’s not the point. The “Aspect” idea originated in my RPG make game in which there is one deity (God) that has multiple “Aspects” that surface themselves in the 6 elements. The people of the game worship God using the elements and they all believe that their way of worshiping is best. This was done on purpose to mirror what we see in our own religious communities. One God worshiped by many with arguments about the best ways to serve Him. I should probably spend more time making this clear. A lesson of how being divided hurts everyone in the end. I see a lot of possible parallels in our society.
Personal Update
I realized this week that as I move my business licence from Texas to Florida it might be time to think about changing the name from Lancer Games to something else. I’ll be talking to some people to get some ideas, but I think I have a solid way forward. One of the things I want to do is build a company that I can make games with but also use when I’m DJing or conducting other artistic services. The name “Lancer Games” feels a bit restrictive now.
I recently read the book “Start with Why” which focuses on the concept of finding your why for your company. After reading the book I came up with the why for my company which is, “We Engage Players and Respect Their Time.” This “Why” is something I can apply to a lot of things, even ones outside of games. Maybe something like “We Engage While Respecting Time.” So many things in our world are built to dominate our attention, and maybe that’s better for business. I suppose I’ll find out.
Lots of other transitions going on this week with my girlfriend. Some things were a bit stressful but it’s important to see how strong a relationship is by putting it through some trials and tribulations. It’s painful but that’s how we grow as individuals, and how we grow as a family too. It’s nice to have someone I can really count on. I’m not sure if I’ve ever had that really until now. Being aligned is something that I appreciate so much.
Game Development Insight
Value Doubling for Quick Iterations
One of the concepts that I learned early on from my mentor was the idea of doubling or halving when I fine tune values in games. An example of this might be lining up a spells x/y/z coordinates in 3D space. Let’s say it was spawning around the characters feet and we want it to be centered. Instead of moving the value from 10 to 11 for the coordinate we should try 20 or even 30 to see a noticeable change and then bring it in from there.
We do this for 2 reasons. The first is that we need to make sure that the value is actually having the effect that we want. Often another issue might mean that we’re changing the wrong value. The second reason is to save time as incremental changes can be less than noticeable. Making extreme changes helps to get things done quickly.
Once we go way past where we want to be we can start going halfway between the values or make a judgment somewhere where we expect it to be. In this way we can zero in on exactly where we want the values to end up. We might also use sliders to move it in real time and then save the values or record them in some way to code them in.