Game Update
Managed to get some additional game development time during the week which has been rare as of late. I finished all the male character animations for the game which is quite a milestone. I moved on to the female characters and found that the animator for the flying ones was shared with the ground versions. This means that I had to duplicate the animator and make some changes to get it working correctly. It would look a little silly to have the ones without wings hovering during the battle.
I found a new issue with the way that we are spawning the area of effect (AOE) type spells in the game. It would seem that no matter who is casting the spell it always spawns centered on the enemy squad. Obviously a big problem which we will have to change. It will probably be a simple conditional statement to test which team is casting the AOE spell.
I’m not sure when I will move my business licence over but it’s a big thing that needs to get done. I just need to sit down and carve out some time to do it. I should also work on getting a solid schedule together of when I do my game development.
Personal Update
I had an exciting development with my second son who told me that he’s interested in making a video game this week. He said that he wants to make a “builder craft” type of game. Of course he’s drawing some inspiration from Minecraft. I told him that he needs to build a tree to combine items and play some other games in the genre like Stardew Valley, and Harvest Moon. I might build a simple construct for something so that we can go from there. It’s a good thing that I’m already well versed at making large lists of things and doing spreadsheets for my in-game troops.
I couldn’t be happier with my girlfriend as she’s taken a lot off of my plate lately which frees me up to get more done at home and be productive. She’s the reason that I got more done this week than previous weeks. She really likes some of the animations that I was working on and so I’m excited to give her an opportunity to add her own ideas to the game.
Game Development Insight
Perfect Imperfection
I was building all of the spreadsheets for my game and I had a friend ask me, “how did you come up with the numbers for your game?” My answer was that I was mostly guessing at what the values should be for the various skills. One core idea I’m trying to stick to is making AOE damage lower than single target damage unless the AOE is confined to anything less than the whole squad as a target. Something like 3 to 1 or even 4 to 1 in favor of single target spells.
Perfect Imperfection is the idea that if we have enough values and choices for the players we will come up with some things that are lower than the power curve and some that are higher. This will create some things that are simply better than other things. In this way we can make players feel powerful when they optimize and find the strongest pieces. I’ve experienced this a lot with mini-war gaming, trading card games, and online multiplayer battle arena games. Often a character, or item will simply be more powerful and more rare than others.
It needs to go beyond numbers though. Eventually I want to create some skills that are more about changing the board state in the game. I want to create a pre-combat phase which will allow for interesting mechanics like randomizing enemy positions, pushing/pulling troops, status effects, adding/subtracting attacks, etc… Doing this will create much more interesting player choices in the long run. It’s important to have things which aren’t necessarily “strictly better.”