Happy Memorial Day

Game Update

Still working on he mass healing for squads in combat. All the numbers are doing what they are supposed to do but our particle effect isn’t spawning as we expected. The options were to make a large effect that would display on the entire squad or to make an effect that would spawn on each troop.

Now that I’m thinking about it, this might be an issue as we may need more functionality to make it possible for one troop to spawn multiple particle effects on multiple targets. It might be easier to set the center to the squad and just use one large effect. Sometimes walking away from the problem and then revisiting it later helps to clear your head a bit.

The big focus after finishing this particle effect problem will be ensuring that troops that are flanked or attacked from behind are using the proper skills. Right now it would seem that only their graphics are swapping over which is a major issue as that’s a primary game feature.

Personal Update

Happy Memorial day to all our uniformed personnel in the military and civilian sector. It not easy wearing the uniform as there are times when we become the least popular person in the room. I’m happy for the time that I spent in the service and for the ability to keep serving now.

Still looking toward a small vacation in Austin after taking my children to be with my ex-wife’s family for most of the summer time. I’m also hoping to have a small vacation with the boys when they come back to me later this summer. I really need to focus and take advantage of the time.

I really want to get the game to early access, and so I hope that I can line all of that up and get a solid release date soon. The major hurdles right now are getting the new business licence, putting the key art together, and fixing this new bug related to rotated squads in combat. Luckily my girlfriend has really jumped in to the key art role and we’ve been slowly building it up. She out works me and that makes me want to work even harder. She’s very inspirational to me.

Game Development Insight

I deviated a little this week and when I revisited an old idea to make a board game with the idea of building a specific type of business. I’m being vague on purpose. It might use dice rolling, and deck building. The main thing is I had to be inspired to create fun mechanics that also play quickly. I was recently at a hobby shop for a board game with a buddy and we were looking for more players. One person said that, “an hour was to long for a board game.” Kind of a cop out, but I get it. It would seem that attention spans are continually getting worse.

On the flip side we have mega board games and to the same extent video games that dominate all of a players time. Some of these board games take 4-6 hours to play one session. I suppose it depends on what type of player you’re building the experience for. The game I’ve played the most lately has been “Marvel United” due to its 30 minute play time. I’ve also been playing a lot of Root, mostly on my phone.

When I design my board game, time is very much a factor I have on my mind. It comes down to being focused and understanding the core game loop. I’ve decided for this game the core game loop is generating money (probably through dice rolls) and purchasing items to build up the business. The other mechanics like hiring staff, responsive game play from competitors, buying more equipment, paying rent, and getting a larger space are all secondary to that. As far as responsive game play I want to put things into the game which encourage players to build their economy together instead of throwing negative events at each other. It’s possible that’s less interesting than purely adversarial responsive game play. I would need to test it to see how it goes.