Game Update
Further issues were discovered with the flanking problem and we managed to solve the spell casting problem for single targets. For some reason the area of effect spells are also not working properly. We have some further work to do to fix them as well.
This week is pretty thin on game updates as I’ve put some efforts into other places and had a couple of other things happen. I am looking forward to a time when I have my business licence, artwork, and early access release on steam. I do like how everything looks when we have a lot of different particle effects triggering at the same time.
Personal Update
This week my cell phone of the past 6 years died. It was a pretty big loss as a lot of things that were on that phone cannot be recovered. I suppose it’s a lesson in keeping a backup of things. A lot of memories and conversations have been lost forever. It hit me pretty hard. I got another phone, but the damage had been done.
I ended up frittering my weekend away on board games and Dungeons and Dragons, but there was a small ray of light. I felt better after getting back to my roots and I felt very motivated to start running Dungeons and Dragons again as a Dungeon Master. It’s been ten years since I ran games. The last time I did that was when I was stationed in Iraq. It made me feel really good. I’m so happy that my girlfriend told me to relax this weekend. Sometimes she knows what I need even when I don’t know.
Game Development Insight - Competitive Elo Part 3
The last two weeks I’ve talked a bit about the competitive systems that have drawbacks and benefits in both realms. I try to take a tempered approach whenever I’m looking at two sides of an issue. I will always remember doing a CLEP test in which I was asked to take one side of an issue and I simply couldn’t do it.
Which system is truly better? It’s difficult to say which I guess is a bit of a cop out. If I had to choose I would pick the original chess ELO, but in team games like League of Legends I feel that this system is to punishing for players in random groups.
That said I’ve always held a fondness for simple tournament structures. Although this way of determining the best is limited as it has no way to handle flukes or performances that don’t represent a team, or individuals true abilities. At the same time this format gives each match a lot of wait and drama. When competition leads to a surprise that’s unexpected it’s very exciting. This contributes to the meta game for future competitions.
I remember playing in a tournament in which my opponent mentioned that the online meta was a couple of iterations ahead of the physical game for this reason. This makes me question if it’s almost better to play less games in order to keep the meta game from developing into its final resting position at the end of the season. Then again what are long time classic games like chess in order to make sure that players don’t have to worry about a changing meta from season to season. Then again the lack of change is probably what makes games like chess less interesting to me.
I think this will be the end of my ELO series. I think I’m going to progress to talking about dark patterns next week. Dark patterns came up while I was doing this series when I did a little research. I feel like it will be a great next subject to talk about.