Game dev is a process of continuous iteration, so we have been revamping some of the stuff you saw last week.
Here are the highlights from today’s stream!
We talk about the limiting factors to prevent the problem of steamrolling in strategy games. Usually resources are low during early game, but later on as you build and capture more structures, the amount of resources you acquire each turn increases, making it easy to do almost any action to overpower your opponents (or alternatively, making it hard to defeat anyone because everyone has close to an infinite amount of resources) - making it less fun for everyone.
For Last Regiment, we are adding resources such as gold and mana, restricting powers to specific units, limiting the number of control points, and adding unit cooldowns.
We also have a brand new main screen! Still being made, but what do you think of it so far?
We describe in it detail in the second video: Youtu.be.
The banner and description would change depending on the menu selected. We’ve also added a section below to announce updates, livestreams, and other news. This section will be replacing the annoying pop-up notifications that we had in Legends of Callasia. We’ve also added icons linking to some of our social media pages on the upper right corner, while the full list would be available in the Community menu.
The next day was spent working with a designer, two coders, and a bunch of artists on improving our editor. Specifically the editor that allows us to build the hexes that go into the game.
Because we’re hoping to ship with an editor, we have sort of broken building maps into 2 steps:
1. Build the building blocks the game is made of – such as the Hexes in the map, the Structures you put on it, and the Units that move around. This is done with a combination of “ugly but functional” internal editors, and some big ass excel spreadsheets that churn out .lua files that define a lot of the game.
2. Put all of these together in a more user friendly, consumer-facing editor, that allows you to build maps w/o having to ever switch programs and makes sure you are working with building blocks that dont (easily) break the game.
Today’s journey (and last night’s) was to pound the “Hex-Editor” – the one that allows us to build hexes – into something that we can use properly, since it has been a bit neglected, and there was a lot of ‘build as you go”-ness to it that needed to be standardized.
It’s unsexy work, but it has to be done.
Of course, making the tool is just the first part. The *really* hard part? Making all of the data once the tool is done. But that work gets compounded terribly if the tool is not optimized – and even a step that takes 1 minute can quickly become HOURS or DAYS after you use the tol long enough – and since game development is all about iterative building, you have to expect you are building allof your maps/levels multiple times. Having a tool that does not let you do that quickly… well, the time is well spent to get it right.
