Dev Log
UI
- added a Victory!! screen that appears when completing a level (didn't yet find any other place to put this)
- Xp Screen now fully functional and awesome
These two new screens will make sure players don't miss anything important. Also, they come with cool stamping and BAM sounds for every piece of information. While all this may sound a bit funny, adequate graphical and audible feedback for player progress is a crucial part in creating a good user experience. Having such screens ready in the next preview version will also allow the playtesters to give us feedback about the entire UX and not only the gameplay.
This week we started working on a complete redesign of the transition from the battlefield to the battle summary screen. Starting with cool feedback from our heroes when completing a level, players will be informed about what they achieved in prominent sequential screens, rather than just getting a cluttered summary screen thrown at their monitor.
Internals
- revised animation handling that now allows easier realization of additional hero poses (an actual redesign of the animation code was considered, but skipped for now)
Gameplay
- heroes now rejoice when completing a level (Yeah!)
UI
- Began designing the XP screen
Internals
Major refactoring of the top level game control and the playfield drawing (which was poorly organized so far). This has become necessary in order to seamlessly integrate some planned features that require different transitions after winning/losing a battle. The top-level game control is now managed by three independent classes:
- BattlefieldManager
- runs the top-level logic (pool-updating, wave control, victory/loss detection)
- fires events that are relevant for scene drawing or battle data administration
- BattleScreen
- organizes drawing components
- passes controller input to hero controllers
- manages screen transitions
- BattleAdministration
- keeps track of relevant top-level data (e.g. wave progress)
- also keeps track of mid-/low-level stuff, i.e. whatever happens during a battle (quite a lot, indeed)
Gameplay
- implemented new game type: Armageddon (see news article)
Content
- Redesigned Level 9 as Armageddon Level
Debugging
- Completely redesigned framework for ingame debugging to allow for more efficient bug detection
Fixes
- Hunted down and eliminated subtle gold dropping bug with awesome new debugging framework
Internals
- Hero Fortification now handled by seperate CreatureComponent
Gameplay
- the turret port now replaces broken turrets during battle
- implemented rules for Hero Tier:
- heroes don't gain Xp when they are able to advance their Tier until they do so
- to play a Level, at least one of the heroes Tier must match or surpass the Level Tier
- if a hero's Tier is less than the Level Tier, the hero won't gain any Xp
Content
- Built last Tier 1 Level (Level 9)
- Created and tweaked Level 10 (Tier 2: Iceworld !)
- discussed coming content for Iceworld
Internals
- moved statistics handling to a seperate creature component
- refactored Creature.Combat (so it's yet easier to finally refactor this into a component some day)
Content
- tweaked Stats of first few enemies (Zombie, Strong Zombie, Bat, Digger, and Spitter)
Fixes
- fixed issues with character manipulation in Hero Screen (debug only)
- fixed issues with Level creation in Home Screen (debug only)
- fixed funny bug where Tier 2 Fortress Sphere would go crazy and spawn a million shield power-ups
