Devlog 26th January 2021 - Game overview, Technology Tree and more

Hello and welcome to our first devlog! In the development team we work in sprints spanning two weeks each. A few sprints have been finished before this recent sprint. This devlog serves to explain the implemented features so far, and the most recent improvements. From now on devlogs will be bi-weekly, so they match with the end/start of a new sprint, and will go over the newly added features.

We will start by showing an overview of a game in progress, with the most important aspects highlighted:

This image is a slightly older one that was used internally, but for the most part, the game looks very similar as you can tell in a later screenshot.

Hopefully this gives an understandable overview of an otherwise hard to understand game in its current stages.

You play cards by dragging them into any square in your safezone, when the turn ends, the unit moves forward one square onto the battlefield. From here the units will move automatically after each turn. A unit is able to attack from the safezone, but not get attacked. Rangers also have a hidden attribute, that allows them to attack opponent units from range (3 squares).

During our most recent sprint we did a lot of work behind the scenes and for future use, including a way to easily define card abilities in scripts, a basic interactive tech tree, tooltips and highlighting unit movement/attack area. We also started including some of the artwork created by our talented artists.

Card visuals

The artists came up with some sketches of how the cards could look, we have now incorporated some of these sketches into the game, with some of their artwork as well, and it really makes a huge difference in the visuals.

There are of course some things missing, and a lot of repetitive cards, but for now this is a great change. As for including artwork on opponent cards, we still have to discuss that with the design team, as we would need a way for the player to easily differentiate between his own cards and the opponent cards.

We have also developed ways to show where cards will move/attack when the turn ends.

On the left we see the player hovering their mouse cursor over the cavalry unit, and the game showing that he will move three squares forward when the turn ends. On the right the player hovers over the ranger, which has a ranged attack, and shows that the ranger will attack the opponent unit from range when the turn ends. The green outline was added in post to highlight the point of interest in the image.

Tech tree

The tech tree for now is purely interactive with no effects, and includes ways of defining prerequisite technologies.

The following screenshot shows the tech tree in its current state, which is at this point, quite bare and temporary.

This is a great start, and when we create a way to define technologies with effects, we have an already existing system to apply those techs to.

Tooltips

Tooltips are boxes of information that become visible when the mouse hovers over specific elements which could use further explanation for newer players.

Here we have a blank test object, which can activate a tooltip. Each tooltip can show a header, image and descriptive text. The size of the tooltip container will scale based on its contents.

Finally I will end this devlog by mentioning what we will be working on for the next sprint: Further improving the gameplay, with better visual feedback and more card types, AI improvements, exploring online multiplayer solutions and more.