Uneven Odds update - playable but not really
What started was a dice game now is a card game. Nothing in terms of mechanics is different, the faces of the die are now different types of cards. We now have:
Some of these types have unique combos whereas others simply have a unlimited scaling factor where the greater the combo the greater the ability efficacy, this is an exponential scale.
Now moving on from the background recap, here is a snippet of the current stage of the game.
All art works except for the background are done in-house! Because I never leave my home...
Here is a list of what is mostly done or fully finished:
Card spawn, re-deal, and play - with UI animation.
Enemy Spawn and player-enemy interaction, with some response animations (take damage animation, focus on enemy in play animation, shield-break animation etc...
Restarting the game when the player dies for immediate continued play
Combo'ed cards have a visual display of their current combo count (bottom of card), and their adjusted attack/ability value (top of card).
Energy system: they player's single resource to be able to re-deal cards and play cards.
DOT system: the player can take damage over time: the (needs UI/visual component).
Most of the combo functionality, including plague AOE, vortex and zap scaled damage, poxy energy gain, and desolate armor break.
The game is currently playable with some major and minor issues:
Animation might be frame-locked, and can play slower than intended on high refresh rate rigs.
Card UI is refreshed on animation finish, so it might sometimes display the wrong value.
Defeating the first round of enemies is not yet accounted for, an randomized spawning pattern is planned in the future, but currently defeating the three enemies marks the player's victor - in the form of an error - or maybe the game restarts...
Challenges faced
I lost all the asset files!!!!, I somehow deleted all my backups too, but managed to recover a pretty recent project by using file recovery tools online. This set me back a tiny bit, but mostly emotionally...
Getting them smooth looking animations and fixing all the errors. One would say that it's too early for polish or bug-fixing, but it was important for the framework of dealing cards to have some level of satisfaction, this helps to abstract the tedious process with some visual feedback.
Realizing the game was wayyy too simple: The original design of just having the cards played from left to right after the player has finished dealing and re-dealing is just too shallow. Now the player choose the order of execution, and by playing cards out of order they can build more combos on the fly, also saving the cards that are not played during their execution phase into the next dealing phase.
Next milestone
Playtesting!! As the original project outline involved three week's play-testing and re-balancing, it would seem that I am behind (who would've thought..). But in the current phase, I will start play-testing with a written instruction of the controls and what each cards do, the player will have access to this information at all times. As I have no time for a tutorial, this will do, besides, the project goal was design-centric, focusing on play-testing with a bare-bones prototype, rather than an actual game!
Thus, let the play-testing phase begin, time to go from development to documentation.
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