Alpha Testing, Polish, Game Balancing and More!

Howdy!

We are on discord, come join us: https://discord.gg/ArZ9Mam

Things are constantly influx but the direction is always forward. The game has seen a lot of progress from a design perspective, an engine perspective, and an art perspective. Let’s tackle these!

Design wise the whole game is now focused on a dungeon run. Your Grrbls just clear rooms until meeting the final boss with the obvious goal of kicking its ass. When you start a dungeon you pick 3 Grrbls which form your team for the run, but also determine what your starter cards are and what cards will drop during the run. As you progress through the dungeon you will aquire action cards and gear cards. Action cards are cards that do something (like damage an enemy) and any Grrbl can play any action. Gear cards are equipped to a Grrbl and it gives that Grrbl a permanent perk. There is also a permanent leveling system where as you level up cards, they will forever be stronger when you find them during runs. I will go into the leveling (and skill tree) system later, but suffice to say I was able to add levels back to the game while keeping this focused on loot hunting.

Programming wise a lot has been done to accommodate the complexities of the various card and perk actions but there is still a lot more work in this area. The animation engine has been heavily updated to better accommodate complex reaction chains so that lots of cool stuff happens but it happens all at once so the game doesn’t get slowed down. I found that while it was easier code wise to have every effect play out sequentially, it was painfully boringly slow. So now, only animations for actions play out (which are fast) and everything else happens (reactions) instantly. This gives the game a much snappier feeling.

Art wise things are chugging a long at full steam. We’ve taken an aggressive look on how to really give our game a pop and feel to it as well as updating some of our legacy art assets to the new modern look. Our goal is to have a cohesive feeling theme which also has great animation eye candy and I think we are heading towards that goal but there is still a lot more to be done.

We are in a flux at the moment with a lot of half finished chunks of the game (yes it’s not ideal from an “agile sprint” perspective but it works for us). In my next post I will add some pictures and animations.

If you are one of the elites who are reading this post around the time I am posting this, then email me at anthonyuccello [a t] gmail [dot] com and I will get you a free alpha key and you can help test the game 🙂