Hello fellow co-conspirators!
Now that I’m back in action I really wanted to make this week count. As I’ve previously mentioned the core of the game is to dismantle existing power structures and instal your own. This is represented by destroying and building networks between the region’s power key holders (which are basically units). Because of this I’m paying special attention on how you create these networks.
In the past weeks, I implemented the ability to create connections between units; but its no use to build a network if you can’t dismantle the one that came before. So this week I concentrated on being able to cut connections between units. In my previous prototype this was managed by an ugly, ugly button with an X in the middle of the connection lines.
For this new version we had to do better… improving the UX was one of our most important goals. Having a whole bunch of buttons = bad UX. So instead I implemented the whole line being clickable. I’ll admit it took me more time than expected, mostly in dealing with rotations [Quaternions are evil!], but I’m happy with the result:
On top of that I also worked on the Vs screen. This is what I call the screen that shows who wins when one unit attacks the other. In the prototype I had this huge spinner come at the fore front which would fill up depending on who had most strength. Honestly it was legacy from a time when this project was probability based. It might have worked…maybe…. but in tests it continuously failed. In another post I can go into more detail on what happened. However the scars it left on the project remained.
After this week, this is how it looks like.
I’m not happy with it (and not just because parts are hard to read. In general, it looks very informative…and boring. There is no life to it and it doesn’t tell a story of an epic shadow war of wits and cunning. This is a part I will definitly come back to again during polish, with some heavy duty art support.
On the marketing front, my website and mailing list are set up, but not ready to be seen by human eyes. There is a lot of polish needed to get the website looking like something that did not crawl out of MySpace, while I’m experimenting with different mailing list configurations so they are not spammy.
Next week we dive into the networking algorithm (to make sure the game is fun….or at least possible) and into the investigation parts of the game….where you discover who is useful for your plan and who isn’t.
Happy Conspiring!