Welcome! What better way to kick off the new year, than to talk about the many changes we made over the last two months of last year! Those months saw a huge amount of additions/changes to the game, that are all working towards bringing a good product to high school students and gamers alike.
Source analyzer
The source analyzer gives the player a choice between a few historical sources, each of those sources has to be analyzed and interpreted by the player, and give correct answers to questions they will be prompted with. You can see the current implementation of the source analyzer in the following illustration. Be aware that the source itself, seen on the left page has been blurred for this particular showcase
Each source has a set of questions with one or multiple correct answers and a set of cards that are rewarded to the player after finishing the source analysis. Currently there is no downside to giving incorrect answers, however, we are considering how it should affect the player's outcome, for example giving less reward cards.
In the following illustration you can see a set of reward cards that are awarded to you after analysing a source. Also a bit of a sneak peak at some of the new cards and traits.
Priority system
We have removed the initiative system, as it adds to the complexity of the game, and we needed some way to simplify it further. We have thus, moved onto what we call a priority system. The player with priority will have their units move/attack one-by-one first. Priority changes every turn. This is the start to a new system that we are looking to implement, where every card moves at once, and trade blows when attacking. What we have now is a slight compromise to that system, and our initial move away from initiative.
Traits and scholar cards
Traits are... Traits that card can have, every unit card has three traits. Only cards with certain traits can be targeted by a scholar card. A scholar card is a card that does not work like a regular unit card, bur rather, has an ability and will go straigt to the graveyard after being used. You can see an example in the following illustration. Disregard the Danish text, that was used for playtesting purposes.
This card affects a targeted unit on the board that has any of the listed traits in the lower half of the description box.
Also the cards the player is rewarded with by analyzing their source, only has two assigned traits each, the player will be prompted to add the last trait to the card, before proceeding to the battle scenario. The interface used to do so is visualized in the following illustration.
Each card has an amount of traits that can be assigned to them, however, only three of those available can be assigned, so you have to consider their synergy with certain scholar cards. Traits are categorized, which is represented by the trait icon. Also, the way the traits are currently visualized and laid out in this interface is not representative of the final product, and we are already looking into making it better.
New board visuals
We have wanted to change the board visuals for a long time, and we finally have something that looks better than the default Unity visuals. However, this is not representative of the final product, and we are already looking to heavily change the visuals, through 3D concept renders.
New cards
Along with all of these major changes we also added around 40+ new cards, however, some of them do not have any special ability, but we will of course look to implement those over time. In the following video, we scroll through the cards currently in the game
Along with the new cards we also added historical context to most of the unit cards. This can be viewed by the player at any time, by right clicking a card. We don't currently have English alternatives, but we are working on that! This also gives you a better look at the card's traits.
Next time we will be looking at a few backend changes to the project, to help speed up further development.
That concludes this devlog. We hope you enjoyed! Any kind of feedback is really appreciated.