Monthly Update – February
Which in this case is actually going to cover the last two months… but who’s counting! We kicked off the year with a nice solid sprint on the game. Ben has recently moved on from his work at FMOD and is now a freelance codeninja, which means Spies & Soldiers will be getting more time and attention. So what’s been happening lately?
Words From Ben
Online Play: You no longer have to be in the same house as your opponent to play Spies & Soldiers. Using the amazing power of the internet, you can play with someone on the other side of the world. Revolutionary! This is actually our second implementation of online play – in the prototype you could only play online, then the MOAI Cloud service we were using was shut down, forcing us to implement LAN play. We weren’t sure what service to go with, but then I had a chance encounter with Ron Gilbert at a game dev conference last year and we got into a conversation about game servers, so based on his recommendation we’re using Google App Engine. It’s pretty awesome – thanks Ron!
Movement Arrows: When you’re about to start a new turn, the game now shows arrows on the map indicating unit movements from the last turn. Very helpful when figuring out where that elusive spy that you’re hunting went, or how a massive army suddenly turned up on your doorstep.
Boring Things: The game now runs in full screen mode, just like a real game. Scripts for testing all the permutations of the battle reports. The ability to return to the main menu at the end of a game. Fixing the delete key in the mac build. The excitement never stops…
Words From Jim
Battle Reports: We’ve finally added the long awaited battle reports system, so now you can figure out exactly why that certain victory turned into a rout, or how your master spy was suddenly assassinated. Goes a long way towards helping learn the game, but even if you know exactly how it works there are always at least a couple of ‘what the hell…’ moments in every game, and being able to read a detailed breakdown of events is great. One interesting side effect is that while our design focus has always been on simplicity and clarity, it’s the more confusing moments in the game that actually make for the more interesting reports – now that you can untangle the chain of events easily, some of the complex outcomes are actually okay to leave in the game.
New Art Style: At the end of last year we came up with an idea for a whole new art style for the game. It’s exciting, will be a lot of fun to create, and will definitely give the game a unique look – but it does come with a few implementation risks, and require redoing all of the art assets. Argh. Not something to be taken lightly! So I’ve been researching this extensively, doing some tests, and over all it’s looking good. Think we’re going to greenlight this crazy plan, and if all goes well I’ll be moving ahead with the new art style over the next month.
Port Routes: Our sea route drawing system still needs an overhaul, but in the meantime we’ve added a UI function that allows you to see which other ports a port is connected to, which helps reduce the game play impact of the messy sea routes until we get time to fix them.
Onwards and upwards!