3 Day Weekend Update

I completely ignored my list of stuff to do, and just worked on whatever I felt like all week. I worked primarily on new art - new characters and new terrain. I also created the battle maps for the first 4 levels. This week I'll post some screenshots of the new maps and some of the characters.

The rest of this week is mostly code-based enhancements.

Plan for the week:
Summon support (I have to do this tommorrow so I can introduce one of the summoners)
Victory and failure screens
Unlocks

Game saves
With whatever time is left, start filling in the map, one battle and one character at a time.


It occurs to me that after these enhancements, the game will be functionally complete. The only things left to do will be content creation, some miscellaneous cleanup, and multiplayer.

Aside, in which I talk myself out of extra features:
I'm actually tempted to leave out multiplayer for the sake of getting to market sooner. Indie games are exploding at the moment, and we're finally seeing some REAL gems. This release season is suprisingly lacking in traditional games. All this means is the little man in the business suit on my shoulder is telling me that it's ok to strip some features for the sake of releasing sooner. I know the indie games release procedure takes a few weeks, and I know I won't be finished before November 1st at this rate. I am SORELY tempted to cut multiplayer, and strip out a few character classes. If the game is sucecssful, I could then make a second release with extra features (local multiplayer, challenge maps, and online multiplayer).

On the other hand, the code is already flexible enough to do local multiplayer with some ease. I mean the game is not exactly a model of a party game - diving into the game without spending significant time with single player is difficult; combat is slow and turn based; it's not exactly riveting for onlookers. I don't know of too many remotely similar games offering local multiplayer. The closet I can think of are some portable games, and some traditional strategy games. But with the portable games, both players have invested in the system and know to play, and most strategy games have simple and forgiving enough mechanics and few enough units to make it easy to pick up. I place a lot of stock on character selection and you need to really know who's available and what they can do. If you pick without that knowledge, it will be a very one sided fight.

The game would benifit from online multiplayer, no doubt, but that requires a significant amount of time to create and debug.When I started, the little man in the business suit on my shoulder determined the risks were not worth it. I told myself before I started that if the game was successful enough for me to afford a second 360 for testing, I would definitly create an online version. So like ~400 sales at 80 MS points.

I think I just talked myself out of local multiplayer support...