The Bounty Hunter

So here we have the Bounty Hunter. The bounty hunter usually only gets paid for bringing someone in alive, so he's good at disabling and weakening his quarry. He usually has to chase his prey for long distances; this means that he has to be prepared for anything that comes his way, and he has quite a bit of endurance. Let's take a look at his tool bag:

• His trusty pistol is never far from his side. It's his standby attack.
• He also carries a knife. Each stab of the knife may not be very damaging, but it's a very quick attack.
  
• Knowing he needs to catch his quarry alive, he throws out a net, tangling up his quarry and stopping them from moving.
• Always prepared, the bounty hunter always carries a flask of hearty stout. He can drink it himself, or toss some to a friend. It heals for a bit, and keeps healing him for a while.
  

He's a pretty sturdy unit, and has a fair bit of MP for endurance. His attacks are probably two of the weakest in game, but in the end, he'll still be standing.

After the jump: I complain about blogger, and talk about a quick design change that has a significant effect on gameplay (and you probably won't notice).

First up, Blogger. I'm not going to lie, this feels like the least polished piece of google's code. Settings are both wonky but predominantly non-existent.

It may be a small thing, but RSS just doesn't work. For a while, no text was included, only the title and link to the post. Sweet defaults, btw. Changing to "short" cuts off the post on the main page and the feed mid-sentence, and the only other choice puts the whole text in the rss, and everything above the cut on the webpage.

Personally I hate RSS feeds that just include everything in a giant wall of text. I'm verbose in all the wrong ways, and I've tried to give myself rambling and ranting space for my sanity, without forcing anyone who subscribed to read giant walls of text. Is it wrong of me to expect the feed to look identical to what is on the front page?

My other big blogger complaint is the editor. Mostly it's fine, but I only just found out how to do the cut thing (it wasn't as obvious as I would have hoped). Also, by default - and occasionally later for no real reason - the editor reverts to HTML mode. I don't mind, but it's bizarre. I don't like the narrow themes - they're too narrow. I don't like the wider themes because they take the whole window width, which is terrible for readability. I don't like the giant monetize button on the main menu, it makes me think of all the idiots aggregating other feeds poorly and hoping to make advertising revenue. I don't like that the dashboard expects you to have several blogs for the same reasons. I think the auto-save may be a little to aggressive. It just strikes me as all strangely unpolished.

Am I going to do anything about any of that? In a word, no. It works mostly. I suspect no one really reads this (I don't blame you, I wouldn't read it). And you know what, it just isn't worth switching over.

Anyway, onto the game.

I had an idea in those last minutes before I fell to sleep (strangely all my best ideas originate there). I was mulling over the ordering of units in game for a while. What I had used originally was a speed based system. The fastest units went first.

Review: each unit has an AP value, this is the number of steps they can spend each turn. Each square of movement costs one step, and each attack has an AP cost.

This turn ordering worked with a small number of units, but as I added more and more I realized that too many had the same speed. All the units have between 4 and 7 AP default. With buffs and statuses the range goes from 2-9, but for the most part everyone is 4-6 with only a few outliers. Basically ordering by AP ended up with strange clumps based on speed. It was hard to remember who went when and since it would alternate players it was hard to plan ahead.

The change was to instead order by player. So now the opponent makes all of his moves, and then you make all of yours, repeat. You don't really have to remember the order, and the game plays very differently.

Before you were very reactionary. You were constantly dealing with whatever enemy units had just gone. It was hard to have a cohesive strategy for your units. Now this is no longer the case. You can set up combos, and have characters really work together. I really can't describe the difference. It's subtle but I think it's a real change for the better. I played a couple test matches to try it out and really loved it.

A few problems, though. Firstly, it's easier. Since you can coordinate your attacks better, the AI shortcomings are a little more apparent. This isn't too much of a problem, but it does mean I think matches won't be quite so balanced once you get off the "tutorial island". Also it's easier to just pick one guy and hit him with everything. Luckily that doesn't work that well in practice, but it does contribute to the ease. Because of this I think I will limit matches a bit more, keeping most of them down to four friendlies for most matches, and maybe adding some more enemies. When you have 6, it becomes too easy to just target the weakest enemy and repeat.

The other problem is that it's easy to change the code, but the interface was not meant for this. I never planned on the player being able to switch to another character to move. This would mess with the balance, because the AI really can't handle that, but as a player, I expect to be able to go in whatever order. When a units selected, you can't pan around the map or pass. The only way out is to spend all the characters AP. I'm not going to change it, but someone will bemoan the lack of such features.

All in all, I'm really pleased with how this game is shaping up. I actually enjoy playing it so far. I'm really looking forward to finishing all the attacks and maps so I can really play around with the strategy.

I promise screenshots this weekend. Probably a group shot on my testing map, packed with most of the characters for testing.

(edited for readability now that I'm awake)