Tag Archives: boomzap entertainment

Dev Blog #24 – It’s fun, but why is it not yet amazing?

Last week we talked a lot about writing the story, which led us to thinking about writing conventions for specific genres.  When we apply it to game development, it’s mostly the same. In the case of Last Regiment, we ask: What do players expect in a turn-based strategy game? Genre differences are important in the entertainment industry, so we have to be in that framework of how we make Last Regiment better.

Right now we can say that the game is in a good state, but still very much in development. Last Regiment is the type of game that’s a bit experimental because it has not been made before. We need to prove that the core gameplay is interesting, and now we can say that at this point that we’re able to verify that it is fun.

The second stage is to ask ourselves: How do we make it more fun? Why is it not amazing yet? It’s an iterative process to get a game from “good” to “great”. These are the things that we’ve found that we still have to address:

  1. Concept of fortification is not working well right now
  2. Stealth mechanic still needs some work
  3. Unpredictability of  unit movement at the end-turn resolution
  4. Polish and visual effects

Meanwhile, here are some of the improvements we’ve made so far.

New tab for Heroes in the Choose A Regiment screen
New tab for Units in the Choose A Regiment screen
Revised Fortification bonus placement

We’re also going to start the the Alliance System next week – we realized that we need it for a lot of the campaign missions, so we decided it was time to start looking into it. For those of you who remember the alliance system in Legends of Callasia: What did you hate or love? What did you want added? Let us know!

Anyway, we might have fewer streams this month. Chris will be away on a working vacation and meeting some of the team, but we might do one final stream next week before we leave. We’ll be announcing it on Discord, where we also post some real-time updates on what we’re currently doing. Join us if you still haven’t, and let us know if you’d like Chris to record some podcasts in the meantime.


Dev Blog #22 – How To Play Last Regiment

Gong Xi Fa Cai! (or simply Happy Chinese New Year)

Now that we got some new people coming in to help with this project, Chris did a “What this game is all about” during the stream to help out the new staff understand the game they’ll be working on.

Watch the introduction on the video below.

Over the weekend we’re going to revamp the tutorial map to shorten it.  What we have now is good for a Level 2 type map. We worry that it may overwhelm our new players. We’ll try to show it next stream.

We also adjusted our UI backgrounds as we got feedback that they’re too dark.

Some features still needed code support for them to actually work. However most of the basic and core features needed to make this playable are all in there.

Any thoughts about the new UI layout?


Dev Blog #21 – Showcasing Last Regiment at PAX South

Belated Happy New Year everyone! 2018 is off to an exciting start for us as we were finally able to show off an exclusive demo of Last Regiment at PAX South in San Antonio, Texas.

We’ve shown the game before at ESGS last year but this is the first time we were able to implement a tutorial for the game. This is also one of the main reasons why we wanted to show the game at PAX South – we wanted to watch people who have never played it before play through our tutorial and see what they thought of the game.

Our estimate is that 5 out of 100 who walked past our booth would actually stop and look at our game. They were like “Oh my God! I’ve been looking for a game like this!”. The other 95 looked at it and very clearly you’ll see in their eyes “Meh, Im not into that.”. But that’s fine. We know this is not a game for everybody. This is a game for a very specific slice of the game market.

The thing that we are most happy about this experience was, nobody really needed to have the game explained to them. In terms of how do you play the game, basically we just sat them down, gave them the rough tutorial that we just banged up in a couple of weeks, and within 2-3 minutes they were able to understand the game flow.

Here’s a brief preview of what the tutorial looks like. We’ll be posting a tutorial play through video soon with Chris and the team as they talk about ways to improve and shorten it.

Special thanks to our friends from Discord/Twitch who helped us man the booth. We couldn’t have lasted the entire 3-day event without your help.