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.
This is our last dev update for the year. Most of the week was spent fixing bugs and addressing a bunch of corner cases, but we’re adding new things to make the gameplay more interesting plus more visual improvements. We’re also getting a build ready for PAX South, so there are several things we need to mark off our checklist.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
People have been discussing artificial intelligence on our Discord. One of the hardest things in making AI is making it seem human. In strategy games, the challenge is how does the AI make a grand strategy/plan and decide to do something in the game? For Last Regiment, we take a different way of doing it by setting decision-making metrics that the AI can look at. However, you can’t get to this point until you already have a game that’s well put together.
Creating the Tutorial
Another thing that had to wait until now is the tutorial, which we are unable to do until the game exists and the rulesets are defined. In the game’s current state, and with PAX South approaching, we are now starting to build it. It’s very challenging work, especially with strategy games being more complicated than normal games, and with our relatively new turn-based simultaneous mechanic. We have to make a fun and interesting tutorial to make our players think it’s easy and draw them into the game step by step.
What We’ve Changed So Far
1. Added gameplay significance to deep and shallow waters by introducing new naval units, such as the Tentaklor of the Deep and the Giant Diseased Crayfish.
2. Added themed bridges and fords that can be crossed by people and boats.
3. Improved the way structures look to make them more “hex-y”
4. Improved the Choose Your Regiment screen and added faction backgrounds for the cards
Watch the video for a more detailed breakdown.
We’ll continue working on these before the holidays and resume next year. We’ll definitely be busy with conventions in January, but you can always keep updated through our Discord.
First off, we’ve finally become a Twitch affiliate and the Subscribe button is now live on Boomzap’s official Twitch channel! Subscribers can now get double the boombux (which gets you into the beta) and we’ve also got some sub-only emotes up.
Back to the game: we’ve made visual improvements and gameplay changes.
Because of the feedback from last time, we’ve changed the way fog of war displayed and replaced our old, blocky user interface. Passive traits, structure powers, and unit abilities are now clearly separated.
You’ll also notice that there is now only one hero per regiment, and we’ve added units from a mercenary faction that can be used in a regiment without hiring a second hero.
We are also playing around with Build and Raze abilities for all units.
We’ve also removed cooldown for powers and made it gold dependent instead.
Watch the video for the full breakdown.
Next week, we’ll be having our last dev stream for the year. We’ve also been doing some silent gameplay streams if you like to check out our multiplayer testing. See you on Twitch!
