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.
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.
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.
