{"id":741,"date":"2014-07-28T18:55:39","date_gmt":"2014-07-28T18:55:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vrdesigns.net\/?p=741"},"modified":"2016-06-26T16:26:25","modified_gmt":"2016-06-26T16:26:25","slug":"a-quick-update-on-shadow-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vrdesigns.net\/?p=741","title":{"rendered":"A quick update on Shadow Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shadow Empire design blog #3<\/strong><\/p>\n

Just a quick word I am still alive and kicking. Designing a new engine is not easy. I have to juggle a lot of different tasks at the same time, but slowly everything is moving forward and integrating. The unit and landscape map artwork is close to completion, I am almost halfway through with the design of the campaign scenarios and the random game maps are starting to become more and more interesting. <\/p>\n

The gameplay has had some live testing against friends and with a few select alpha testers from previous games. And it is good! As you might remember there are 3 modes of play: simple rules, basic rules and full rules. Especially the advanced parts of the rules need more fine-tuning. They were often a bit to overwhelming and confusing. But I am making a lot of changes for the better that keep the depth but provide a more tranquil playing experience.<\/p>\n

I guess everything is taking a long time because I am not choosing the easy route very often. With the landscape artwork for example I chose to have dynamic generation of maps, but also dynamic generation of some hex tile artwork, moving water and quite some animation with some units and locations.<\/p>\n

The same for the campaign. Definitely not the easy route… Every scenario has a semi-randomized map, meaning that the core logic of a scenario stays the same, but every play is subtly different. The campaign comes with a story that can be influenced by the player. Every scenario is a little mini story where you can actually make some choices and in between the scenarios you’ll find some time to wander around your base and talk with your leaders. <\/p>\n

Big task ahead of me now is the creation of the final user interface. Moving your units around on the map is already a pleasure, and just a few days ago I worked on improving the flow for combat. It is quite amazing how approaching combat between two units like a little movie script pays off. Also experimenting with some audio feedback. Which works amazingly well, although I get tired of my own voice used in the placeholders. It is a lot of work to make sure the key rules are visible and audible to the player, but it pays off. Also a clear game flow and visibly transparent rules makes me reflect more on my own design and it already happened quite a few times a change in the game flow or interface also caused a change in the game rules.<\/p>\n

The interface and the game flow are the areas where I really try to make an enormous improvement compared to earlier engines. We will soon see if I succeeded or not :) <\/p>\n

Best wishes,
\nVic<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shadow Empire design blog #3 Just a quick word I am still alive and kicking. Designing a new engine is not easy. I have to juggle a lot of different tasks at the same time, but slowly everything is moving … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vrdesigns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vrdesigns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vrdesigns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrdesigns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrdesigns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=741"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrdesigns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":742,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrdesigns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions\/742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vrdesigns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrdesigns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrdesigns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}