April Devlog - Striving for Perfection

I have reached the stage of development that is most important but least fun.

A project always starts with an idea. It is a thrilling moment. A ‘What if?’ that starts quickly branching and spreading through the pathways of the mind, filling out into a whole new universe.

All developers are victim to the consequences. All developers have believed themselves capable of simulating the world itself, piece by piece. It is the dreaded ‘feature-creep’. As you play your own game you find yourself constantly thinking of cool new additions that would give yet one more dimension.

I’m looking at you Dwarf Fortress.

The other day I booted DF up to see how it was going. It took several HOURS on my high end PC to build a new world, replete with realistic geology and several hundred years of procedurally generated (yes, procedurally and not randomly) culture and history that evolved on its own in actual (game)world locations that were thereby marked for all time. Eventually my particular dwarves were born and lived out lives for years until suddenly the moment came, on a specific day, when they became mine to control. I stared at all the symbols on screen, dug a hole and found some mud, read the incredible biography of one of my dwarves, repeated with poetry and personality, and then quit, completely overwhelmed.

Sometimes its important to remember you’re making a game.

So at some point you’ve got to declare your features complete even though you know that’s a lie – there’s no way you’ll resist a few additions down the track.

Once that happens you’re through the job of invention and into the pain of completion. In gamer parlance, you’re at level 156 and it now takes twenty times as long to get each endorphin rushing loot crate.

Or as Sir Francis Drake, vice admiral, privateer, navigator, naval pioneer, raider and politician said:

“There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory.”

A mighty fine thought from a pirate.

So these devlogs are now less exciting on the feature side, but just as important in showing that this is a serious project that will be continued unto the end.

I am now into the stage of making sure the game is easy and fun to play. That means correcting unfun things and ensuring that user experience is good. To that end I revised the forfeit system in the past few weeks.

Previously gladiators had a habit of getting injured for months, because I was striving for realism, and if you’ve had your skull caved in, or your forearm shattered, you’re not going back into the fight any time soon. Even when I tried to ensure that AI managers were sacking long term injuries where they lacked sufficient merit to be waited out, teams were still filling up with injuries. Every fourth week a team would be in a 4 v 4 fight and if on the losing side, would normally have 4 injured fighters. This led to a spiral of bad form, with teams putting out weaker and weaker fighters until they had nobody to field at all and suffered forfeits. Forfeits are pretty lame and unsatisfying, so this was bad in many ways.

I’ve fixed this with a few changes:

• Injuries now last FAR less long. This makes it all a bit more arcade-y but sometime it’s necessary to sacrifice realism for fun. Fighters are now typically out for only 1-3 fights or in the worst cases about 6.
• Teams can no longer EVER forfeit. Instead if a team hasn’t enough uninjured gladiators the state will send in a few utterly hopeless criminals to join the team. So they’re pretty unlikely to win, but you never know. In the meantime a week goes by and they get some of their regulars back from injury. This saves the downward spiral and prevents ugly ‘forfeit’ results.

Having optimised that area of the game I also realised that although the game has a fully implemented Cup each season, taking in all 50 teams in the game world over six rounds, there is very minimal visual information available about that Cup in game. I have therefore created a Cup screen to show all the fixtures and results in all of the rounds.

The Cup Screen. A WIP.

That process pointed out to me some of the UI shortcomings in the game when the screen resolution is altered from my standard (16:9) to something really small like 4:3 (or 800×600). Making a game compatible with all resolutions is a cracking faff but another important ‘thorough’ finish. So I painstakingly picked through all the game’s scenes to fix any resolution errors. My conclusion: small screens really suck.

Although this stuff is less fun, it tells me that I’m moving towards completion of the project, and confirms that I’m on track for finish around the end of the year.

That’s very satisfying.