Extra Knights and a Stable
Here's an update for August!
Level 2
I have finally after nearly 3 years of development started work on level 2! The good news is that most of the mechanics are in place so each new level wont (I hope!) take 3 years. It is a castle perched on the tip of a tall cliff. The 3d artist has resumed work after a few months off, so will be building this castle up over the next few months.
However I encountered a problem.
Initially the maximum number of knights in a level was just 8. During the development of level 1 this limit made sense in terms of how long it took to have all the knights compete on a single jousting tilt.
I knew that subsequent levels, (starting with this one), there would be extra event types introduced: melee and archery. So with 8 knights how could you have more than one thing go on at a time? If you did, you would at some point have to wait one one of the events when you got to someone competing as the finalists in another event going on.
So after some thought I came up with a good solution. Up the number of knights to 16. So now you can run 2 events at a time with two groups of eight. This opened up a few interesting options. You can select an event for each group to do, and if its the same type of thing (e.g. they are both jousting) then the winner of each group competes in a grand final. The scheduling menu needed some work, but that is done now. I need to work on the graphics but here is how it looks:
Stable
Now that a player can have 16 knights I needed a faster way to invite them. In level 1 you have to build a guest tent, which triggers a knight to be invited - but I thought that doing that 16 times would be tedious, and need to much actual space to place them in the tournament ground. So I came up with a new model: a stable! Now you build this one building and it triggers 6 invites.
Testing
You could say that the game is in alpha in a way. In that a friend came over and ran through the first level to see how it played. It went quite well! It did highlight some parts of the game are not particularly clear, such as the clarity of the mini game to determine tactics for your knights in a joust. I redid this so that it is much more straightforward, and quick to do. It was clear this needed to be simpler since there is a lot going on in the game.
Next up...
- complete the jousting and scheduling menu graphics
- melee combat arena
