Sunday, April 1, 2012

Card Creatures v0.5.2

New in this release:
  • A rudimentary single-player campaign flow! All of the data is placeholder, but the backend support should be mostly done. The only big improvement I can think of making right now would be a visual tool for hooking together dependencies, instead of specifying them by hand in the .ini configuration file. But since I'll probably be the main person setting up these dependencies it seems like it probably won't be worth the effort of making a complicated visual scripting tool.
    • The campaign flow is set up as a generic lock-and-key system, with certain player actions (defeating an npc for the first time, obtaining a card for the first time, currently owning a card, etc) automatically giving keys to the player, which can then be set as requirements for some progress condition (new npcs becoming available, high level cards showing up in npc's hands, dialogue changes, etc). The lock-and-key system can work like the following example:
    • Class=FoeInfo
      Name=Rena
      AvailableAfterKeys=[ClaudeBeatOnce]
      &Class=Card
      Name=TTOdin
      AvailableAfterKeys=[RenaBeatOnce]
    • In that example, the npc opponent Rena will become available after the player has defeated the npc named Claude once, and npcs will only start using the card TTOdin (if it's in their deck) after the player has defeated Rena once.
    • The current campaign flow I've set up starts with Claude as the only available opponent, with more unlocking along the way once the player has defeated all of the previous npcs at least once.
  • Dialogue text. The current plan is for the narrative and character development to occur through text-based dialogue. I've added dialogue hooks for the start of a match against an npc, after the match depending on who won or lost, and from a new Talk option in the npc-selection screen (hold Shift while clicking on the npc to talk to them).
    • Right now only Claude is set up with any dialogue, but he will change what he says after the player has defeated him (once again using the keys as described above).
    • The idea is for the dialogues to be a back-and-forth between the npc and the player (...hence the name), but right now the messages that pop up only include the first line. This will be fixed soon.
  • Some misc bug fixes: card capture status not always being cleared correctly between matches, rules being misapplied on occasion, always having to write [1*thing] to have an array entry with only 1 thing in it, etc.
Design discussion:
I've kicked around a few fancier ideas for what-happens-between-card-games. Right now I'm sticking with the npc-selection menu and some text-based dialogue, but there are a lot of directions I'd like to go in to expand this, from simple village-exploration-and-npc-talking a la Zelda: Link to the Past or Pokemon, to a full-on highschool dating sim where everyone is strangely into playing cards O_o. I think the first step I'll make toward these types of expansions will be a relationship value that changes depending on wins/loses/card-gifts/???.

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