Hey everyone,

Firstly, I’d like to apologise for the delay for the gap in between dev blogs. Rest assured that I’m still chugging away at these games, I’m just getting swamped with uni work as semester two is slowly wrapping up. Since my last update, I’ve managed to get through a decent chunk of the testing notes I gathered from Playup Perth’s last event and I’ve started implementing a tutorial so that, when I show it off at the upcoming Perth Games Festival, I won’t have to stand around and explain what to do as I did at Playup Perth. So, without further delay, let’s talk about what’s happened!

New Features

 

More Boasts

Thanks to the way I designed this system in the early phases of development (it’s literally a text document called boasts), all I needed to do to add new boasts was to add them to a new line in the text document. The system, as it stands today, automatically selects a random boast and prevents duplicate boasts from occurring. The list of boasts, as it currently stands, can be found here: boasts

As always, I plan to add to this list as development continues so that there are a number of cool/funny/silly things that get said by your samurai just before they duel (and/or die).

 

Difficulty Selection

I’ve also added a difficulty selection screen for the classic/multi-stage battle game mode. Depending on the difficulty selected before the game starts, players will be aiming to hit 4, 6, or 8 buttons for easy, medium, and hard respectively. At the Perth Games Festival (or PGF), I intend to ask if players would like the difficulty screen to also determine how much time each round lasts for.

 

Guitar Hero-style button selection 

As requested by several people at Playup Perth, I have implemented a Guitar Hero-style system of detecting button inputs that only penalises incorrect button presses by removing a point and proceeding to the next button in the list instead of by removing a point, delaying for half a second, and remaining at the current button. This was done as players at Playup Perth found the initial punishment system to be unfair and confusing as they would accidentally hit the wrong button and lose a point, but because they thought they’d hit the right button they would try to hit the next button in the list of buttons and get it wrong a second time, thus repeating the cycle.

This new system should hopefully improve the player experience a great deal and i look forward to seeing how people feel about it at the PGF.

 

Adjusted game start screen to prevent one player having an advantage

Another issue discovered at the Playup Perth event is that the layout of the versus screen (they were both triangles with player 1’s obscuring the top of their button list until the last few seconds before the game starts) gave player 2 an advantage over player 1 as they had a longer time to memorize the list of buttons they needed to press. As a result of this unfair advantage, I have removed the triangles used in the old versus screen and replaced them with squares that obscure both sides of the screen equally and reveal what’s behind them at the same rate.

 

Tutorial (Work In progress)

The final feature that I’ve added, which is still very much a work in progress, is a tutorial system for the upcoming Perth Games Festival. I’ve started working on this feature as I feel like I’m at the stage where I’m able to add a tutorial without having to worry about things changing too much. Additionally, I feel like a tutorial is pretty much required at this point as I won’t be able to teach people how to play Samurai Showdown all day while at the PGF, and I’ll also be trying to get people’s thoughts and ideas about Small Gods at the same time. With luck, and effort, I should be able to finish off the tutorial by the 29th and then prepare for the PGF-proper.

 

Future Plans

 

Finish the tutorial system

This is self-explanatory. The system as it stands doesn’t actually finish and there’s no way to return to the menu. I’ll definitely need to sort out those issues by the Friday before PGF.

 

Add map selection

At this point in time, I feel as if adding extra maps to Samurai Showdown is something I need to do in order to make it more interesting than it currently is. As it stands, a single map makes a demo, not a game.

Maps will be selectable prior to starting a match and can be selected for every game mode with tournaments cycling through maps at random.

 

Add character selection

This is just a feature to add personalisation to the game, but I’d like players to be able to play as a specific character prior to starting a match. While the characters won’t have anything fancy like specific attacks at this point in time, I feel as if players would really enjoy the additional personalisation that character selection would offer and it wouldn’t be too difficult to implement thanks to the way the game is set up to handle sprites.

 

Bugs

Controls

Pressing the Left button on the PS4 controller’s D-pad is treated the same way as pressing the Down button. Assuming it’s an issue with the Rewired setup I’m using, this should be a very easy fix to make. If not, well…… 😦

 

Final notes

As you can see Samurai Showdown is going really well even though there’s still a good chunk of work left to do before I can confidently show it at the Perth Games Festival. There’s also a lot of work left to do before I’ll even consider making a demo for it, but I feel like this game will be something great when it’s done.

Bye!