Early in the week I pushed the latest build to the play store. A day later I noticed I had the client pointed at the internal server rather than prod. Glad to catch that, and guess what? From now on I’ll work from a deployment checklist! Seriously though, it’s no fun pushing bad code and then waiting 2 days for google to approve the fix and get it to players.
I published a new playthrough, the title format of these have been the somewhat clickbaity “Overworld too easy? Dev proves ’em wrong!” Don’t worry, it’s not working. Maybe it’s my crummy microphone, but I might not have the gravitas of a vlogger. This week was the “Impossible giant” edition. I like playing the giant because she’s radically different to other characters, mostly relying on innate skills to survive to the end. She chucks boulders like in the trailer!
Looking back dev work was a lot of fixing bugs in the new world map and taming confirmation. Previously (per minimalist design) tapping a creature when holding food you like would always feed and tame them. Now you get a dialogue for whether you want to tame them or attack. If you attack (directly or indirectly), you do not get another chance to tame them. It means you get to keep your food in cases where you just wanted rid of the creature. My artist Psiweapon especially likes this feature.
Speaking of, that sir posted his latest work for the game here. This post has more upvotes than the whole game has ever seen in its life, perhaps a critique on the relative salability of our skillsets. Jealousy aside it looks really cool and I want him to do the rest of the spells.
What DID get done is groundwork for next week’s release, including a skippable intro video (which will also get more upvotes than I can dream of), and a demo feature. This will grab the longest, highest scoring games from each hero type, store them, and send them to everyone else. Then you can watch some (probably) decent demo play of any hero you like, and I’ll have it show a random one if the game idles on the main menu.
Had some debate on the discord server, trying to decide if the game should move to higher visible map resolution than 3×3. It would be a lot of work, and change the feel of the game significantly. Players have a lot of difficulty making the leap to a small grid, the single comment on one thread cut to the bone with “this game is way too zoomed in lol”. The other option is to hold a Kickstarter and raise money to double the graphical resolution. Probably a ~$20k job so we’ll see how that goes. Please comment and lmk which you think would be more effective!
Next week I’ll start my holiday so I might miss or shorten next Saturday’s post. I think I’ll start the iOS integration when I get back (we are Android only so far), which should double our potential audience.
Android users, please try the beta. So hangry! For your feedbacks.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.overworld.app