Update 8/10/13

Has it really been a month since my last update? Jeez, time moves too quickly. Well, let's see...  

Decoys, now far from stagnating, is going in several different directions. Pocket is working on dressing up the vanilla game, while another friend of mine is helping me make a variant that's similar to my Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy idea, and at the same time I'm working on finishing the old digital version in GameMaker.



This new variant drops Gadget Cards in favor of character/piece specific abilities. They effectively work like Gadget Cards that players have access to from the start of the game. Another artist friend, Chris Deverell, came to me with the idea and even a few abilities. We spent a weekend fleshing out the ideas, and while they still need more playtesting, the few rounds we went through were fun. We just replaced the Gadget Cards with more Move Cards so there's smaller strategies to consider. We ended up with 12 different abilities, with a couple common themes.

The first one is Stun; when a piece gets Stunned, that means it cannot move or use its particular ability on the next turn.

The second is Push, which allows your piece to move an opponent's piece(s) within a certain range and to a certain distance. We're not sure if we should change the capture rules such that a capture takes place at the beginning of your turn as opposed to the end of it so that you could Push a piece off an OPoint to prevent a capture on its' next turn. Might be too overpowered, but we'll have to test and see.

The rest of the abilities are more or less left over Gadget Cards ideas, with the exception of a few Chris had already come up with. I'll make a post detailing all the ability rules once they're balanced.

This video game version is going a bit smoother than my previous digital endeavor, Clepto. I find it ironic that I dropped Clepto to not have to code a game, and here I am, almost a year later, coding a game. The difference is that Decoys, as a board game, is (presumably) a lot easier to code for me than Clepto, which was going to be a top-down stealth-action game. While I'm still not very skilled, I noticed that I've been relying less on the internet for answers to code related problems and more on me trying to figure out why the code is doing what it is. I'm trying to keep it simple, but still it takes me quite a while to get even small things working properly. I'll keep on it, for sure, but I wonder how long it's going to take me.

So that's basically what my past month has looked like. Well, all that and trying to push my game on different forums, to basically no avail. I'm thinking I need to make it print n play ready to get more people interested. We'll see I suppose. I'm not sure why people don't want to play, or maybe they do play and never tell me about it. Maybe the game just sucks. I don't know. I'm gonna keep on trucking till it's all over, one way or the other.