Dev Diary #20: Cards & Events

Hey folks,

Zanzo checkin' in to update you on the development of Date Mode! Let me tell you, I‘m hard at work getting all the mechanics in place and thanks to the awesome support from all of you, I am able to skip a job or two every now and then in order to have more time to work on Sexy Exile. We still need to earn money otherwise, but it really helps a lot :)

Therefore, I managed to make some good progress: I basically reworked the play card system like three times now as it wasn‘t as flexible as I want it to be. Finally, it‘s now possible to easily create all kinds of play cards, from simple „move 1 step forward“ types all the way to „randomly choose to move 1-3 steps in a random direction and lose 50 points OR move one step back and choose between two possible bonuses“.

Design-wise, those can look pretty confusing for now, as I only use letters for visualization so far, but rest assured, we will do all the graphics stuff and such later to make sure it‘s easily understandable. So here is a VERY WIP prototype screenshot just to demonstrate some different card types:

Again, please don't get confused yet, these will get a proper and comprehensible design later on. At the moment, "@" and the spiral in the center both mean "random", while "#" and the checkbox mean "choose". The white letters are the effects, H for heart, B for broken heart and S for shield. They don't actually do anything yet, so I will talk about them later.

I also managed to get most of the standard event logic done, events being what happens when you move to a certain field. Those can be short dialogues or stories that pop up and can occasionally include one or more multiple choice questions. I also want to add a few really tiny mini-games like a wheel of fortune and maybe something that needs a little bit of dexterity or logical thinking as possible events to get a little more variety. Depending on the event and/or your skill/luck, you then win or lose points, get buffs or debuffs or determine which way you go at a junction. At this point, events work fine but are just plain text on a solid color background, but for those of you who are interested anyway:

Okay, I could have been a little more creative on this event's text and choices, but let's keep that for later, also ;P

There's a little bit more, but I will talk about it when there's more to show. Oh, I also made a thingy that shows you where you will (or possibly could) end up when hovering over a card, but with the latest redo of the cards, that's broken at the moment and I won't be able to fix it today. So that too will have to wait for next time :)

Also, we're thinking about taking a bit of time to do some animating, soon, since it's been a while and we don't want to fall short on certain tier rewards. D:

Back to work, have a great day!

Zanzo