Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

We're back to seeing good progress again. This week, I finally finished testing and bug-fixing all the new cards, including adding a card ability that I had completely forgotten to implement earlier. As far as I can tell, all the cards now work the way they should. Are they balanced, though? Probably not, but that will be your job to test. ;)

After finishing the cards, I moved on to the next important feature for version 2.0: Booster packs! You will earn a randomly generated pack of cards whenever you win a match. The harder the difficulty, the higher the chance that you will find the rarest types of cards in your booster pack. 

While I'm not going to have microtransactions in this game, I still want to feed your dopamines when you unwrap a shiny new booster, so I'm taking great care with the presentation here. This goes for both audio and visuals. I have already created a fancy background animation, the booster pack itself, the animation for unwrapping it and revealing its cards (their backs only so far), and another special effect to be used on valuable cards. It's thanks to earlier work on things like the deck builder and particle systems that I can progress so quickly here. All I need to do is adjust the existing code, not write it from scratch. Well, for the most part, anyway.

I expect to spend several more days working on the booster packs, but the progress is good so far.

This week's card preview

This time, I'm previewing one of the ways in which your Confidence cards can open up entirely new strategies. Confidence cards typically focus on gaining you Heat, but this one does not. Instead, it gives you Usable Heat, the temporary variant that can only be used to play cards but won't otherwise directly impact your ability to win a match. Playing this card will give you a solid early boost that you can use to play expensive cards sooner, but it comes with a risk. Since it doesn't directly contribute to your Heat score, you will need to compensate with other cards, and you only have 5 slots in which to place them. And if you can't leverage the Usable Heat effectively, this card might turn out to be a liability instead of an asset. 

An entire tree of cards follows this pattern, so if you want to really focus on Usable Heat generation, the new cards have you covered.

And that's it for this week's progress report. Things are absolutely shaping up, but there is still a ton of things to be done. I'd better get back to work.

Until next time!