Hello again, it's been a few days!
... Uh oh, it has been a few days.
Anyway, great news everyone the game is now finished and playable over at: https://cattanherself.itch.io/the-cycle-of-war-trench-assault
I was planning to write a more expensive log to celebrate yesterday but unfortunately I find myself a bit under the weather and I don't really have the energy to write things in details. Still, I wanted to take some time to go over what I did during the last few days.
The week started with my first build of the game in WebGL. I handed it to a few people to get some early feedbacks and see which ways of breaking the game they could think of. With this done I continued working on including the mortars and barbed wires and... To my great surprise this was no big challenge. Artillery added a really good component to the game because it allowed the player to tip the scales during the battle. So far the player could "edge their bets" by placing ladders and guns in a clever way, but once the battle started that was it...
Well not anymore! Being able to see something going wrong and (attempt to) fix it adds tension and helps combat frustration. Unsurprisingly.
Next up came a pass on the UI. So far I had worked with a mostly placeholder UI, and I was honestly a little bit afraid of TextMeshPro. It turned out to be fine once I looked at it in more details. During the course of this UI pass however, I got the idea of adding some flavour text here and there. When finishing a battle, the player will now have a random quote from a character in the game's world (though none are named). Which means, that's right, we have Cycle Of War lore now! Additionally I should mention that this has been a lovely occasion to design a random insult generator: At the end of a battle, some text explains how many casualties each side took, and the RED nation is each time called a different, randomly selected pejorative adjective. This was more fun to do than challenging if I'm honest but hey I'm allowed to have fun with my own video games, right,
Last but not least came the sound implementation. As discussed last weekend I already had selected the music and the sounds I wanted in the game, but of course when the time came to actually implement them I noticed some things I did not like and did a few modifications.
Gone are the drums that were supposed to play in between assault, replaced by the sounds of distant combat. As I mentioned before I dislike using too much music, and it felt like there was just not enough time between assaults to appreciate it anyway. The result is interesting because it creates a strong contrast with the go-lucky music that plays during an assault.
Then came a short phase of closed test which finally give birth to the finished game. It's been a short but really interesting journey and I am definitely happy to have participated in the jam. I learned a few things but most importantly I solidified my knowledge: I turned theoretical, academic knowledge of Unity and game development into experience and the beginning of a portfolio. To say that this is invaluable is an understatement.