Is it finally May? I feel like it's been two or three months since I wrote one of these.

Sprint Recap

Visualization support.

Replace the forced/group movement with a visualization blueprint instead of a native one.

Sprint Results

I would probably rate this sprint's results as: Fantastic. All the tasks that I had committed to for the month I had finished about half way through!

The trickiest thing I had to tackle was dealing with interruptions from things that occurred between the start and finish of the move. The solution that we used for this in XCom (primarily used in the case of overwatch abilities) I never really liked. It involved incrementally trying partial solutions and then rolling state changes back before trying the next partial solution. I never really liked that solution. So instead I introduced a couple new sub-types that could be used specifically in the case of interruptions.

I was able to do a few more pieces of the visualization support unrelated to getting the forced movement visualization working. That includes working on a visualization used at the end of missions to show a “Mission Failure” or “Mission Victory” screen

I was able to get rid of an old UI updating solution that I wrote when I had a different version of my Event Manager. My Event Manager is quite a bit more flexible than it was making it more than capable of updating the UI in a way that the previous version couldn't.

I was able to cleanup two of my interfaces (class interfaces not UI interfaces). One that had a couple member variables (which is really a no-no but I didn't have a good alternative at the time). The other was an interface that had to duplicate a bunch of functions from another API.

I also fixed a bug that I had found a while back with the UI I've been using that allows the player to change the speed of their ships.

May '20 Sprint Goals

Over the last month I spent most of my efforts on systems work, so this month I'd like to get back to gameplay. Balance things out a bit so to speak.

Looking over my backlog, the thing that jumped out at me as a task was a system for loot. As with other games in this genre, there's a basic loop of strategic gameplay that provide you the tools to take on tactical missions and then the tactical missions that provide the resources that allow for the actions taken in strategy. At the moment the strategy to tactical part is supported pretty well (if not entirely balanced or complete). So this sprint I'm planning on working up a system of loot drops and mission rewards that will provide the other half of that loop. I currently hope to be able to reuse the output part of the transaction system I built, since there are a lot of similarities there. I can imagine that anything that might be awarded as loot could also be the output of a transaction, and vice versa.

Another part of closing that gameplay loop would be to have some consequences persist from the tactical gameplay. Things like ships being destroyed or damaged making them no longer available in the campaign. I'd like to get some of this into the game as well.

At the moment I don't have any specific breakdown for how loot should work or the scope of the tactical consequences (the downside to working on the fly the way I do for this project). So there's a good chance that either or both of those tasks can easily expand to fill the time that I will have available. Half the fun of this project is about feeling things (both design and technical elements) out as I go and just trying stuff.

There are of course a few tech debt items that I'd like to address. I just have to be careful that they are too much of a distraction from those primary goals.

I should also really do some more research into screen capture or gif recording so that I can start sharing those for my project.

Games

Fate Grand/Order

Civ 6 - I said I would and amazingly I played through nearly 3 full matches over the month (I always play on Epic). It's been a great diversion to stave off possible burnout. A domination victory with Trajan, a diplomatic victory with Victoria and still working on a religious victory with Ghandi. That last game was temporary interrupted by the next game.

XCom: Chimera Squad - The latest release from Firaxis. Not the project that I've been working on so it's been fun to play through a new XCom that that I hadn't already played through a million times already. It's a smaller title and experiments with a few interesting tweaks to the formula. I'm probably about 2/3rds of the way through and am thoroughly enjoying myself with it.