Forge War - Initialization

May 23, 2013

Well, it was a bumpy road, but I've finally finished the second milestone for coding Forge War - initializing the board.

It really doesn't seem like much when you first think about it - just deal out some cards, put some resources in the mine and start everybody off with their initial cash, quest tokens, adventurers and weapon plans. But in order to really do all that right, you pretty much have to plan out the structure for coding the entire game and make sure that the initialization fits into that grand plan.

For instance, all players start off with the copper dagger and copper sword weapon plans, so I could have just animated the cards for those two plans in each player's market tabs and said I had initialized the game, but then I would have no framework for adding future market cards to the market tab and all the code I had written to do the initialization animation would probably have been useless because I would have had to gone back later to fix it to be more versatile. So instead I started it off being versatile, so each player was attributed an array of market cards, and the the animation code looked at that array and arranged all cards in that array into the market tab.

Maybe that was a simple example, but doing that for everything added up to quite a lot of work that I feel good about.

I basically laid down a strong foundation for all future code to build upon instead of just throwing boards together and hoping that they would stay standing in the end.

I made a video demonstration of all the features I've done so far. Now I'm just going to start coding in gameplay order from there, starting with placing overseers in the mine (super-easy) and then moving the overseers around on the hex grid (umm...yeah, need to think about this one some more...I think the easiest way is probably to use 3 indices).

In other news, I'm changing the name of Dungeon Hunters to Tribal Assault, and I am trying to work on that a bit more, as circumstances may have pushed forward the time that I want to Kickstart the project...maybe. But anyway, I need to work on making the game more hospitable to larger numbers of players and start playtesting it again at the board game nights I go to.

Super-excited about the future!

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