Developer Blog

Developer Build 1.0.09 of Valor and Victory is now available – https://yobowargames.itch.io/valor-and-victory/devlog/38640/developer-build-1009

Important disclaimer: Developer build means the game is still being developed. Features will be missing and things may break! You should not consider this to be a representation of the final game.

Whats new in this build?

• Combat working for Allied Units
• Advance and Close Combat working
• Opportunity Fire implemented
• Splitting and Merging Units fully implemented
• Windowed Version now available to download
• Many fixes

Can you eliminate those Germans in the Church in one turn??

Any feedback or questions ping me in the discord channel https://discord.gg/f85Cxb7

or feel free to email me at lance@yobowargames.com

First a quick summary of my 2018 objectives which is year 2 in my three-year plan and had as its main objective of publishing more than one game and building a track record. In more details I had planned for the following:

• Publish Battle for Korsun
• Publish Invaders from Dimension X
• Work on Kampfgruppe
• Start work on other games
• Be more proactive on Social Media

So how am I doing?

Publish Battle for Korsun

Still working on the AI for this. Actually, I have taken a small break from it as was proving to be too grueling to keep looking at the same code.

Publish Invaders from Dimension X

This game is ready to go. Still working on the publishing strategy.

Work on Kampfgruppe

This has now morphed into Valor & Victory and work is progressing extremely well.

Be more proactive on Social Media

Well apart from this blog I have done nothing different – definitely a fail here.

In addition, I have in various states the following (All planned for 2019):

• Fall of France
  • Map Graphics done
  • Units Graphics done
  • Basic game framework set up

• Picketts Mill
  • Map Graphics done
  • Basic game framework set up

• Iwo Jima
  • Map Graphics done
  • Basic game framework set up

• Cassino
  • Map Graphics done

Years Progress summary

Right now I feel I am on track with what I had planned to do apart from being active on Social Media. Social Media is just not my thing. At the moment it’s not having any impact on anything but once I have a bigger portfolio I feel it will become more important. Need to think about how to tackle this weakness.

This week I emailed the guys at Wargamer.com to give them a heads up about Valor & Victory. They very kindly mentioned me on their Friday weekly update – https://www.wargamer.com/articles/wargaming-news-may-31st/. Actually, it was a bit of a bonus as it just so happened they also had news on Unity of Command. There’s my game in the mix with a follow up to an outstanding game!

Of course, my main purpose was to start to generate interest in the game but also to expose the fact I am providing development builds of the game as I work on it. I certainly got a lot of interest because of that article as you can see below. Another unexpected bonus was that some people donated money when they downloaded the game. I also had a few extra sales with my previous game Kursk.

There is a risk to doing this and good reasons why no one else does it. What does developer build really mean to a downloader of the game? Are they expecting to be able to play a complete game, expecting a buggy beta or are they aligned with my vision of a “Hey this is where I am with getting the game working. Oh, btw nothing is tested and uhmm not much works”?

Indirectly this has been a discussion point for another game in development at the moment. Slitherine announced Panzer Corps 2 on 08 Mar 2017 and immediately fans of the game wanted to see screenshots and asked about when they can test the game –
http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=464&t=78967. They have seen very little and are fairly vocal about it.  The point is they want to be involved and give early feedback. The risk to Slitherine is that the early feedback is negative and the fans are turned off to the game and doom it before its even released. A commercial disaster for a business. So I totally understand the reluctance to give out something too early.

I hope I am not unique in the fact I write code, feed in some new graphics and after a few playthroughs realize its just not working, something is not gelling or its plain too difficult to implement correctly. No one gets to see these failures if you keep them hidden. Sometimes I rewrite whole chunks of code because I suddenly have an “ah ha!” moment and realize I can make my life a lot easier. There’s no direct impact to an end user of the game so they see nothing new but I spent a week doing it. “Hey guys check out the new build – nothing new to see but the code looks great!”. Without frequent real updates perception can be – He gave up on the game as we have had no news for weeks now.

So why am I providing development builds so early in the process? Well, I play games in a certain way. I don’t read instructions, I never play in windowed mode and I use a mouse almost 100% if I can. No keyboard shortcuts for me if I can avoid it. I have no UI expert with 20 years of game design to help me. I have no AI genius who knows every algorithm there is to know and also knows how to code them. I don’t have much time, funds or indeed the skill set for PR & Marketing. I do this in my spare time. Sometimes there is no spare time. Should I focus on coding or testing during that time? I need help filling those gaps.

The first feedback I got was “Can you make a windowed version” and “Keyboard shortcuts?”. Oh maybe that is important then. “Hey your icons are overlapping with unit displays”. Hmm not everyone has a 1920 * 1080 screen then.  There are my UI experts.

“Hey we passed on the news about your game” – Thanks guys from Burden of Command (seriously, thanks, after they twittered to their followers I saw a spike immediately). There are my PR and Marketing experts.

“Hey your AI sucks”. But I haven’t coded any yet! I reply. “It still sucks”. There is my QA team.

Sometimes I imagine myself as the lonely long distant runner at the back of the pack. Tired and despairing of ever finishing the race. Then I look up and I realize there is a crowd running alongside me cheering me on. I hope by the end of this race the crowd will be big. A recent blog on Gamasutra nicely covered this subject https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TellyLee/20180601/319126/Indie_Game_Marketing_The_Value_of_Fans.php
I hear a voice in the crowd “Your AI still sucks”. I put my head back down and start coding again…

// Try and beat this AI
if (player.equals(“voice in the crowd”){
stackEliminated = true;
}

Saturday morning is coffee date time with my wife. We share a coffee and a Double Bacon and Egg roll. She studies Japanese and I pretend to work on my game but mostly I end up daydreaming and people watching.

So today’s daydreaming was related to Heroic Maps. I was thinking that these would look great in a computer game. Getting artwork done is one of my biggest pain points as I cannot engage someone full time so have to fit in with their other work. Of course, if they are good they tend to have a lot of other work. So here’s me thinking “look at all this already done artwork! I wonder if they would license it? Hmm but I need a game to go with them. Do I want to go down the fantasy route? Do I need a storyline?”.  And so on.

I did do one thing that was productive. I put all my blogs into one Flipboard Magazine. So if you are a (the?) reader of my blogs and use Flipboard then now you can read it in a magazine format.

View my Flipboard Magazine. View my Flipboard Magazine.

I finally got around to implementing MiniMaps for my games. To be honest I could never quite figure out how to do it but its been bugging me so I made a big push to get it done.

Whilst I was surrounding myself in a glow of self-appreciation my wife immediately asked “So if I click on the minimap then the screen will scroll to that location?”. Uhmm no. Ok so not quite done yet…

Below are comparisons for 4 of my games. These are all 40 times smaller than the actual game. The white rectangle shows what you can see on a 1920*1080 monitor. If you click on the minimap in the game nothing happens – that’s a project for another day…

Fall of France

Iwo Jima

Battle for Korsun

Battle for Picketts Mill

Not much to show this week but I did manage to work on some more of the Units for Fall of France.

Below is a screenshot of the BEF, Dutch, and Belgium units in place. Facing them is the might of the 1940 German Army.

For those who follow my progress and experiences in developing wargames, I have made a couple of changes.

My store page now has links to itch.io which I will use as my storefront going forward. I already had an itch.io presence but wasn’t really utilizing it. There are several reasons behind this but the main one is preparing for my work on Valor & Victory. I feel this game will benefit from the existing community involvement and itch.io has many great features for helping with this.

The second thing I have finally set up is a Discord channel at https://discordapp.com/invite/f85Cxb7. Again this is in preparation for Valor & Victory but also something I should have done a while ago. I will see how successful it is as a tool to engage with fans of my games.