Gladiator Dev Update - Week 1.5

Hello all! Progress report time!

Would've been a couple days sooner, but...well it wasn't. So. So we're here.

O_O

Anyway, the first chunk of time on this game has been decided on the particular pieces and mechanics of how the combat's going to work *while* making the character artwork, and finding out through making said artwork what will be feasible to do come the final product in a balance between would can be 'functional' vs. what looks good/polished, and where the priorities lie.

The Wall

First, I threw a whole bunch of ideas at the wall, you know, real pie-in-the-sky stuff to think of what an idealized version of the game would look like.

To pick out some choice parts -

• A 'Thrallworks Launcher', a kind of hub that you could click on to either open the Gladiator game, Reorientation or the Thrallopedia and download updates through rather than having to redownload through itch or...something.

• A fully fleshed out lobby system where you can book and organize tournaments, send messages to each other, open private rooms, and a 'Social' score along with a 'Battle Rank' score that you can toggle so you can fight people of certain levels of sportsmanship.

• A 'single-player 'Career mode', and a slay-the-spire style item and card action system that represents the progress of a Gladiator

• A 'starting room' or K-Class Avatar Chambers, where a secretary greets you and gives you a short tutorial of how things go.

• As well as the 'base' game, also making a free public 'mod' for the kind of characters you normally get in other TW stuff that are proprietary, so having a division between purely OC content/characters in the game itself, with some non-official support for other characters.

And a bunch of other things beside.

Some of these things are clearly immediate write-offs; the launcher idea is a good one I think, but requires its own time to work out. The private messages and etc. for the Lobby system could be too...'spicy' is the word, and again, feels like setting up how to arrange tournaments in-game or etc. might take too much time.

Probably th largest change though is in the mechanics, as the kind of early mechanics I was considering regarding choosing action-cards and etc. hit a pretty large roadblock, in that if we were considering it a turn-based game, whoever went first would have a significant advantage, and I was hoping for a game with more silmultaneous choices for players to lock in. Also, the mix of physical attacks and metal attacks were being swished together in the same phase, and I since decided to split these into 'Combat' and 'Override' phases respectively.

In the end, gladiator fights are shaping up to be slightly more auto-battler leaning, with just a few choices to make each round and relying on skills picked and stats adjusted prior to the battle to secure success; a mix between Fire Emblem and the Dune board game.

This does mean some kind of single-player would be easier to implement too. We'll see what comes of that.

Polish vs. Function

Currently I'm leaning much more toward notions of 'polish', as I think that if we're looking at something to be wheeled out early November then I think it's better to have an experience that's satisfying in some way rather than just a curiosity.

To that end, I've been working on the poses and additions to the main Gladiator and seeing what I would want there to be for options.

I feel there's a bunch to say about what I'm having to cut out because it doesn't work into a timeslot, but we might save that for when the projects over, so instead here's some of the in-progress lines:

The rest of the week will probably be spent just on completing this model-- honestly, it does feel the majority of the work for this is going to be art-related, but I am hoping to get to the coding and putting it all together in the last third of the month.

See you in another week's time with some more updates, chums!