The project is almost into it's last week on Kickstarter! No matter what the final amount raised is, it's been an incredible success- far past 300% of the goal. This project would not be able to be what I want it to be without the incredible support from the backers!
Since passing the initial target I have been working a lot on the game itself. I've added a tutorial to the preview build (previously there was just a how-to-play video), I've done some important UI tweaks to make the game easier to understand, and I've also tweaked some cards and added a few more buildings.
- The tutorial is still in early stages, but it should give you a pretty clear idea on how to play the game or at the very least give you enough of a grasp to start exploring the more intricate mechanics. I also wanted to give the player the first taste of the characters - they will be playable in the final game and each one will have access to some unique cards/buildings. I'd love to get some voice actors for the game's dialog, but that's a low priority for now.
- UI changes. It's a little difficult to detail this to anybody who hasn't played the game yet. Some early feedback I had from the first version of the preview build was that some of the colour coding ended up being confusing to people learning how to play the game. Specifically, I had used red and blue for the spacial effects of the buildings and also for the economy/advancement counters.The reasoning behind my original decision was that blue/red naturally represents good/bad. There's two different types of good/bad in the game and I had used blue/red for both. My desire to keep everything 'neat' was coming at the expense of player confusion- and that's not a good trade off. So I swapped two of the stats for yellow/orange (two colours that aren't broadly used elsewhere).
A quick explanation - the yellow number is how many 'buys' you have, which are spent on adding new cards to your deck. The orange number is the target you have to reach to clear a column and get more space to build- the higher it is, the more difficult the game becomes.
- Building Tweaks. I've been brainstorming a lot recently on card abilities and effects and I've come up with some exciting ones.
Some of the cards in the first preview build could be powerful and fun in the right situations, but weren't really flexible enough to be fun in enough situations. I've been doing a lot of thinking to rectify that and I've expanded some special abilities to allow for some more flexibility when it comes to cards that allow you to discard/delete other cards. Controlling your deck and cycling through it is a critical part of the game, and the expansion of that has improved the preview build a lot. It's something I'm sure I'll continue to tweak and tinker with during further development.
- New Buildings! I've even found some time to add a few new buildings to the preview build. I've got a *lot* of buildings to make during the rest of the project, so I might as well start now, right?
Coal Power Plant. Loosely based on London's old but iconic Battersea power plant.
Oil Power Plant. I did some research - the overall theme of oil power plants seems to be 'pipes and smokestacks'.
Car Dealership. I may come back to this, I think it may need some more detail.
Strip Mall. The black bars holding the roof signs up look a little odd, I may revisit this too.
That puts the number of buildings in the preview version up to 48. There are 50 cards now in the game total, but 2 are non-buildings.
I plan to keep posting regular updates with the new additions to the game every week or so.
The car dealership looks more like a garage/repair shop than an actual dealership, but otherwise these buildings look pretty sweet. I particularly like the oil plant.
Can't wait!