Capesong Development Update #2: Systems Coming Together
It's been about a month since the last post. I'm terrible at documenting my progress, but I'll aim to make monthly(ish) updates to keep track of development.
Run Loop
The biggest effort has been getting the core run loop working end-to-end. A hero can now be generated, sent into a sequence of battles with scaling difficulty, earn shards between fights, and eventually be promoted to the Global Defenders roster. There's also a post-battle screen where you make the healing vs growth decisions that I talked about in the game description. It's all rough, but the skeleton is there and playable.
Combat CPU and Autobattle
The autobattle system has gotten a lot of attention. Each hero now has an Emphasis Triangle on their hero card that lets you influence whether they lean offensive, defensive, or tactical in auto-battles. Their personality already gives them a natural temperament, but you can nudge it. The goal is to make autobattle really feel like it’s reflecting your instructions, but it’s still not working right. The CPU weighs things weird and certain powers that I know should be used frequently never get cast. But that’s fine for now. I’m still iterating on the actual RPS system and figuring out where multipliers come from, etc. So I need to get that stuff nailed down before trying to fine-tune how the CPU makes its decisions. I’m pivoting away from this for a while and I’ll come back to it once the game itself is more built out.
Hero Card and Portraits
The more I build the game, the more I realize it actually has a lot of similarities with a sports management sim. You make your player (hero), you assign them attributes and a position (element/trait), you guide them through their career, and your goal isn’t just to max everything, but to build towards a specialty that works well as part of a team. So I actually went and looked at a few games like 2K and FIFA, trying to draw inspiration from their player modes for the ‘hero card’ that Capesong characters will go back to over the course of a run. I’ve spent a good bit of time over the last month starting on the paper-doll portrait system where each hero's face, hair, costume, and features are assembled from separate layers. There's also a dossier tab with identity details, a generate tab for rerolling and viewing scouting reports, and the combat tab with the autobattle instructions. I really want to do what I can to help you develop an emotional connection to your heroes, so in addition to adding details like hobbies and locations and pets, I’m making blank and editable sections so you can write your own notes or backstories or really flesh out your character like an OC that you created if you want to.
Power Icons
Still grinding through power icon art in Aseprite. I’ve now finished 300+ of the planned icons - the full spread for all 10 elements and 7 traits. Still to be done are the cross-element and multi-element powers, plus a few random stragglers. But because the math and the multipliers are still not nailed down, I know I’m going to be making more powers soon anyway, so I’ll get back to this in a dedicated second pass later on. But just having these done, plus the portrait system, means the game looks 100% better than it did a month or two ago.
What's Next
Combat legibility is the big focus going forward. The game needs to do a better job of showing you why things are happening, not just that they happened. The battle screen itself is a rough jumble of icons, sprites and text. And because I want to be able to make a gameplay trailer so that I can feel confident drawing attention to my Steam page, the look of the battle screen has to be a focus soon. The math underpinning everything is also still getting fine-tuned. The game needs to feel like it’s rewarding RPS reads and smart gameplay correctly, which means finding the right numbers and placement for the multipliers that will determine winners and losers. That’s a constant and ongoing challenge, but until I really get that cemented, I can’t trust any of the stuff that I’m building on top of it. And, of course, there's the whole story and lore layer that still needs to be layered on top, which is honestly the part I'm most excited about.
Thanks for following along. More soon.