AA Battery - Week 43

I’ve failed to update this development diary for a couple of weeks, because I got sidetracked by Ludum Dare 42… here’s a quick update before hopefully returning to the normal schedule this week.

13 August - 19 August, 2018

This was the week immediately following LD42, so I spent most of it playing games to garner some reviews of my submission and had the initial inspiration for a blog series on the Turn-Based Strategy (TBS) genre. Writing the series started out very well - I had two detailed articles on various types of TBS mechanics ready by the end of the week, but then decided that I needed an introductory article for the series, so I couldn’t publish either of them just yet…

20 August - 26 August, 2018

This week again featured no work on AA Battery… instead I struggled mightily to come up with a definition of turn-based that is more correct than “players take turns when playing”. I had some valuable insights while pursuing that quest, but then ran headlong into the difficulty of trying to define strategy - so again I didn’t have anything ready to publish by the Sunday.

27 August - 2 September, 2018

This week I finally spent some time on AA Battery again, even if it was only a measly half-hour! In that half-hour I managed to discover that I had failed to hook the new Crew System into the game in 2 places:

• The prefab for the shop manager that I use to check various values in all scenes of the game.
• The code for starting a new game, which meant that it never got initialised.

After fixing those two oversights I had my first succesful test of Crew System V4! So this week I’ll start ripping out the old crew system, which should be fun - I’ll be deleting reams of code from the project.

I also pretty much finished the introductory post to my TBS series of posts last night. It was quite long and after 4 straight hours of working on it I had my blinders firmly affixed, so I asked my wife to help me proofread it to make the final product a bit clearer (good thing as there were many errors that I had missed). We got about 75% of the way through the article by midnight, so we should be able to finish off this evening. So you expect that to be up sometime in the next couple of days.