AA Battery - Week 44

This turned out to be an incredibly productive week and not just for AA Battery…

3 September - 9 September, 2018

I’ve been struggling to get into a regular daily routine of working on AA Battery since Ludum Dare 42. I was a bit sidetracked by working on the introduction to my Turn-Based Strategy series which I finally published this week.

Michelle had her sister and friends over for the weekend to play Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle. Being a 4 player game I couldn’t exactly play along, so I ended up spending most of the weekend on the couch working on AA Battery. Thanks to that I was quite a bit more productive than I expected, putting in a total of just over 20 hours for the week.

It was great that I could spend a solid 9 or 10 hours on AA Battery, because there was much more work left to do on the new crew system than I thought! While the basic rewrite was in a roughly working state, I was still missing commander abilities and guards from the original system - the new crew system also wasn’t applying bonuses correctly, so I had to do a fair bit more testing and fixing.

At this point I’ve got the new crew system working and commander abilities have been re-implemented, so this week I just need to finish off re-implementing guards. This is also turning out to be a bit more work than I initially realised, as the new system is going to be a bit more dynamic, with the player able to allocate guards from surplus crew during battle.

I also need to try and get the first mechanics article of my TBS series finished this week… I’ve already made a fair start, so hopefully it won’t take as long as the introduction post, which was a good 3 weeks of work.

Author

Matt Van Der Westhuizen

Back-end service developer at Ubisoft Blue Byte by day - wannabe game designer & developer by night.