There hasn’t been much to blog about lately. I don’t have a set-in-stone beta-date for GTB, but it’s likely to be the first half of March. This clashes horribly with GDC, and it’s associated press crush, and also with a friend going to Australia, and also with stuff I can’t talk about just yet but will do soon.
Right now I am just slogging through a list of tons of features in the game, making sure they work, and do what they should do. In doing-so, I’m finding all kinds of minor quirks that have crept in. As designs and code changes, stuff often gets left in a paradoxical state, where it no longer makes sense. For example, I had three options when picking defender as a mission:
Scripted AI
Adaptive AI
Adaptive++ AI
And as defender, two options:
Attacker uses scenario-defined designs.
Attacker uses any designs (including yours).
The thing is, the 2nd two defender options are the same as the attacker ones. It was just described really badly, and makes much more sense now I’ve harmonised it. This is one of those things that isn’t a ‘bug’ as such, just a thing that is obviously ‘wrong’ to a newcomer to the game, but has so much code & design history (I won’t bore you…) that it went by un-noticed by me for months.
The one thing that I reckon will confuse people about GTB, and the thing I’m still not happy with, is the vast complexity of different options when it comes to how to play a battle. This isn’t just a tower defense game. It’s more like a tower-defense/attack / RTS/ simulation toolkit. I guess it’s ‘little-big-planet-meets spore-meets tower defense. None of this trips-off-the-tongue. I can see a lot of me waving my hands in videos trying to explain the various permutations of how to play the game. I guess that will make for content-rich interviews :D