Hey, everyone!

Wanted to write this blogpost yesterday, but then I got distracted and I completely forgot about it… Either way: It’s here now!

Today, I wanted to discuss a whole bunch of things, so let’s get started right away!

The vacation

You might’ve seen this on my Twitter, but I’ve been on vacation for a few weeks, which means I didn’t spend any time working on Checkmate. That is over now, so progress will resume from now on!

What’s on the agenda?

As I mentioned last time, I’ve got just a few things planned down the line before a first public alpha release can be done. One of these things is AI. The AI already exists, but it doesn’t have a building part (yet).

I’ve already been working on the AI for the last few days, and it has proven to be quite a challenge, although it already is capable to placing down bear traps. The first step would be to refine the bear trap placement, making sure that it never makes any grave errors, like spawning it in extremely odd positions or at incorrect times when there are more severe threats at hand.

After that, the next step would be to include several other buildings. The biggest issue right now, is that several buildings require additional buildings to function (the resources). This means that some logic has to be built to maintain these resources. This is the current challenge to figure out.

Apart from the AI, pretty much everything is already done. I’ve been talking about the Wizard Tower; One of the buildings I still wanted to add, which I’m definitely going to do before the release.

Finally, the last thing on the list is adding multiplayer and fixing a few smaller bugs that I’ve discovered over the past few days.

The full game release

I’ve been debating for a while now what to do with the game release, so let’s discuss that here.

For a long time, I’ve said: “The price won’t be any higher than 5 bucks”, which is still valid, don’t worry. However, lately, I’ve been looking at a bunch of numbers and what I can expect from these numbers.

The game doesn’t get a whole lot of coverage (which is mostly me not doing a whole bunch of advertising), however, from all of the opinions I get from people, they all boil down to the same thing: “It’s cool and all, but it’s not something for me”.

This is, in fact, pretty true. The game is aimed at a very niche category when you think about it. People who aren’t much into strategy will immediatly skip the game and people who are into strategy may think: “Why play Chess in a slightly different version, when I can play Chess for free on the internet?”.

And that’s another good point.

Basically, there are two options right now: Make the game extremely cheap (say: ‘$1’), so people will buy even when hestitative OR make the game free and add DLC of some sorts (even if the DLC does not add anything).

I’m currently learning towards the second option, or making the game free in its entirety. I’m still debating, however. More information on this, will follow.

Conclusion

That was all for now.

I just wanted to make this blogpost to state that the game is not dead and I am in fact working on it already!

See y’all next time!