Hey, everyone!

As promised I would make a blog today talking about the new building changes; How they’ve changed, why they had to change and why this is such a great thing!

Let’s get started right away!

Old situation

The old situation isn’t a whole lot different from the newer situation. The models were a bit simpler, they had less detail and they barely had any animation whatsoever. This needed to change.

There are three “actual” buildings right now (there are some resources, they’re fine as is right now): The spawner, the spike trap & the newly added catapult.

I’ll be discussing the general changes and things added for all of these buildings.

Command buildings

The first addition is the option to command buildings. In the “old situation”, buildings would automatically activate as their delay reached zero. The idea here was that you had to plan when to create your buildings ahead of time and that the enemy could use your buildings against you if you didn’t take this delay into account.

However, this quickly turned against itself as buildings already require an amount of risk in order to be built (considering you have to skip very useful turns to gain ore). This means, that you can lose all of your effort put into the building by simply mistiming something by a single turn. This leads to lots of frustration for the player, which is the something the game should cause!

To solve this issue, all that had to be done was simply add the option for players to activate the building at the time they wish to do so. This is therefore the new feature that has been implement and it can be seen in the image above.

Once a building is ready, simply press the “Command” button to see visible options for each building and select the option you wish to execute. In this case, we’re spawning a piece on the board, but this option could just aswell be replaced by “Launch catapult” or, maybe in the future, “Cast spell”.

The catapult

The catapult is the new building in the attackers category that I wanted to have for a while now. The goal of the catapult is to destroy the center 4 squares of the board, killing everything that’s on it.

This building isn’t cheap and can only be used once, but it’s very effective. As you might know, one of the big parts of Chess is how much you can control the center squares on the board. Having a strong piece in that center means it has a wide range of effect, allowing it to deal a lot of potential damage.

The catapult is made to combat this exact behaviour. It forces pieces out to the side, forcing you and/or the enemy to adapt its plans and create new strategies to reclaim control on that part of the board, …or to go for a whole different approach!

The spike trap

Finally, the spike trap was revised.

The spike trap is different in that it is one of the few buildings which will in fact automatically trigger. This is one of the trade-offs against the other buildings; It’s a very cheap solution, but is also automated, and therefore may shoot one of your own pieces if you’re not careful enough.

This building is most useful when it comes to preventing pawns from passing through an area of the board. You can block a few rows and quickly prevent that one free running pawn from becoming a queen near the end of the board. However, if you really dig that queen, perhaps a few sacrifices of your own team could help you out empty that trap…

Other stuff

I also changed some other stuff, including a cool death cam when one of the kings dies.

These “slowmo-kills” are really neat and will really press the enemy’s face on the fact that you’ve just won that match!

On top of that, I’ve also added some screenshake when a piece gets murdered for some additional emotional investment into losing a piece!

Conclusion

My next step would be to fix up a couple of small issues with the AI that are still lying around, such as when it determines when to skip a turn, which currently is incorrect most of the time, causing the AI to throw a lot of good moves.

After that, I want to start focussing on a simple menu and see where the game gets taken from there. After all, with a menu included, it starts to really look like an actual playable game!

For now, all I can ask you, is to have a great day and I’ll catch y’all later!