Dev Log - Volume 3

Plastic Tactics Online - Coming Soon

Solving one of our critical bugs has taken much longer than expected and required some refactoring to enable us to move forward more easily in the future. If you've been a dev you get this and may want to skip ahead

The Backstory

A few years back I was working as an instructor at one of the more well known Game Design schools and part of the student experience was a capstone project. This project was modeled after much larger studio processes (where most of the instructors had once worked). The culmination of these projects was often a solid prototype game with potential, but it died there.

So I formed Kibble Game Studios to try and get some of these to market. The alumni built out the prototype into a full game, we eventually share whatever we earn. The developers get valuable experience and that may help with their next project. These are first time devs though, so sometimes they make choices and build things in, how can I say, non-optimal ways.

After the team moves on, my team and I get to work figuring out what needs to be revised and what doesn't.

What to Fix, What to Leave

Last week we ran into one of those things that needed to be fixed. It was highlighted by a simple bug but it highlighted a game flow issue and architectural inconsistency that needed to be fixed. Happy to say we have that resolved and the update will give us the ability to more easily add modes and enhance the game flow in future.

The Marketing Work is Never Done

Time to make sure people know about the game. Our audience is small but we'll be enhancing that over the next couple months using tools we added to the engine (some home grown, some packages we included) to help us gather enough media to keep everybody interested.

Seems this is a much bigger challenge than expected, so the first advice to all aspiring developers -- build these tools in to your plan in the beginning. Screenshot tools, like being able to position a camera and take a high res shot are critical. Video capture tools, these are the most challenging - and yes you can use the great tools that Steam provides for some things but inevitably you'll want to see that cool event from a great camera angle. More special tools for that.

Ate least the game views seem to be interesting - like targeting.

Steam post image\

Bugs & Fixes

Countdown timers, some graphical glitches, turn switches made smooth, transitions are all getting some polish. Really we've been focusing on just one problem area lately the whole spectator mode and transitions in and out of it. We want players to be able to look around the play space like they are on a cart following a track around the map. Transitions in/out of that view and adding a full recon mode to let the players zoom in to the areas of interest for their next turn are finally working correctly. More things to fix, of course but this was a big one. Want to get into more ideas and suggestions head over to the Game Discord

Wishlist us, and follow the trail from fledgling student project to indie darling.