Yay! We've got some gorgeous new world art to give more of a sense of the world and the different MegaCorps in Metroplex Zero! This should add a lot of flash and pizzazz to the game!
In addition to that, we're progressively tackling a variety of quality-of-life things, including some pretty substantial Performance Improvements to make the game run silky smooth on even old machines and toasters.
Weekend Dev Notes - Silas - Lead Game Designer
A friendly AI teammate has joined our futuristic indie dev team. Say hello to MJ! I worked with MJ a lot this past week to get some stunning environment concept art pieces for all of our different MegaCorps. I love looking at pretty things, so this weekend's art extravaganza made me very happy.
Besides that, one of the pieces of feedback from Alpha Playtest 2 was that some cards, especially ones with a high number and an X factor were causing the game to lag. I put on my professional performance engineer hat, and dived deep into a weekend of staring at Flame Charts, Timeline Graphs, and Memory Allocation visualizations. I don't know precisely how it happened... Maybe my profiler had a time machine hooked up to it. Next thing I knew a whole day had vanished! Just gone! Poof!
As a beautiful side effect, the Battle Engine now performs about 5x Faster than it did before, and everything in battle feels much snappier. I love it! Perf Hat + Time Machine seems like a winning combo. I'll definitely be wearing that one again in the future.
In addition to that, I've starting some more design for stronger onboarding and tutorial flow. This should help hook new players even better, and reduce confusion over a couple of the mechanics that are still a bit complex or hard to grok.
Let's go!
