Habemus Tutorials! And a bit more :)
After a long 3 week period of good work and a little bit of crunching for some couple of days, we have interactive tutorials for our 4 first playable units. Yes, we just have a new unit too... The Barbarian! The Wizard will have to wait a little bit... :( But with the barbarian in place we have *some* of the code required to support spells (and eventually the wizard in the future). The barbarian is a cool unit with the rage special ability. Once it reaches 3 points or less, it will enter rage mode. While in rage, the action bars will re-fill every second for 3 consecutive actions! On the third action or 16 seconds after the rage started the rage will finish.
Also, all but the Barbarian's playground are playable too. A Playground is a nice way to let the player discover and try out all the new units without putting a tutorial in its face.
As a game designer I dislike tutorials *a lot*. Sometimes they are a necessary evil... but most of the time they are just a side effect of poor game design or a bad attempt on explaining your game. When you can't escape them, it's best to keep them small and simple. That said, I'm not happy with our current tutorials. They have a lot of text but, unit I figure out a better way to teach my players how to play this is how it's going to be...
About our focus group, it really went great! Response was very positive to the game and although we didn't had tutorials at the time, our players managed to play and have fun after just a couple of games (and a verbal explanation on how to play).
Next in our backlog is some work on the backend, mainly begin storage of player data in our database (including replays). Right now, replays are being saved in plain text files, and in order to view a replay I have to manually set up the server with a hard coded path for the file and turn on some flags. I expect that at least for this week we will have the replay storage in place as it should be, for when the UI is ready, we just plug the system and we will have our replays working :)
That's it for today, thanks for reading and let's keep the hard work!
Cheers,