When we swapped Combat Card’s engine a few weeks ago, the behaviour of quite a few game systems changed with it. Some of these changes are legitimate bugs, but others are just due to the way the two engines handle things differently. Either way, we’re working to get the game back to at least the quality of the old version, and improving it wherever possible.
Deploy
One area we’ve just finished improving – so will be putting out in an update shortly – is how you deploy cards to the battlefield. This seemingly easy area of code has needed quite a bit of work to get it doing exactly what we intended and to make it feel nice to use.
When people wonder why game development takes a long time, it’s often down to working through all the ‘edge cases’ which crop up. The player can put their finger on a card in their hand, then drag and release over an empty slot. Sounds easy, right? But what about:
- When you want to deploy the card into an occupied slot?
- Or when two other slots are occupied?
- When you shove a card out of a slot, how quickly should it move?
- And which way should it go – left or right?
- When you drag the card half over a slot and release?
- When you release the card somewhere else, nowhere near a slot?
- Should Warlords auto-deploy, or let you do it manually?
Tactics
As you can see, there are a lot of seemingly insignificant factors we need to get right with this, otherwise card deployment will ‘feel’ bad, or shoving cards aside will feel arbitrary and random. Plus, we really want to get this area working well, because deploying your cards is one of the key tactics in Combat Cards.
Obviously, you need to choose which of your cards faces each enemy card. But, are you trying to destroy that card or just hold it up as long as possible? Then there are decisions to make when you deploy a new card after an old one has been destroyed. Do you put the fresh card in the empty slot or slide a (possibly damaged) card there? If you’re expecting your cards to destroy the enemy opposite them, can you do it without ‘wasting’ damage output (when your card does way more damage then the enemy needs to destroy it)? Or do you accept that waste, ready for whichever card your enemy deploys next?
So many decisions! This depth is how Combat Cards can be fun with only three attack choices (but much more on width and depth in a future post).
Warlords
Other than the initial tutorial battles, we let you manually deploy your Warlord, even though they have to go into the centre slot. So why do we do this?
If you already have two cards on the battlefield when you deploy your Warlord, there are no choices to make – the Warlord will just shove its way to the centre slot. But if you’re deploying the Warlord with only one card on the battlefield, we’ve found that choosing where you leave that lone bodyguard can make the difference between victory and defeat.
If you leave your bodyguard facing an enemy, you prevent that enemy from attacking your Warlord, but if you deploy opposite an empty slot then your bodyguard will attack the enemy Warlord. Which is better changes from battle to battle, and working out the optimum choice is a fun decision.
Conclusion
We realise that waiting for us to release updates is frustrating, and I’m not trying to brush aside the valid complaints about some of the issues the game is suffering from. But one of the key reasons I wanted to write these blog posts is to make sure that you at least understand why things are happening, even if you don’t like or agree with them.
I wasn’t planning to cover every feature we work to improve and fix, but feel free to let me know if you’d like that approach – this blog exists to talk about the things you guys find interesting.
As ever you can get in touch via our Facebook page, leaving a comment here, or mailing [email protected].
Thanks,
Stu
Thanks for the candidness, it’s a lot more than the majority of devs do across the life of their games. In my (strokes waist length Gandalf beard) years of gaming, the norm seems to be highly censored snips of info either released without any chance to reply/discuss said updates etc. or at the most, being able to confuse, confound and ultimately frustrate a moderator with no real official knowledge to further, other than towing the line, so to speak. Not being a large dev team, and actually going the extra distance to communicate, there shouldn’t be the expectations that a AAA big franchise ‘should’ deliver in regards to deadlines. Unfortunately many gamers act like selfish children and have unfair expectations. Personally, I have come to appreciate delays, knowing full well that extra time can only benefit the gamer in the end. Been bitten too many times by rushed unfinished rubbish and it’s become the norm, so to see the way you guys are approaching this is actually a welcome rarity. If only gamers as a whole could experience what has occurred in the past, then they would appreciate the path being taken here. Keep up the great work.
(Hopefully that made sense, as it’s the day after Australia Day and many brain cells were sacrificed)
Thanks for the comment, I’ve shared it with the rest of the team.
We’ll see how long we can keep this level of communication and transparency up – it’s possible it’ll become more difficult as the audience grows – but we definitely believe in talking to our core audience where possible.
If only gamers as a whole could experience what has happened in the past? Are you referring to how this game ran with the unreal engine? Or to the fact that they rushed the engine change and released a broken game? I wish all the players had experienced this game and how it used to play before december 20th as well, then they would have hope for this game.
Its been over a month since youve switched engines, i think the hard part for people to swallow, is the fact that the game ran so smoothly with the unreal engine, there were not card deployment problems before, and now there are a ton. Another problem that i have, is all the glossing over of the problems we sumbit, always seems like the response is that you guys are working to fix, yet no patch ever comes, there are new card releases, but no fixes for gameplay. Some of the problems ive asked you to fix are extremly easy, like the nercron objective spelling error, or the fact you get victory screen for surrendering… when you just ignore the feedback people give, they will stop playing, im currently ranked last on the campaign with less than 700 active players…. there used to be thousands?
I wish we would get a reduction in the campaign level when we surrender or have to reset the phone since the game froze. Obviously the energy goes down when the battle starts, and the campaign battle ends, but you forgot about the surrender option. Due to the warlord ability, poor luck for us, brilliant luck for the enemy, I can tell I’m going to lose the battle, and surrendering will save time and stress, ie I’m playing the space marine warlord that boosts psychic attacks. But my bodyguards with the psychic skills are not on my initial choices, and the enemy have placed seriously OP cards then I know the battle is lost
Thanks for the comment. We have various improvements to the Campaign, including changes to the way the AI deck building works. Unfortunately those updates are a little while off, as we focus on bug fixing and performance improvements first.
I would argue that the items mentioned by Din are both bugs and performance issues. (The freezing of the game if your phone locks is a performance issue and surrendering a round in campaign having no effect on the level of AI for the next round is a bug)