Monday, April 01, 2013

Gridiron Solitaire #49: New Stuff

After a long and contentious discussion with some people who know much more about development than I do, they convinced me that always-on DRM is the only reasonable way to prevent piracy of Gridiron Solitaire.

Oh, hell. I can't even type that without bursting out laughing. It's April Fool's Day, remember.

Everything from here on forwards, though, is real.

Item number one is save games. For a long time, I thought there should only be one active game, period. Eli 11.8 brought up an excellent point, though, which is that if anyone had a league going and their kid wanted to play, they couldn't start their own league.

That was a winning argument. So I'm putting in save games--up to four--and everything should be done by the end of this week.

Item number, two, which is bigger. Fredrik has been trying to convince me for months that we needed more than one stadium. I was concerned about crowd placement, though, as well as any kind of domed stadium being unusable because of the graphics layers and how they're prioritized.

I e-mailed him yesterday, though, and said we should take a crack at it again, and sent along a few collegiate stadiums as examples of stadiums that weren't fully enclosed. He sent back three images that I really, really like, and while they're very much preliminary (there will be trees, etc., in the open spaces, here's a look:




That's the field surface for rain games, by the way.

So there will be four stadiums now instead of one, and as part of team customization, you'll be able to pick the stadium you want for your team (or any other team as well). Once the crowd is added in and the backgrounds are created, I think they'll be a nice addition to the atmosphere.

I'm also working on a "stretch" feature this week (lighting), but it's early enough where I have no idea if anything I'm trying will work. I'll have more for you on that subject next week, though.


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