Tuesday, September 03, 2013

Gridiron Solitaire #70:

Eli 12.1 had a nice suggestion last week. He said that I should add a team picture after winning the Gridiron Bowl. I think he might have gotten the idea from NHL 13, where there's a team picture after you win the Stanley Cup, but it would actually be a nice bookend to the team picture (from the very early days of card football) from the cut scene. Fredrik is making the image and it should be in the game in a day or so.

So with that, the enhanced championship celebration is finished. Falling confetti, team picture, special newspaper edition, and a trophy reminder on the Team Hub during the following season. It's a definite upgrade from static confetti and a special newspaper headline.

The beta testers have made some excellent suggestions in the last few weeks (including the suggestion to enhance the championship celebration, which came from them), and one of the most interesting was that if the shaking animation for an incorrect playcall means losing a card slot, then the correct playcall should use a different animation. Then, and this is very clever, it was suggested that if shaking back and forth could be interpreted as "no", then a nodding animation could be seen as "yes". So now, when you make a correct playcall, the card slot that you keep will nod up and down.

Other than that, I'm just trying to do a bit of nipping and tucking. I added 45 more offseason cards (now a total of 245), and I am officially out of goofy names. I'm going through the project and removing old images from previous versions (boy, the art has really evolved in this game over time, thanks to Fredrik).

Here's a good example of the kind of clean-up I'm going through now. I added the bugle fanfare while simulating the Gridiron Bowl (which takes place, instantly, but the fanfare lasts about five seconds to build up some drama before the champion is revealed). That's fine, but I noticed that if your team is in the GI Bowl, and you sim the game (blasphemy, but available), then the final score shows up on your user schedule before it shows up on the playoff canvas. So you're listening to this dramatic bugle fanfare, and in the corner of your eye you can see--oops, the game score. That's fixed now, and there's a little list of things like that I have to take care of (hopefully all done by the end of this week).

There are really no features to add at this point. Once the team picture is in, that's it in terms of adding content. After that, it will just be bug fixing, and if I can solve a couple of nagging issues (the cut scene on XP systems, for one, and an odd crash bug on a Win 8 system that I haven't been able to duplicate yet), then I'll be essentially done.

Well, except for one thing. I have a new beta tester who is a very, very smart guy, but the dynamic help totally flummoxed him. I don't know if he was distracted or what, but he totally lost the thread of the basic instruction and didn't wind up knowing how to play the game. I have to figure that out, because even if he's an edge case, he won't be the only one, and I want people to have a good experience.

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