Devlog

Red spiders, one hero each and towers you can garrison

Red spiders

I typed “red spiders” and got the usual colours, plus a note saying it had no idea what “red” meant. Colour words work now. Spiders got four new colours too, red, white, yellow and blue, all kept far enough from the team colours that you can still tell the sides apart.

Red spiders and their riders on the left, white spiders and a giant tarantula on the right

One hero each

Yesterday we made it so you can name your hero. But if you didn’t name one you got all of the race’s heroes, which meant three to buy at the Town Center, and there should never be three heroes to buy. So every race has one now. It’s the one you named, or one picked by the race, and it’s the same one every time.

My favourite note from testing was “swamp frog mossback and the loud”. The game says “Only one hero leads a race, so ‘mossback’ came and ‘loud’ stayed home.”

Towers

Three bugs from a match I was playing:

  • I couldn’t put people in towers. The game could do it all along, but right-click only looked at the ground under the cursor, and a tower is one tile drawn tall, so clicking on it hit the grass behind.
  • Feet sticking out. A frog standing in a wall tower had a foot poking out through the stone.
  • A tree’s shadow lying across a tower roof. The shadows were baked into the trees, so a tree in front of a tall tower painted its shadow on the roof. They lie on the ground now.
Before: a frog's foot pokes out below a tower's wooden gallery
After: the same frog, feet inside the tower

I also started thinking about how the game will pay for itself and what the website should say. More on that tomorrow.