Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

Let's begin the progress report by looking at this week's preview card: "Burst of Inspiration." This card introduces two new mechanics to the game that were not present in version 1.1:

• "Requires 3 Trust" means that to even play this card at all, you must have at least 3 combined levels of Trust Engines and/or Upgrades in play. For example, you could play this card with a level 1 Trust Engine and a level 2 Trust Upgrade in play. You can still use cards with requirements to attack with during the Challenge phase even if you do not fulfill that requirement. However, this particular card has no attack values and would become dead weight on your hand if you either don't fulfill the requirement or can't pay its Heat cost. This adds a bit of risk when choosing to include it in your deck, especially if you do not specialize in Trust cards. You can expect to see several cards with requirements in version 2.0, all designed to reward specialization.
• "Any phase" means that you are not limited to playing this card in the Action phase but can actually play it during the Challenge phase as well. This makes it massively helpful when you need to deal with Challenge cards. Not many cards will have this ability, making it quite rare indeed.

"Burst of Inspiration" is a card that helps make decks with plenty of Trust cards feel distinct. Such decks will often rotate through large amounts of cards quickly, and this card is an important tool for letting you do just that. The Heat cost may appear problematic, but that is only until you recall that many Trust Upgrades reduce that cost significantly, possibly even making this card free to play. However, version 2.0 of Snapshot will offer alternate paths through the Trust tree, and those paths may provide different benefits. Picking and choosing between them will be tricky, as it was meant to be.

Let's discuss my progress this week with the card preview out of the way. To summarize, I have focused almost exclusively on making art for the new cards in this update. This colossal undertaking requires a lot of creative decision-making and thinking outside the box. I still have a handful of cards left to illustrate, which will continue to be my focus until they are all done.

I also added some additional settings for you to play around with in the game's preferences, including the ability to toggle Ren'py's power-saving mode and to pause all sounds when the game window loses focus. Finally, I improved the code that renders the large versions of the cards to the screen since the old code had inefficient and laggy transitions and was somewhat hard to read. You won't notice it while playing, but it must still be added for a polished experience. Such is the life of a software developer.

Anyway, that's it for this week. I will continue to churn away at the cards until I feel confident they both look good and actually do what they claim when you play them. I expect this will take up all of the coming week. Still, the progress is progressing rapidly enough that I could see this thing releasing in June with some luck. It's a bit of a stretch, but it is certainly possible. No promises, though.

Until next time!