Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

I reached a couple of neat milestones this week, one of which you can see in the attached animated GIF. 

This video shows an example of what I wanted the particle effects for so badly. In it, I'm using one of my cards to directly attack a Challenge card. The moment I let go of my card, the Challenge card shakes while its health bar explodes and updates to reflect its new health. It would have flown up and out of the screen if it had been destroyed. Meanwhile, my own card quickly slides over to the discard pile after dealing its damage. The explosion is generated on the fly with particle effects and is not pre-rendered. This type of particle effect can be used for many things; this is merely an example.

Add a sound effect (not in the video), and you have a good idea of how I intend to make simple actions feel satisfying during gameplay. Also, pay attention to all the movement happening here, from the shaking of the Challenge card to the smoothly panning background image. I want Supermodel to feel alive, and animation is a big part of that. 

In addition, I added a system that makes Heat gains zoom out of your cards before flying over to the Heat bar. This makes it instantly apparent that you have gained Heat and how much of it you got, not to mention which cards produced it. I will add similar transitions to several other game systems that can be confusing without visual aids. This was a proof of concept to demonstrate that I can make multiple effects happen simultaneously in Ren'py, which is easier said than done.

Finally, I tried the game on an Android tablet for the first time, and it ran perfectly. The game feels nice to control on a touch screen since I designed the mechanics with this in mind from day one, and the text is perfectly legible, at least on a 12" screen. Note that while Supermodel will support Android, it is intended for tablets, not phones. A phone screen would simply be way too small for this kind of game, so Supermodel will not be a game you can play on your phone. On the plus side, this means I can take better advantage of the screen estate and use smaller fonts without worrying about tiny cell phones having to read everything.

My plan for the coming week is to continue adding these new effects to multiple game systems, polishing up the gameplay feel before the release of the prototype.

Until next time!