New year, new diary

Hi all and happy New Year! Things have been a bit quiet around here for the last few weeks because we’ve been on holiday and also we’ve had our heads down trying to nail down how we’re going to get this game finished so you can play it!

We now have a schedule that we’re going to try to follow for the next few months that takes us through various milestones like pre-alpha, alpha, beta and so on. And, when the time comes, yes, we will be calling for testers to come in and help us evaluate and stress test the game. And, no, I don’t have a date for that yet! Rest assured we’ll let you know as soon as we have one.

In the meantime, what have we been doing? Quite a few things actually! For one, we’ve pretty much finished off the battle part of the game, rounding things off with card and figure animations and other bits of polish like terrain modification (very cool). The only thing missing from there now is audio.

Another thing we’ve been busy with is the shop and deck builder, which I’ll talk more about over the coming weeks. And I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks on the tutorial (which you’d know about if you’ve been following our new twitter feed).

But today, I want to show you our world screen. Here it is:

That’s a huge picture, so you’ll probably have to click on it to see what’s going  on. This is the central hub of the game that you see when you log in and, as you can probably tell, everything is represented by a geographic location on this map.

The map is huge! You can drag it around to see other parts of the world – which will get revealed as you progress through the game.

So what are the things you can see on the map? The most important things are the adventures:

These launch you into a series of battles – the meat of the game. Once you’ve completed an adventure it gets turned into a smoking ruin:

You can see from the map above that I’ve completed the “Raid on Ommlet”, “Kobold Encampment”, “Tunnels into Darkness” and “White Skull Canyon” adventures, but not any of the others. You can always go on those adventure again, but you can only get experience points once from each adventure (for each character in your party), so it’s important to see which ones you’ve done.

There’s also a whole achievement system for adventures that will be shown along with them, but we haven’t done that yet.

As you would expect, shops are places you buy stuff:

Shops also hang a little banner out the front when they get new stock in to let you know.

It’s worth noting that there’s no “travel time” in the game. You just click on the location to go there. You don’t have to walk around or anything.

Taverns are a lot like shops, but they’re where you recruit new characters:

The “Pig and Hart” is the first tavern you can visit and it’s where you’ll find your starting adventure party.

Finally, the shield you can see on the map obscures your “home” keep where you go to look at and organise your collection of items. That shield is “where you are” at the moment. If it’s sitting on top of an adventure, it means your party is out on that adventure and moving them to a store or tavern would interrupt it (which you can do, but you’ll lose your progress).

Finally, you might have noticed the Arena button in the lower right hand corner. That’s how you get into multi-player games.

Anyway, that’s the Card Hunter world map. I hope it proves to you that we haven’t just been stuffing our faces with Christmas cake and boozing it up over the holidays. Although there might have been some of that going on too.