I go in completely from scratch. They come up with a theme, and then you make a game that follows that theme. For Ludum Dare 36, the theme was "Ancient Technology", which dovetails nicely, thematically, with Pharaoh! Over the last 48 hours, I made a game that Pharaoh players would probably like called Aqueducts of Solomon. It's another solitaire strategy game set in the ancient world, only this time you're playing on a hex map with cards that create new locations. Here's an animated GIF I made of some of the gameplay: It's of course nowhere near a fully-polished, perfect game, because it was created in such a brief time frame, but I think it turned out pretty well considering the compressed schedule. You can play it here: Aqueducts of Solomon Game jams are fun, and good for keeping your skills up and trying out new game mechanics, but they are also exhausting. I'll be taking a few days to recuperate, and then it's back to working on Pharaoh! (Maybe this will be the germ that gets fleshed out into the next game after Pharaoh; this is exactly how Pharaoh was born, after all!)
Ditto. It boggles my mind that you came up with even a moderately fleshed-out concept and have a working prototype that looks better than many finished games in that time span.
Glad you enjoyed Aqueducts of Solomon - it was a fun little diversion. But now it's time to get back to work on Pharaoh! The big news right now is that I've hired an artist to upgrade the graphics quality of the game. It will be a while before you start seeing the new graphics start showing up in the game, but it's coming. We'll probably start with the cards first, and update the UI/UX stuff after that.
Worked quite a bit on Pharaoh today. I'm experimenting with switching to a portrait view. So far, it's working rather well! There have been a few UI issues that have been hard to move over, but in solving them, I've actually improved a few things, which is nice. It does feel a little more cramped, however. I think the game naturally lends itself to landscape view, and the reasons for moving to portrait have more to do with the physical ergonomics of the device than the game itself. Landscape feels more "epic", at least in my current testing, but this does allow for one-handed play, which would be very nice for the subway commuters out there. Screenshots! I'm interested in hearing what you think about these portrait views. They're still rough, but should give an idea of what it would look like as a portrait game.
I like the portrait interface. It's good to have options. I'm waiting for gameplay adjustments (if any) before playing again. fwiw I think the current art is fine.
The portraits looks great. All I'd do is flip the deck piles to be portrait as well but if you left it as it is now it would be just fine #
Nothing specific, just if you adjust gameplay I'll definitely try the changes and leave feedback. But I do have some thoughts, in order of how easy they are to implement and/or how much they may conflict with your vision of the game: 1. I'd personally like to see 10 years added to lifespan. Maybe that makes the game not difficult enough, I'm not sure. How many playtesters have made it to the afterlife after you added the prophecy cards and time limit? 2. You may want to add a small tweak to the starting deck to help new players make it deeper into the game, an extra nile card, a single jewel at reign requirement 5, something. 3. I mentioned this in a previous post, but I've thought about this some more and my perspective has changed a bit. In my current game, I have 4 years left to live and still have 4 stages left to build in the pyramid. It's a loss, but there's no game over screen. The game is hard enough that I feel a sense of investment in it, so I don't want to abandon it but at the same time there is no point in playing to the end either. It's a kind of limbo. It might be best to add some uncertainty to the old age ending. Maybe sometimes "good omen" cards are shuffled into the deck that are removed on play but add a year to your life. Or use the spinner mechanic to sometimes extend lifespan. 4. I'd love to see something added to give more replayability. Maybe an upgradeable pharaoh card that may get better with each dynasty, or a way to change the starting deck. That would give a reason to finish up losing games too, and would help players with difficulty.
Just another status update. Over the last week, I've been working on two things: investigating switching over to a Portrait view, and adding VoiceOver capability for the game. The portrait view is coming along nicely. There were a few design hurdles, but I think I have them settled now. VoiceOver support, however, has been a bear. VoiceOver is Apple's accessibility affordance that allows the operating system to read out the interface elements under your finger and otherwise annotate what's going on so that you can use the device without being able to see the screen. There's plenty of information out there on supporting VoiceOver in standard apps that use UIKit (Apple's native user interface framework), but there's precious little information out there about supporting VoiceOver with SpriteKit, which is their 2D game rendering framework. I've kind of had to educate myself from the ground up on this stuff, and it's been taking a while. But the good news is that I think I will be able to make the game accessible through VoiceOver. I have a prototype of VoiceOver in SpriteKit that has all the interface elements Pharaoh uses, so I've managed to reach "proof of concept" stage for VoiceOver support. My goal is for the next release to be the first draft of VoiceOver support.
Looks like I spoke too soon. I'm having a lot of trouble moving the VoiceOver support over from my sandbox project to the actual game. If there are any developers out there who have used SpriteKit and VoiceOver in a project before, I'd love to hear from you, if you'd be willing to chat about it.
Okay, I've identified the issue that's been causing me so much trouble adding VoiceOver support to Pharaoh. It has to do with the way VoiceOver touches are transmitted down through the view hierarchy of SpriteKit scenes. Basically, simple scenes like my sandbox environment work, but more complex hierarchies prevent touches from being recognized. I've filed a radar with Apple on this, and I expect that it will be addressed at some point, but for now, I'm sadly going to have to put VoiceOver support on hold. Kinda bummed about this, because I've really put a lot of time into it, and it would be nice to be able to support it.
Release 14 I just submitted the latest release build to Apple. Should show up soon. This release has been a long time coming, but it has a lot going on under the hood. It's got a totally revamped UI, and I've switched the game over to portrait mode. I've tightened up a few things here and there, added some new animation flourishes, and fixed a few bugs. The big new feature in this release is a statistics panel that shows your progress over time. You get a stacked bar chart showing the makeup of your deck, along with the total number of cards, the number of years you survived, whether you made it to the afterlife, and whether you ascended. Sadly, as discussed above, VoiceOver support did not make it into this build. I spent a lot of time trying to make it work, but it's not in the cards - so to speak - until Apple addresses an issue with VoiceOver touch recognition in SpriteKit hierarchies. I'm going to be taking a week-long break from development for the coming week. Spending some quality time with the family. But I'll respond to questions and comments here. Let me know what you think of the new layout.
