The title exactly sums up what I’ve been doing on Projekt “W” the last couple of days. After an extensive round of playtesting I squashed the last few remaining bugs and problems I encountered and was finally able to play a whole game without any troubles, crashes or other things that disturbed a smooth gameplay experience. It took me around 90 turns to finish a whole game, playing the oceanic front. Though it’s the smallest nation in the game it’s also the only one with only one bordering enemy nation, so though you’ll have to work with fewer ressources at the beginning it’s easier to defend (and maybe turtle for some time) and makes up for a calmer style of gameplay.
But one thing I noticed during that full game was the weakness of the computer-controlled nations, so I also started to put some more effort into the AI-controlled enemies in order to make the game more challenging, also giving the AI different factors so that each game plays slightly different. I’m not totally done with this but since this is an important part that adds a lot to the final gameplay experience I’m trying to get this done as good as possible (in the end I’m no AI-specialist and this is my first complex AI for a game).
And I also got something else done that was almost haunting my mind, the last remaining 3D-background for the oceanic front. It’s hard to create some kind of background that resembles certain aspects of a world’s region if you don’t know much about it so after googling around a lot I finally got a vision on how it should look like and the result doesn’t look that bad though I’ll still have to finish some things. Just take a look at the shot in the upper left and you can see an in-game shot with the new background.
Well, it’s getting closer and closer to release and playing the game is now a real swift without all the bugs, exploits and crashes I fixed since my last posting!