Forge War - Market Interactions

July 11, 2013

Well, work continues on the Flash version of Forge War. I haven't quite hit the next milestone - the market phase - but I'm pretty close.

I mean, the actual market phase is done, and that was much rougher than I expected. So much communication between the clients and the server, with bidding back and forth and players passing in different capacities. And then when a player acquires a card, in most situations you just stick it in their inventory, but other one-shot cards give resources or allow worker or overseer movements, so that needs to be resolved and then transitioned back into market bidding. And having to double-check everything with the server is so annoying...

It probably wasn't the best way to do it, but I took, like, 1 or 2 weeks and just coded everything for market interactions without testing it at all. Then I had to spend July 4 weekend debugging the ridiculous beast and it nearly drove me insane. Not quite, but I did break my mouse in frustration. The cursor sort of wobbles about now, make it very hard to make graphics and get headshots in Borderlands 2. Very troublesome.

So anyway, that was that, but in addition to the bidding process, the market phase is also about interacting with the merchant and using market stalls, so that's what I'm finishing up now. I'm probably half-way through coding the merchant, and the market stalls shouldn't be too hard.

After I've finished with the market, I'm gonna take a small break (the quest phase scares me!) to work on designing a website. Soon (before GenCon at least) I'll be moving this blog over to this new website (cephalofair.com? maybe?), where the Flash game will also be hosted, as well as some board game reviews probably. Exciting business.

I also need to work on getting a page for Forge War on BoardGameGeek.com. They say you need to have an actual finished, produced game to have a page, but I'm not sure what that means. Obviously I'm not waiting until after the Kickstarter. In fact, I really need it before GenCon. I think once I have all the stage 1 art done and have the board art printed on an actual piece of quad-fold cardboard, then it will be a real game and I can take some pictures and submit a BGG request.

Anyway, so there's all that to look forward to. Pretty soon I'll have the times I'll be in the First Exposure Playtest Hall at GenCon, so I'll share that. Good times!

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