Milestone 7 - The Tutorial and World Map

Play the latest version in browser (0.0.7.0)

0.0.7 is here. Not as major of an update as 0.0.6 was, but a lot of important improvements all the same.

What's New?

• The tutorial! I wanted to have one similar to the in game tutorial of the gbc games. If you've never played the Pokémon tcg and somehow managed to find this your feedback on this specifically would be greatly appreciated.
• Most of the club rooms are now a bit bigger. The camera can now follow the player around individual areas of the map! This has made most of the areas go from too cramped to too sparse, but that's a much better problem to have at this point.
• The world map! There's only two places to move between but still! With this adding more places in future builds will be hardly any more difficult. Speaking of new places,
• The Lab! Most new features added to the game will show up here. For now it's pretty empty, having only the tutorial, the deck-testing npc, and a bunch of others telling you how unfinished it is. Also, as part of what is mentioned, this is the first hint of one of the first changes to the world of the game. The Science Club will now be merged with the Lab. What will be where the Science club was? Who knows~
• Card effect tooltips! Now all the status icons you'll see next to cards will have unique descriptions explaining what they do. A massive quality of life improvement for new players. I did want to have different icons for each attack that fit more (Eevee's Tail Wag still has the same icon as Leer, for example), but I'll get around to that next milestone probably.
• There's now a brief start of duel cutscene! It's a bit primitive at the moment but it's a great little startup to each duel.
• The club master now has different music! Music can now be programmed for each npc individually. That's the only one who has it now, but other special npcs will also have different music. I definitely have plans to bring back the one character you're expecting will be back.
• Over 20 new cards! These primarily from the gb and vending sets. All these required some basic hard-coding to implement. There are now less than 100 cards left to add from the Rocket, GB, and Vending sets (plus some promos), but everything that's left is going to be harder still. Expect the release of new card to be even slower going forward, unless maybe I just take one milestone to focus on finishing all of those. I haven't decided yet. After that... well we'll need to have a bigger conversation on where to go from there.
• Of course, some minor bug fixes as always. Most notably, you could just immediately win the duel by clicking Next as the cards were being dealt. I can't believe I didn't catch that earlier. There's always more out there (I definitely didn't test all the cards this time around). Please don't hesitate to send me feedback if you find something.

What's Next?

If this Milestone was to improve the game for new players, Milestone 8 is to make it better for more experienced players.

• An improved deck builder! - The deck builder is serviceable as it is, but with the next update I want it to have more of the features of a more modern, professional deck builder.
• Special duels! - This is the first new feature I want to add to the game. In the Japanese-exclusive sequel to the gameboy game, many later npcs would impose specific rules on duels with them. For this game, I want to go sort of half way with that idea. All players in the game will have their own special rule that you can duel them with. Though not all of them will be required to complete the game, you will always get better rewards for winning an npc's special duel. The next milestone may or may not have all npcs have one, but I'm hoping to have all the infrastructure in place for setting such a duel up. Some will have special duel rules, some will check your deck for specific cards, some may even force you to duel them with a rented deck.
• Forwards compatibility! - I would like to make some kind of encrypted code that you can copy from an older version of the game to paste into the new one and have at least your card inventory remain the same as the game continues to update. I've been seeing that people have probably been making good use of saving replaying the game over the past few weeks, and I imagine it might suck to have to start from scratch without warning. I'll make a bold promise that this will be the last milestone you will have to do that.

I'm kind of unsure what Milestone 9 will be, but  Milestone 10 is planned to finally be 0.1.0.0. So most likely it will be many minor improvements in preparation for that.

In other news...

Regarding the Unity news, I'm monitoring the situation. Even though I don't think it directly effects this game since I can't charge for it anyway, this entire project is to build my portfolio as a Unity developer. If developers no longer see Unity as viable, that means less Unity jobs, and no Unity jobs means I have no reason to continue with this. I would probably choose to eventually remake this in another engine, most likely Unreal. It's not something I want to do after 8 months of work, but it's enough of an issue that I'm seriously considering it.

Now for the good news. According to itch's analytics, at least one person has played this game every day since the release of the last build, with the median being closer to four or five. Though I don't know how many people that works out to individually, I want to thank everyone that has been playing. I don't how good of a statistic that actually is, but at least one person per day is definitely better than zero players per day, and it definitely feels like a big step.