September saw a lot of work on the traditional things that go on behind the scenes to make the game better but aren’t necessarily visible: UI improvements and game balance issues.
But there were two big new features added to the game that I can show off: opposed promos and special match types.
Promos
The first is that you can now book promos where two wrestlers face off and exchange barbs.
Promos are a critical part of a wrestling show that are missing in most wrestling games, so they’re something I want to focus on really getting right in Championship Wrestling Promoter to help make the game unique, and feel like you’re getting the complete experience of being a professional wrestling promoter.
Stipulations
It’s now possible to add stipulations to matches in CWP. “Stipulations” are the term I’m using to describe what you might think of as special match types, like steel cage matches. At the moment the only kind of special match that has enough work to actually be selected is ladder matches, but you can see from the selection screen that there will be several types available.
A quick breakdown of how stipulations work:
You can only add stipulations to a match between two wrestlers who have built up some Heat in a Feud. Every interaction between two wrestlers, such as a match or a promo, will add some amount of Heat between them (Heat will decay over time, so you can’t build an infinite number of Feuds). Then that Heat can be “spent” like a currency in order to add a stipulation to a match. As you can see, there are bigger and bigger Audience boosts for a match based on how much Heat is required to select a Stipulation.
Stipulation matches will work like regular matches, except that the descriptions will match the type of Stipulation selected, as you can see below for ladder matches.
There’s a lot more work to do to add more Stipulations and increase the number and type of Promos that are available, but with these two major features now in the game it’s now beginning to feel a lot more like you can book and run complete wrestling shows . There’s a lot of work left to do from a content creation standpoint to add in the rest of the Stipulations and expand out all the available promos, but they’re both feature complete in terms of design and implementation.