Releasing the demo of the match simulation engine of Championship Wrestler Promoter last month was a big relief. After working on the game without really sharing anything about it for 6-7 months, it was nice to finally be able to give people a glimpse of how the game is shaping up, even if it was just a fraction of what will be in the final game.
There’s one big new addition that I’ve since made to the game, and quite a few smaller upgrades to the look and interface that make CWP better to play.
Promos
Wrestlers can now cut promos in the game! At the moment there’s only one style of promo to cut, but as I continue working on the game there will be a wide variety of promos available. One big difference between promos and matches is that promos will play out differently depending on whether the wrestler is a face or a heel. Matches don’t currently pay much attention to wrestler alignment except for the Audience bonus for matching a face against a heel, but promos are unique to a wrestler’s alignment. I think the promos are where a lot of the character of the game is going to really come through.
You can see another of the changes in that screen, which is that the Audience panel is now a bar that fills up and changes colour to let you know how interested in the match or promo the crowd is. This is a big improvement on the old version, where the Audience panel just displayed a number, but it wasn’t clear whether the number was good or bad.
UI Upgrades
I’ve made many smaller interface changes to try to make the game look nicer, but there are two big ones I want to highlight. The first is that the focus panel at the top of the Roster menu is now divided into tabs, so that rather than having to view all of the information about a wrestler at once, you can scroll through and see information that’s related. This will probably go through more iterations in the future, but it’s already far easier to read.
The second big change I want to highlight is that the layout of the segment selection screen has been completely reworked. Now you can view the different kinds of available segments all at once. This reduces the number of clicks necessary to create a segment, which will really add up when you’re adding several segments to each show. It’s also just a bit easier to read.
That’s it for August. It hasn’t even been a full month since the demo was released and already the game’s gotten noticeably better in a number of ways. The main task for September is to continue to flesh out the promos, which need to be brought up to the same level as the match simulation.