Last month was a pretty big one for CWP, with a lot of new things added to the game. We’re getting much closer to having an “alpha” build of the game ready, which to me means that every feature planned for the game is functional, but the game needs work on the balance, content, and of course a lot of bug squashing. So let’s dive into what’s new over the past month, and then a brief look at what’s coming next.
NEW STUFF
The most visible addition to the game in recent weeks is that 3 person and 4 person matches are now playable. This coincides with a new design for the post-match stat updates that auto-resizes based on the number of wrestlers/teams in a match, rather than the old format where these windows were hard-coded.
A small but critical change from a usability standpoint is that you can now drag and drop segments on the show creation screen to re-order them. The old format where you had to use buttons to move segments up and down was clunky and I’m glad to have replaced it.
The rest of the recent work was done on the stuff that happens, mostly behind the scenes, between shows and matches. Wrestlers now age and eventually retire, with their statistics changing along the way. Young wrestlers get better as they approach their late 20s, and older wrestlers continually decline. The stat changes are pretty small for any one year of their life, but over time you’ll notice the changes building up. To take a wrestler with the highest possible potential, for example, at age 20 they’ll have the statistics of a lower-midcard wrestler, by 23 they’ll be ready for the upper-midcard, and by the late 20s they’ll be among the best in the world. There is some randomness involved, but generally the aging process follows a set curve.
At the end of each show you’ll get notifications about which wrestlers have had their stats updated.
Another new system is the one for sending out emails. You now get emails from a variety of departments in your promotion letting you know about important events, like wrestler contracts that are getting close to expiring and injured stars who are set to make their return.
WHAT’s NEXT
There’s one very big system that isn’t in the game at all yet, and that’s artificial intelligence. In previous demos of Championship Wrestling Promoter the opposing promotions were never really simulated aside from a very basic formula for giving their shows a rating. Leaving AI until the end has always been the plan, because to my mind there’s not much point going in depth writing AI for a strategy game until all the systems are playable. Otherwise you’re going to wind up spending half the development time rewriting the AI every time new systems come online.
So at some point in December when all of the major features are implemented I will begin writing the code to properly simulate the opposing promotions in the game, which means they’ll manage their rosters, run shows, and so forth. That’s the last really big system that isn’t in the game yet, and it will change the way the game feels to play pretty substantially.
Aside from that there are still some smaller systems to add that aren’t in the game yet, and the UI in the game is going to start to get a bit of a graphical overhaul over the next couple of months as well. After that we’ll go into the polishing phase, with the game ready for release sometime in 2022.