This month’s update will be a bit shorter than other months because I spent a bunch of time working on some new art, and since I’m not a professional artist it takes a while to get anything done. Even though I’m only adding placeholder art until I bring a professional artist onboard for the project, I think it makes the game look better, and it helps a lot with designing the screen layouts. Other than that, a lot of what I’ve been working on has been changes on the back-end that are harder to show off, but make the game more fun to play.
NEW ART
There’s now some default art for women wrestlers.
In the screenshot you can see another of the recent additions to the game, which is that at the end of every match or promo, there’s a panel that indicates how the final Audience score for the segment was calculated. Previously it was unclear how the score was being calculated, with explanations split up into several different pre-match screens and tutorials, so this makes it way easier to understand why the crowd did or didn’t like a match. Since TV ratings are calculated based on the Audience scores, and since boosting your TV ratings is the main goal of the game, I think this goes a long way towards making it easier to understand how to get better ratings.
The script that generates new wrestlers has also been reworked to create wrestlers that work better with the new match flow algorithm, and wrestlers now get uniquely named finishers. For example, if a wrestler is called Toni Lamar like in the screenshot above, if they’re a Technical wrestler they might get a finisher called the Lamarplex, or if they’re an Aerial wrestler they might get assigned a move like the Lamar Splash.
I’ve also been adding in more match types (such as steel cage matches, which you can see in the screenshot above), and my current goal is to get all of the currently planned special match types into the game over the next couple of weeks (with the exception of Iron Man matches, which will require unique coding that I’ll add at a later date).
I’m currently gearing up to release an updated demo with all these new features some time in April, and I’m pretty excited about having a new build of the game to show off.